The civil war that has devastated Syria, wreaked havoc on countless lives, and thrown the Levant into turmoil is the subject of a rapidly growing literature from scholars, activists, researchers, and journalists—including, most prominently, Syrians themselves—who are working to make sense of the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. Yet systematic efforts to situate the Syrian conflict within literatures on civil war, in particular drawing on Syria's experience to test existing theories about the origins and effects of civil wars, are only now beginning to appear.
Civil War in Syria is perhaps the most ambitious effort to date to offer a comprehensive theoretical account of the Syrian conflict. Rejecting quantitative, narrowly institutional, neopositivist, and rationalist theories of civil war, as well as those that adopt Weberian definitions of the state, the authors argue for an approach anchored in the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. They define civil war as “the co-existence on the same national territory of competing social orders engaged in a violent relationship. By social order, [they] mean an economy of violence, relative values of capitals and relations between fields at varying degrees of institutionalization” (p. 18). Focusing on three forms of capital—social, economic, and identity-based—they propose to trace the effects of civil war through “the appearance of new capitals, an often-severe fluctuation in the value of existing capitals, and … new circuits for converting capitals” (p. 18). The authors develop their approach in four sections, covering the onset of the Syrian uprising and its transformation into violent conflict; the emergence, organization, and functioning of insurgent institutions; the fragmentation of the uprising; and social dimensions of the conflict. Individual chapters provide exhaustive, often quite effective, coverage of institutional domains, actors, and contexts since 2011.
This sociological turn in the study of Syria's civil war is welcome. It builds on prior research that applies Bourdieu's core concepts to the study of violence, the state, and insurgency, and makes a compelling case for insights from Bourdieusian theory. Unfortunately, the volume's flaws are commensurate with its ambitions. It opens with a puzzling diatribe against quantitative methods that evokes the Perestroika moment in political science of the 2000s—a movement that mobilized effectively against the increasingly formal, quantitative turn within the discipline—yet with little appreciation for how, two decades later, the discipline has absorbed and responded to this critique. The authors are equally blistering, and equally blinkered, in their critique of rational choice theory, characterizing it as entombed in a homo economicus conception of behavior that has long since been overtaken by understandings of rationality that accommodate emotion, altruism, and sociological attributes. They excoriate prior research on Syria for its failure to use interview data, when in fact interviewing is widely used. The authors suggest that readers uninterested in these debates skip the prologue. Worthy advice.
More important is the often-problematic quality of core chapters. First, the authors are uneven in the application of their framework. Readers might expect to see how the authors’ framework advances our understanding of specific aspects of the Syrian conflict. In some chapters, these expectations are generally met, notably Chapter 4, “The Building of Military Capital,” and in the three chapters that constitute the volume's final section, “A Society at War.” In other chapters, however, including Chapter 1 on the origins of the uprising, Chapter 7 on the internationalization of the uprising, and Chapter 9 on processes of Islamization, the narrative is not consistently driven by the framework elaborated with such vigor in the introduction. The implications of such variability are not trivial. Whether readers accept the theoretical claims that frame the study or not, the authors’ failure to apply them in a coherent, consistent fashion leads to a narrative that is at times disorganized and unfocused, with chapters lapsing into merely chronological accounts. To be fair, in some areas, the results of this treatment may not meet theoretical expectations but are nonetheless quite impressive. Chapter 1 detailing “The al-Assad System” is a very effective account of the Assad regime, for instance.
Second, the book exhibits idiosyncratic intellectual judgment in places, along with numerous errors of omission, fact, and interpretation. Readers will need to approach this text with an especially keen critical eye. The authors overstate the extent of institutionalization and consolidation of opposition governance. They largely overlook the regime's strategy of continuing to pay salaries and maintain state institutions in opposition-held areas. Further, their characterization of armed opposition is marred by inaccuracies. They claim, incorrectly, that “in 2012 and 2013, [armed] groups gradually fell into line behind the FSA,” or Free Syrian Army (p. 103). This is demonstrably false. The authority of the FSA was always far more contingent. In fact, the authors fail to reckon accurately with the organization of militarization, in which the vast majority of localized militias constituted little more than village defense units.
The authors’ treatment of the role of Kurdish actors is also problematic. In Chapter 8, “The Kurds and the PKK,” the authors virtually erase the PYD (The Democratic Union Party), referring to it throughout as the PKK (The Kurdistan Workers’ Party). Close ties between the two notwithstanding, this is unfortunate. The PYD emerged from and operates within a Syrian context that has affected its development, its behavior, its relationships with other Syrian actors, with the Syrian uprising and opposition, and with the Assad regime. To condense it into a local extension of the PKK flattens and distorts this history and its impact on the PYD's experience since 2011. In a volume that stresses the imperative of attention to history and context, the formation of individual and collective capitals and their transformation during conflict, this presentation is at odds with the authors’ insistence on bottom-up and sociologically-informed research methods.
Additional problematic claims appear throughout the volume. The authors offer an extended critique of claims that link the rapid escalation of peaceful mobilization in early 2011 to the impact of early protests on the willingness of largely a-political Syrians to participate in mass protests (p. 69–71). Such mobilization cascades have been widely explained by Timur Kuran, Adam Przeworski, and others as the result of shifting preferences among individuals who recalculate their own willingness to engage in high risk behavior as others are doing the same. They argue that shifting tolerance for risk cannot account for mobilization cascades because initial protesters were not “extremists” and “lacked political organization.” Yet preference shifts do not require political organization, and references to extremists in the literature they cite refer simply to individuals whose tolerance for a given status quo is exceptionally low. The authors later distinguish the behavior of the military in Syria from its counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt with the dubious claim that in Syria, “unlike in [Egypt and Tunisia], where Western assistance enabled a degree of independence from the political leadership,” the Syrian military remained committed to the regime (p. 84). It is not accurate to attribute the defection of militaries in Egypt and Tunisia to Western assistance. And so on.
The cumulative effect of these flaws in the volume's presentation undermines confidence in the authors’ analysis and findings. Yet it is important to acknowledge that their narrative is often compelling, insightful, and persuasive in its ability to weave together critical threads in the experience of Syria's civil war that are too often presented without sufficient awareness of their interconnectedness. Chapters in the closing section of the book, on variations of social capital, wartime economic orders, and new identity regimes, are very effectively rendered. Nor should the authors be taken to task for the scale of their ambition, however imperfectly realized. They are not wrong in their intent to push the field toward more sociologically-oriented theories of violence and civil war. They are not wrong to insist that top-down statist approaches be integrated with those that take adequate account of bottom-up processes and dynamics. This is, overall, a flawed and often frustrating study, yet it should not be cavalierly dismissed. Instead, it should be read, debated, and challenged as research programs focusing on the Syrian civil war continue to develop.
