In July 2012, the forces of the Assad regime withdrew from northern Syria. Since then, the predominantly Kurdish population has established self-governing cantons that operate with near complete autonomy from Damascus. Due to a string of victories against the Islamic State, the Kurds now control a contiguous swath of territory linking the border region of northern Syria all the way to Iraqi Kurdistan. These victories are due in part to the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ). Both the YPJ and YPG emerged out of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). When compared to the PKK and other national liberation struggles, both the internal praxis and larger goals of the YPJ/YPG are novel in two respects: regarding their gender politics and their aspirations for statehood. Given that the YPJ was founded very recently, this paper represents one of the first academic analyses of the Kurdish women’s militia. The YPJ is of interest not only because of their success in combating the Islamic State and their unprecedented level of mobilization of women, but because it is also a window through which to understand the larger goals of the “Rojava Revolution.” The data for the paper is based on three trips to the region, including a survey that was conducted with a unit of the YPJ based in Kobani. Because the YPJ represent a “hidden population”, random sampling is impossible. Instead, I used a respondent-driven sampling technique. Despite these limitations, my survey data provides basic demographic information about the women who have joined the YPJ, which until now has been lacking. One of the surprising results of the survey is that most respondents emphatically say that they do not want to emulate the de-facto state structures that have been created in Iraqi Kurdistan. Instead of aiming to establish an independent Kurdistan, the movement aims to establish autonomous structures at the local level based on the principles of democratic confederalism. This includes a bottom-up democracy, cooperative economy, gender egalitarianism, and environmentalism. I argue that the shift away from the goal of establishing an independent state is not merely tactical but reflects a shift in political strategy and ideology. Secondly, this shift can in part be explained by women's previous experience of marginalization within the PKK and other national liberation struggles.

What prompts people to engage in political activities that are extremely risky? This question has inspired a myriad of political science works on contentious mobilization and revolutions, the formation of rebel movements and violent insurgencies, and individual actions against coercive, authoritarian regimes. This paper contributes to a scholarly discussion on the most effective predictors of high-risk individual action that has circulated around two sets of arguments: individual grievances vs. opportunities for collective action. Drawing on empirical insights into the Syrian civil war, we are interested in discussing this question in the context of individual military insubordination. Our empirical subject is particularly valuable for studying the effectiveness of grievances and opportunities as drivers of high-risk action, because the focus on army deserters allows us to account for individual action rather than collective action. The latter is in the center of inquiry when studying rebel formation or contentious mobilization. Second, desertions from the Syrian army have proved to be associated with extreme forms of punishment for those who attempted but failed to walk away from their units, including summary executions. Hence, using military insubordination during civil war in a repressive authoritarian regime serves as a valuable prism through which to study those factors effectively triggering individual high-risk action.

This paper examines the significance and implications of Syrian nationalism in the context of the ongoing uprising. It argues that the emergent popular nationalism in Syria since 2011 should be understood both as a discourse of rupture with state-centric Baathist nationalism, and a continuation of the early nationalism of the 1920 revolt and the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925-27. The process consists of the creation of various vital institutions and spaces such as revolutionary courts, councils, committees, newspapers, and schools, many of which were also created by nationalists in the 1920s. Popular nationalism is not operating in a vacuum. It is repressed by the war and discursive machines of the Syrian state since the beginning of the uprising. In addition, it is competing with a number of subnational and supranational ideologies such as regional, ethnic, and sectarian loyalties as well as global Salafi and Shia discourses. Since 2011, nationalism has been undergoing structural transformations and its contours are renegotiated and challenged. This analytical task is particularly urgent in a region where a self-appointed Islamic State is dismantling century-old national borders and building what it claims to be a post-national paradigm. This paper examines the case of Manbij, a city in the Aleppo Province located in Northern Syria. The city provides an interesting site for the study of the different aspects of popular nationalism. Manbij shows that the construction of a new national community is a vital site of resistance without which the revolt is bound to fail. This explains why the Syrian regime is using all tools at its disposal to counter popular nationalism as it takes place in the streets and the liberated neighborhoods.

The uprising that took place in Syria in March 2011 occurred with a troubling absence of a decided tipping majority. In this paper I look at the action and discourse of various opposing factions during the first two years of the Syrian uprising. I utilize framing theory as an analytical tool to examine the Syrian uprising. I argue that Syrian protesters against the existing regime failed to mobilize a tipping majority because they framed their struggle as a Sunni uprising against an Alawite rule, which was perceived by the Alawites and other minorities to be a sectarian retaliation for the violent response of the Syrian regime against the armed insurgency of Muslim Brotherhood in Hama in the 1980s. Besides, by looking at action repertoires, I analyze the various forms of the protesters’ actions – demonstrative, expressive, and conventional- which further helps to illustrate how they framed their struggle as a sectarian, rather than a political, conflict. I argue that the silent majority of the people on the sidelines opted not to join the uprising as they feared sectarian strife and instability, on account of the sectarian discourse used by the protesters and various factions of the opposition.