During the Sadat and Mubarak periods, Coptic (Orthodox Egyptian Christian) activism was extraordinarily rare. Rather than making demands on the state, members of the Coptic community operated through the Church, in what has been called a "neo-millet" system. This practice positioned Copts as clients of the Egyptian Pope while preventing them from petitioning the government as citizens. In the late Mubarak era, during a period of rising insecurity for Egyptian Christians, young Copts began organizing and protesting outside of the aegis of the Church. Coptic demonstrations increased after the 2011 uprising that deposed Mubarak. In this same period, roughly 2009-2012, attacks upon Copts increased dramatically. Although national politics, including the (unsuccessful) struggles of the Mubarak and SCAF regimes to consolidate power, certainly played a part in the escalation of violence, this paper finds that the main drivers of conflict can be found at the local level. Perhaps counterintuitively, an increase in political rights was inversely proportional to the physical security of Egyptian Copts in general. The reason was that the more struggles for citizenship rights threatened local strongmen and traditional (extra-legal) modes of conflict resolution, the more those same local elites retaliated against Coptic communities. Extensive newspaper research shows that violence through the local coercive apparatus typically took the form of attacks upon churches and individuals, as well as tacit permission for vigilante assaults. For this reason, fluctuations in Muslim-Coptic relations must be understood not only in relation to national politics but also in terms of the local stakeholders who benefit from or are threatened by formal juridical accountability. Drawing on dozens of interviews in Cairo and Upper Egypt, as well as sources in three languages (Arabic, French, and English), the paper traces variations in anti-Coptic attacks and Coptic organizing across the late Mubarak period, the transitional rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and the first year of Mohamed Morsi's presidency. After assessing variations in violence across time and space, I find that attacks are most frequent when traditional local elites are under threat and their hegemony is in decline. In this sense, so-called sectarian tension may actually constitute a milestone in the development of citizenship.

What happens when struggling rebels acquire external support? This paper argues that changes in militants’ access to external funding or non-lethal aid create cleavages within rebel organizations by producing a “generational effect” in longitudinal recruitment, cohesion-building, and promotion trends. Specifically, variations in the amount, type, or source of external support affect the scope of recruitment drives and the potential for bureaucratic expansion and employment of non-fighters. Focusing longitudinally on Fateh in Lebanon following 1982, this paper shows how shifts in rebel finance produced competing intra-organizational coalitions in three ways: they drew a line between battle-seasoned volunteers and fresh, financially-backed recruits; they separated those willing to accept external funders’ demands from those who would not; and, they produced schisms between ground troops and top brass, to name a few options. I argue that within Fateh, these generational effects alienated a seasoned old guard from newly minted bureaucrats and well-compensated rebel leaderships, disrupting the organizations’ overall unity and creating uneven patterns of unit-level solidarity. The resulting internal schisms, in turn, affect long-term command-and-control, secondary unit cohesion, intra-organizational violence, and patronage distribution within the organization. To elucidate these processes, this paper draws on 19 months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork among over a dozen Palestinian militant organizations in Lebanon. In particular, it combines in-depth interviews with current and former members of Fateh with nine months of focused organizational ethnography to evaluate the long-term relationship between variance in violence, external funding, and intra-organizational cleavage structure. It demonstrates, in particular, the ways in which different generational cohorts within Fateh developed their own sub-organizational identities, cultures, and practices, creating networks of gossip, protection, favor exchange, and “die hard” behavior that superseded formal organizational hierarchies and challenged leadership control of intra-factional coalitions. Expanding from the focal case, the paper later suggests ways in which lessons from Fateh’s experience can inform research on ongoing and interwoven processes of violence, rebel meaning-making practices, and political outcomes in Libya and Syria. By demonstrating the uneven intra-organizational impact of external material support and by emphasizing intra-organizational politics, this paper challenges existing arguments that associate violent rebel behavior with external funding and lack of cohesion. On a broader level, it also emphasizes the unforeseen consequences of nonlethal foreign interventions in civil wars.

Syria’s ongoing civil war epitomizes a challenge third parties – whether aid NGOs, international organizations like the Arab League, and indeed foreign governments – face in policy-making with respect to conflict: many civil wars are fought not between *the* government and *the* rebels but rather diverse armed actors. Uncertainty surrounding the trajectory of the Arab uprisings even in countries where regimes fell, due to factionalism and the inability of governments to secure a monopoly over the use of force, suggests the continuing relevance of this challenge. Multiple militias, paramilitary groups, and autonomous segments of the security forces leave an imprint on internal warfare. Observers sometimes refer to “kaleidoscopes”, “dizzying” numbers, or “countless” warring groups. Outright fighting between putative allies is particularly puzzling. What determines whether allied armed groups can successfully cooperate, using this to their advantage against a common enemy? Why are some wars prone to seemingly self-destructive fighting between purported allies, to the detriment of their shared interests and their civilian constituencies? This paper develops a concept of violent conflict within alliances, an understudied phenomenon in civil wars. I theorize the role of threats to survival in generating cooperation among armed actors, arguing that reprieves from violent elimination by the enemy cause cooperation to break down. The assurance of survival pushes an armed actor to fight its allies, with whom it competes most intensely for political support, with an eye towards increasing its political power in the eventual post-war period. At the same time, the war continues to tie the fratricidal groups together as meaningful allies. This theory differs from existing explanations of the fragmentation of armed actors and shifting alliances within civil wars, which view threats to survival as generating break-downs in cooperation. Here, the opposite is the case: cooperation between allies breaks down when survival is secured. I test the theory using data on armed group interactions in the Syrian civil war. I also use structured comparisons within the subnational research design to check theoretical implications concerning the effects of variation in the cleavage separating competing allies (e.g. ideological versus identity-based; local versus regional or national) and in the source of the reprieve from violent elimination (e.g. infusion of resources from an external patron versus unexpected military gains). These comparisons allow for a nuanced understanding of conflict and cooperation between Islamist groups and the Free Syrian Army, umbrella groups and their component organizations, and Arab and Kurdish armed groups.

In 2005, observers of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) described a series of elections around that time as a “desert spring.” Although events such as municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, granting of women’s suffrage in Kuwait, parliamentary elections in Oman, peaceful elections in Yemen, and electoral and constitutional changes in Algeria and Morocco--were largely top-down, analysts celebrated them as democratic stirrings. Subsequent setbacks, such as Syria’s and Egypt’s sham elections in 2007 and 2010, respectively, Iran’s contested 2009 election, and strong performance of Islamist parties such as Hamas brought renewed skepticism about the region’s long-term prospects for democracy. When mass uprisings began to sweep the region in late 2010, another optimistic term, “Arab spring,” emerged. Work seeking to explain it and why social scientists and regional scholars failed to predict it is proliferating. Drawing on literatures on the role of violence in institutional change and “democratization by elections," I advance the hypothesis that the timing and nature of the current revolutions are primarily the outcome of a process that began with earlier cosmetic electoral reforms--dating even to pre-independence colonial elections--and the cycles of participation, expectations, and violence they produce. I argue that they are comparable to democratization processes that occurred in Europe and elsewhere between 1792 and 1920, particularly given the relative insulation the region has enjoyed from broader international norms and trends that some argue make European and modern democratization qualitatively different. Despite leaders’ best efforts to retain power through what Marc Lynch calls “defensive democratization,” subsequent election fraud and manipulation following phony or incomplete openings legitimizes opposition use of violence to actualize the principles that even the most superficial reforms represent. I test the hypothesis by analyzing the timing of election fraud, violence, and revolution using an original global dataset(1800-2012) and qualitative and event data analysis from elections in Algeria (1894-2012) and Egypt (2005-2012).