The Syrian Uprising and the Origins of Violence This paper focuses on the period in which Syria’s largely peaceful uprising mutated into a sustained armed insurgency by identifying the origins of violence during the first 9 months following the onset of mass mobilization in March 2011. It finds common and contending arguments explaining early protestors’ violence wanting, and it seeks to develop an alternative perspective drawing on social movement theory and theorical insights into the use of violence in civil wars. While carefully steering away from primordialist and essentialist pitfalls, the paper finds that the changing context of hardened sectarianism and, to a lesser extent, tribal / clan-based solidarity, combined with fierce regime repression, were key to the creation of opportunities, resources and framing practices relevant to contenders’ use of force against regime targets.

Three years after the start of the Uprisings, the Syrian Revolution has been repressed and transformed into an all-out war; and the country’s human, social and economic fabric tragically torn apart. Syria’s regional and international position is also profoundly impacted, its relationships with regional partners, the effects of the conflict on neighboring societies, the disintegration or consolidation of external alliances, and penetration by foreign state and non-state actors. The paper addresses Syria’s “new” international relations after the Uprisings. The objective is to explore the dual interaction between theory and reality, and consider the extent to which the case provides a challenge to theory. Indeed, the reflection on Syria’s changed domestic and foreign policies raises interesting issues relating, amongst others, to major debates in international relations (IR) theory and Middle East studies. The study of the region was traditionally underdeveloped from a theoretical perspective, feeding into Orientalist accounts of the Arab and Muslim worlds as “unique” entities outside the realm of analytic theory. Syria and the region continue to be predominantly analyzed through the lens of identity politics, hence reducing the variety of political and strategic developments to explanations based on the immutable essence of sectarian strife. This study proposes to address a challenging theoretical and empirical puzzle: How can political theory, and more specifically IR theories, help in understanding recent shifts in Syria’s international relations? Is the current struggle for Syria more convincingly ordered through the conceptual lens of ideology, identity and the construction of new narratives relating to “the fight against terrorism”, the rise of “Islamist threats” or the so-called “Shi’a-Sunni” regional divide; is it rather about power maximization and balancing against new threats to domestic and regional stability; or is perhaps the most powerful explanation found in broader conceptualizations borrowed from these different perspectives? The paper argues that Syria’s “new” international relations are best captured by exploring the interplay between different levels of analysis (systemic, regional and domestic), the nature, role and narratives of the different actors involved (state, non-state, sub-national), their identity and threat perceptions, and coalition-building processes. In addition to the relevant conceptual and empirical literature, the paper draws on primary sources collected in the region. Ultimately, the purpose is to provide a theoretically and empirically grounded analysis on post-2011 Syria beyond damning perspectives on the inescapability of sectarianism; and possibly, outline recommendations for the future of Syria.

With a population of 200,000 and an equal number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), Manbij is one of the largest cities in the liberated North of Syria. From July 2012 to January 2014, the city was governed by a Revolutionary Council and a Trustee Council but since early 2014, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) took it over. Based on three months of ethnographic research and more than two hundred interviews with key players as well as ordinary residents, the paper examines social and political challenges the revolutionaries were facing during the period before ISIS’s takeover. It pays particular attention to the creative ways they use to run the existing institutions and by doing so, the paper suggests, they lay down the first building blocks for the future nation. Staying away from empty and elitist discourses about the nation, the citizens of Manbij redefine the meaning of national identity by exploring practical ways to solve their everyday problems. As a central case, the paper explores the negotiations and deliberative practices surrounding the operation of one of the most important mills in Northern Syria, which produces enough flour to feed one million people. The research analyzes how for almost twenty months, Manbij became an incubator for nation-building and participatory democracy despite the multifaceted challenges it was facing. With its meager resources and despite the regime’s frequent airstrikes, the city was actively transforming its institutions to address the socio-economic, political, and humanitarian problems. Revolutionaries were coming up with innovative solutions to provide bread, water, electricity, and security to the population. More importantly, by making the city livable, and solving everyday challenges, the residents were negotiating a fragile and emergent democracy and as a result they were redefining the meaning of the new nation. Theirs is not an oppositional nationalism that simply rejects the officially sanctioned version propagated by the Ba’ath Party, but an iterative one that is adjusted and transformed myriad times every day through countless micro-encounters among an increasingly diverse population. The research suggests that iterative nationalism, which works best in a democratic environment, will prevent the fragmentation and tensions between the different groups, if nurtured and safeguarded.

The high flow of events concerning the present ‘conflict’ in Syria and its media coverage hide the continuity and the key components which created the present situation. I will argue that long term and short term histories shed light on how and why the oppositional movement has spread around the country. It also clarifies some specificities of the present movement compared to the previous ones known in Syria. Contrary to the confessional lecture on the present conflict, the underpinning structure that permits the movement to grow since 2011 is the quarter or the village. It became the place upon which local committees organized themselves and connected one to another. Moreover, the different geographical trends under which the movement extends to different parts of the country cannot be understood without taking the quarter or the village into consideration. Finally, the day-to-day crisis management such as in Yarmuk camp or Old Towns in Homs led to focus on this stage. Studying the long term history is essential in understanding the importance of the quarter and its leading role in the event. Three lenses prove this assumption. First, the quarter has historically been the place of socialization, and people identify with this place. Second, the network of the uprising followed the pattern of rural migration between the mid- 19th to the mid-20th century. Third, in some areas, memory had a key role in the commitment of the protestors. I will finally argue that this pattern is now leading to the regime’s fragmentation.

The first months of the Syrian uprising saw the spread of mobilizations in most regions of the country, from one village, small city or urban neighborhood to another. Three years later, the revolution has evolved into an armed conflict and the Syrian territory is divided into a patchwork of areas dominated either by the regime forces or by one of the many armed opposition groups. Most of the media attention is directed towards the evolution of the rapport de force on the ground, an ever-difficult task as the events are spiraling-up. Some commentators borrow analogies from other conflicts to depict the Syrian crisis: “libanization”, “irakization” or even, more recently, “somalization”. Not only is the use of these analogies loose, but it also preempts the analysis, in that they suggest a trajectory of Syria towards collapsing and/or territorial partition along sectarian lines. The paper does not attempt to foresee the future – and the level of complexification of the on-going situation in Syria in 2014 leaves indeed the door open to many scenarii. However, based on an original work of mapping of the contestation and of its repression, it analyses the spatial dynamics of the Syrian crisis through an argument based on social change theory. Social change in Syria is understood through the prism of three main structural and long-term trends - the demographic transition, the generalization of literacy and access to basic education, and the fact that the Syrian population has gone from being rural to being urban. Therefore, rather than resorting to sectarian logics (although the sectarian narrative and “geography” are clearly exploited since the beginning of the crisis), the argument builds on the major reconfigurations of the Syrian society and of its territorial organization over the last decades to inform the spatial dynamics of the conflict – the “bottom-up” diffusion of the revolutionary movement, the modalities of the repression, the territorial fragmentation. The paper shows that if the current territorial fragmentation is indeed a result of the development of the armed conflict, the fluidity of the interactions and the overlaps that take place at the local scale contradict a more geopolitical type of analysis.