During the first seven years of the French occupation of Syria, colonial forces faced a series of armed insurrections which culminated in the nationwide Great Revolt of 1925-7. While the French Mandate is typically seen as a unwieldy hybrid of liberalism and colonialism, this paper pursues the post-colonial argument that empire does not contradict but constitutes liberalism (Mehta 1999). It focuses on French practices of counter-insurgency during the 1920s to show that liberal and colonial models of warfare are profoundly intertwined and mutually enabling. The paper looks at the discourse, practice and spaces of colonial violence in Syria. Drawing on archival sources in Arabic and French, it shows how the practices of colonial warfare were ordered according to the peculiar spatial logic entailed by the French tradition of counter-insurgency and colonial occupation. 'La guerre coloniale' adopted a distinctive vision of the battlefield as a military, social and even geographical space. The paper details the kind of vision implied by colonial modes of controlling, ordering and even moving through spaces of insurrection in Syria. Colonial counter-insurgency entailed not simply the destruction of nationalist enemies, but the reconstruction of occupied Syria in a manner subsumed within the broader paradigm of liberal governmentality. The colonial regime of practices conveys the essence of the liberal way of both war and peace.