The historical emergence of the concept and practice of sectarianism is indissociable from the historical emergence of the concept and practice of the modern state. Political scientists, sociologists, and historians have repeatedly refuted primordialist understandings of sectarian, ethnic, and national identities by demonstrating that these forms of communalism are contingent upon the socio-economic, world-historical, institutional, and discursive conditions unique to modernity, including the modern state (e.g. Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Calhoun 1997; Makdisi 2000; Wimmer 2013). These modernist approaches help explain how processes of state formation do not simply mobilize latent sectarian identity, but produce ‘sect’ as a valid category upon which to ground social action. Against the backdrop of the modern state, sect becomes the expression of an essentially local communal identity. As practice, sectarianism threatens to fragment politics at the national scale or, conversely, emerges as a sub-state response to state weakness, state failure, or civil war (Zartman 1995). This approach has been well represented in serious scholarship on Syria, which generally eschews essentialist analysis and instead argues that sectarian identity becomes relevant in situations of peripheral resistance to central state expansion (Landis 1997), political fragmentation and weak state institutions (Van Dam 1981), class conflict (Batatu 1981), and struggles to control the Bonapartist state (Hinnebusch 1990). Breaking from this consensus, this paper argues that both disciplinary and Syria literatures share a problematic understanding of the state that prevents them from conceptualizing the state/sect relationship in anything but antithetical terms. The scholarship implicitly adopts a quintessentially Weberian concept of the state as a territorially bounded set of institutions that wields a monopoly of legitimate coercion and acts with varying degrees of organizational autonomy from society. Yet this overlooks the fact that Weber’s concept of the state is an ideal type, not empirical description. Neo-Weberian approaches not only disorient our understanding of the state, I contest, but consequently misdirect our understanding of sectarianism. This paper offers an alternative account by reinterpreting 20th century Syrian state formation through the post-Marxist concept of the state (Poulantzas 1980; Jessop 2007; Hay 1996). Drawing on wide-ranging empirical evidence from memoirs, newspapers, government publications and secondary sources, my paper explores how to define sectarianism in Syria after reconceptualizing the state as a spatial, emergent, strategic-relational, and semiotic institutional ensemble. If Poulantzas famously defined the state as a ‘social relation,’ does that mean that the Syrian state expresses a sectarian relation?

In the 1970s and the 1980s the Raqqa province was the center of massive state attention through the Euphrates Scheme, with the building of a huge dam and the establishment of new irrigation systems. Today, instead, it is known as the center of ISIS administration. After independence, the expansion of agriculture in this region made it economically important for the country as a whole. But economic and political inequalities also increased, not least among the shawai’a, the rural ‘Arab’ non-Bedouin inhabitants of the province. These inequalities were partly addressed during the land reform of the 1960s whereby many villagers were more closely tied to the state and the ruling party. Until 2011 native townsmen in Raqqa and employees from the rest of Syria have used the term shawai’a (s. shaawi) in a derogatory way. In the provincial play of power, shawai’a were opportunistic in their allegiance to the state according to native townsmen. To outside employees they were seen uncivilized country bumpkins. This paper addresses the complex developments of shawai’a identities and identifications, political actions and activisms since they were welded into distinct tribes during the French mandate. It also addresses the provincial struggles of power and how terms like co-operation, co-optation, withdrawal and resistance were used by rural inhabitants, townspeople and newcomers to the province between the late 1970s until 2011. The paper is based mainly on intermittent anthropological fieldwork in the Raqqa province and elsewhere in Syria between 1978 and 2011. The aim of the paper is to engage in a discussion on sectarianism and identity in Syria.

Accounts of sectarianism in the current Syrian uprising, offered by participants and observers alike, have a schizophrenic quality: sectarianism seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Participants challenging the state assert that the uprising began as a civic revolution and was spoiled by the sectarianism of the Syrian regime. The regime and its allies, by contrast, point out the official secularism of the ruling Ba’th party and point to sectarian statements and behaviors of their opponents. Academic accounts generally argue that one of several factors, such as economic change (Hokayem 2013), environmental stress (De Châtel 2014) or spatial inequality (Barout 2012), impelled initial societal mobilization and that the state introduced sectarianism to control the uprising. These accounts rightly highlight some of the ways to which the state has put sectarian boundaries to work, but offer little insight into why they were used in some areas rather than others, at some times rather than others, or the reasons that these techniques resonated with the segments of society in which they were used. Furthermore, extant academic accounts offer little help in disentangling sectarianism from regional, tribal and class solidarities driving actors' behavior in the uprising. This paper argues that the omnipresent but elusive character of sectarianism in Syria stems, in large part, from the phenomenon being poorly defined; it proposes a definition of sectarianism that analytically separates strategies of categorization from networks of actors that crisscross sectarian boundaries. Sectarianism, on this definition, is the invocation of the sectarian boundary to achieve an end an actor could not achieve through networks alone. This definition builds on recent research on social boundary processes; group membership is not an essential property of an individual (something he or she ‘has’) but a relationship constituted by the boundaries that demarcate groups and the networks that bind its members (Brubaker 2004, Tilly 1998, Wimmer 2013). Understood in this way we see, paradoxically, that sectarian boundaries are omnipresent yet invoked relatively infrequently because doing so is costly in terms of limiting future cooperation using networks crossing sectarian boundaries. The paper draws on interview material from recent field research on the first eighteen months of the Syrian uprising to illustrate the concept. It draws, in particular, on events in Homs and the Hassakeh governorate to demonstrate the state’s use of categorization strategies and the factors within society that make this activation and exploitation of boundaries possible.