In Surviving the War in Syria, Justin Schon examines the ways that civilians safeguard themselves and aid others during civil wars. Focusing on the ongoing civil war in Syria, the book discusses a wide range of “survival strategies” that civilians undertake and examines empirical variation in two of them: the timing of civilian migration outside the country and the extent to which civilians provide “community support”, material or emotional assistance to other civilians. The book proceeds from the astute observation that there is no direct, mechanical relationship between the level of violence an individual witnesses or is subjected to and that individual’s propensity to migrate or provide aid—instead, a host of structural and situational factors mediate these outcomes. To explain this variation, Schon introduces both “motivation” and “opportunity” factors, operating at the societal and individual cognitive levels. The motivation theory holds that social ties to “violent actors” make individuals more likely to witness violence during civil war; this exposure, in turn, spurs posttraumatic growth, and posttraumatic growth then impels the individual to provide community support and delay migration. The opportunity account holds that having high social status, for which Schon uses the Arabic term wasta, enables individuals to both provide community support and migrate earlier (pp. 10–11).
Empirical materials are drawn primarily from structured interviews of roughly 200 Syrians, all of whom were residing outside Syria at the time of interview, mostly in Turkey and Jordan; responses to closed-ended questions form the basis for a statistical analysis and open-ended questions provide the bulk of the qualitative data marshaled in further support of the book’s claims. Several of the chapters take up individual links in the causal chain of the “motivation” account. Chapter 3 demonstrates that preexisting ties to members of armed groups increase a civilian’s propensity to witness violence; chapter 6 argues that witnessing violence correlates with one form of community support, providing information to other civilians; and chapter 7 examines the psychological and informational mechanisms determining migration timing. Chapter 5 unpacks a part of the “opportunity” account, demonstrating how wasta, understood as the types of social status and networks needed to protect oneself and other civilians, shifts over time from connections to individuals in the incumbent regime to material resources and membership in the regime’s ethnic group.
Surviving the War in Syria addresses an important and frequently overlooked aspect of life under civil war conditions, namely, the actions of those not involved in fighting or other overt political activity during war. Schon’s observation that exposure to violence does not have uniform effects across the noncombatant population is a vital one; it shows civilians to be agents with at least some control over their situation, rendering their actions a viable field of study. Among the book’s strengths is Schon’s honesty about the multiplicity of factors impelling noncombatant action; rather than focusing on a single factor, he highlights the range of conditions and dispositions given by his survey respondents that impelled them to act as they did (p. 15). By proposing this wide range of explanations operating on cognitive, material, and relational planes, this book lays the groundwork for future research on the action of noncombatants in civil war. Also notable in this regard is the book’s explication of the decision tree that precedes the adoption of survival strategies—become a militant or remain a civilian and, if the latter, engage in violent resistance, nonviolent resistance, or survival strategies (pp. 3–4). This will aid future studies of noncombatant action in defining the universe of cases in the field and appropriate scope conditions.
The choice to examine noncombatant action during civil war puts a spotlight on the quotidian strategies that individuals undertake, which is a needed supplement to the dominant emphasis in the literature on why some individuals join armed groups and the dynamics of intrastate warfare. But conceptualizing this action as “survival” and “civilian self-protection” comes at an analytical cost: it moves away from the political entanglements and identities that structure the actions of different subsets of the civilian population. Indeed, the book analogizes surviving civil war to surviving natural disaster and suggests that its findings can aid in formulating plans for natural disaster response (p. 189).
Yet civil wars are not natural disasters, which damage human settlements without regard to their inhabitants’ identity and occur independently of human processes (the role of climate change in recent natural disasters notwithstanding). Rather, connections between cleavages at the political center and those within local communities—alliances, in Stathis Kalyvas’s formulation—are a central factor structuring local-level dynamics of violence.
The book’s discussion of “safe” and “dangerous” sites in a binary fashion is instructive in this regard; Schon at one point declares the entirety of Syria a “dangerous location” (p. 91), but does not interrogate the question, “dangerous for whom?” Few sites within a polity undergoing civil war are dangerous to all civilians for prolonged periods of time (for example, because of active fighting); “dangerous” locales are more often dangerous to a large swath of civilians, but not to others, because of features of those civilians’ identities and their network ties (the same criticism could be leveled regarding the oft-employed term “violent actors,” which refers to individuals who are not necessarily violent by disposition but rather act violently toward specific others for specific reasons). In other words, political identities systematically influence the strategies that appeal to and are available for different subsets of the civilian population.
In the case of civilian responses to war unfolding around them, political identities factor centrally into how individuals are targeted by violent actors and the strategies for seeking protection available to them. In the Syrian case, a local community with ties to regime security forces through customary leaders or one that shares the Alawi ethnic identity of the regime would almost certainly be spared the regime violence that displaced many of Schon’s interviewees. Those same populations would also be more likely than others to experience violent reprisals by rebels as the regime lost control of territory in 2012 and 2013. In turn, civilians with identity markers that align them with the regime in the eyes of its opponents and supporters—here I am thinking not just of Alawis and other ethnic minorities but also of Sunni regime clients, like business elites and mid-level public servants—could more easily seek shelter in regime-controlled Syrian urban centers, and many might have reason to fear migrating to a neighboring country providing tacit support to the opposition, like Turkey. Both of these factors create systematic variation in the form and timing of violence meted out against subsets of the civilian population—variation that the natural disaster approach to civil war violence treats as random.
This systematic variation is little discussed in the book, in part, because its empirical materials cover only the segment of the Syrian civilian population most accessible to foreign researchers: refugees in Turkey and Jordan. These populations generally lacked high-level patronage ties to the regime and were overwhelmingly of Sunni Arab ethnic identity; it is telling, for example, that not a single interviewee of Schon’s in Turkey was Alawi or Christian (p. 73). This limitation—which Schon, to his credit, acknowledges (p. 77)—hardly undermines the value of studying displaced populations, but it requires discussion of whether and how the reader should extrapolate from findings from the population studied. The book leaves this discussion underdeveloped.
In addition to concerns about the political nature of surviving war, the book raises several other theoretical questions. First is how the psychological explanatory factors interact with the structural ones. Schon asserts at one point that the psychological factors are mechanisms through which broad structural processes play out (p. 112), but in the rest of the theoretical discussion, they seem to have a causal status equal to that of network linkages. If psychological processes are mechanisms, it would be helpful to know the structural situations that trigger them—but Schon tells us that these processes are activated under circumstances that cannot be precisely defined (pp. 28, 158). By contrast, if psychological factors are independent causal variables, it would be helpful to have a list of indicators for both posttraumatic growth and “narrative rupture” and their statistical correlates or interview data on the consequences of these states emerging.
These questions about the psychological mechanisms notwithstanding, the book’s empirical analysis makes a solid case for the role of structural factors—particularly network ties to armed actors and political authorities—in determining civilian strategies. This empirical work on networks is obscured rather than clarified, however, by the book’s conceptualization of wasta, which conflates material resources and personal networks. Schon initially defines wasta by regression—analyzing the demographic correlates of his interviewees’ stating that they possess wasta—and eventually settles on a definition of wasta as “advantaged social status,” based on money and connections to powerful people (p. 117). But wasta etymologically relates to intermediation, that is, networks not material resources, and is typically understood to refer only to the former (e.g., Steffen Hertog, “The Sociology of the Gulf Rentier States,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 289, 2010). The book’s all-encompassing definition allows Schon to assert at one point that an entire ethnic group can have wasta (p. 124). Separating out and naming different components of what interviewees described under the rubric of wasta—such as material resources, cross-ethnic patronage ties, and family/clan/intra-ethnic solidarity ties—might yield further insights into the book’s observation that the meaning and value of wasta shift over time.
Finally, the book’s multimethod empirical strategy is innovative for political science in that it uses the same data source—structured interviews conducted mostly by the author—for qualitative and quantitative analysis. This method, which Schon describes as “mixed data analysis” (p. 82), allows for deep inspection of a particularly rich dataset like the one he was able to amass. But it entails a costly trade-off: although the use of structured questionnaires enables the quantitative analysis of interview materials, it precludes the use of interview data for close analysis of temporal sequences. The book’s qualitative materials are short quotations from the structured interviews and from general, English-language secondary literature about the conflict in Syria. Analysis of temporal sequences would have greatly helped in drawing valid inferences to support the book’s correlational statistical analyses. For example, although the statistical analysis includes information about individuals’ migration timing, the reader has no way of gauging whether the time-invariant wasta variable was the driver of the decision to migrate, rather than one of the other covariates. More information on sequences of events in a given locale—whether gathered from specialized secondary sources or open-ended interviews with former residents—would have provided greater confidence that posttraumatic growth and wasta were doing the causal work the book attributes to them.
Questions about conceptualization and empirical strategies aside, Surviving the War in Syria has set the stage for future research on civilian strategies, a crucial but underexplored area of research on civil war violence.
