The Syrian war is widely perceived as a vicious battle between armed actors. Non-combatants are considered too, but usually as a refugee "problem." My project takes a closer look at the Syrian warscape and reveals the exercise of agency among nonviolent activists in the realms of civil society and governance, both inside the conflict state and in refuge in neighboring countries. These ordinary people act in extraordinary circumstances to deliver emergency relief to places inaccessible to external actors, institute alternative governance bodies, and create civil society organizations. Since the 2011 uprising, such civilian mobilization has evolved, notably varying in its extensiveness and contentiousness. I seek to understand both the persistence of civilian participation against the odds of violence and displacement, and the variation in its nature. My theory establishes a connection between activism and the assistance it receives. I forge a theory of aid's impacts that pays particular attention to the resources offered by external actors in an era of expansive humanitarianism and developmentalism, in comparison to the resources offered by local communities or armed actors. While local communities and armed actors have means and reasons for supporting civilian activism, that activism will remain limited, and vary in its contentiousness, for reasons I explain in the paper. External actors also support activists in rebel-held territory and in refugee host states. My theory contends that the more assistance these actors give, the more likely they are to activate processes that generate extensive, uncontentious activism. The processes I have identified are threefold: feeding, formalizing, and fragmenting. This paper focuses on the first, feeding, which captures aid's emergence and expansion in the warscape. Aid funding has increased enormously over time, as have its purposes, its actors, and the institutional arrangements it activates (de Waal 1997, Duffield 2001, Barnett and Weiss 2008b, Risse 2013). Humanitarianism has come to include everything from emergency relief to the transformation of civil society (Duffield 2001, Hoffman and Weiss 2006), sweeping in activism at every turn. In this process, we observe activists appealing for assistance, forming civil society organizations to attain it, and using it as leverage vis-à-vis other conflict actors. For evidence, I draw on fieldwork in Jordan and Turkey, where I conducted over 125 qualitative interviews with Syrians and foreign aid workers, and a unique survey of 176 Syrian activists in Amman, in addition to other primary and secondary sources.