Kevin Mazur’s Revolution in Syria: Identity, Networks, and Repression has a difficult task. Knowing that unrest that began in 2011 in Syria turned into a full-fledged civil war fought along ethnic lines, or became “ethnicized” as Mazur puts it, the book zooms in on the first year of the Syrian uprising and traces how ethnicization occurred. Mazur highlights that in the first year, it was not at all clear what would happen. The uprising could have been short and fleeting and be easy for regime forces to quash, transform into ethnicized civil war as it became, or could have produced a broad coalition of actors waging a nonviolent revolution. In his book, Mazur painstakingly shows how the unrest in 2011 began with widely varying dynamics across Syria and then how those varied dynamics converged into country-wide ethnicized civil war.
After the introduction in chapter 1, Mazur articulates his argument in chapter 2. He then dives into various forms of spatial and temporal disaggregation to expand on his argument. Chapter 3 describes the context in which the uprising began, with a focus on the Syrian regime and how it used patrimonial networks as a critical component of its governance. These networks elevated the Alawi ethnic group and included bridges to Sunni Arabs and other non-Alawi populations. Chapter 4 is an event study of the sequence of events in the first year of the uprising, with a focus on categorizing contention and regime response into five ideal types each and showing how those types evolved over time. For contention, these ideal types include citizenship-focused, parochial, hybrid popular, ethnic insurgency, and particularist challenge (pp. 110–11). Regime responses include clashes with armed challengers, three types of action short of clashes (crowd control, tactical control, and town destruction), and ally actions (pp. 99–100).
Chapter 5 examines why some Syrians participated in contention in the early months. Its discussion of participation focuses on citizenship-focused, parochial, and hybrid popular challenges. The particularist challenge in Syria is primarily attributed to the Kurds, and ethnic insurgency is arguably what these three types of challenge evolved into. Citizenship-focused challenge attracted the broadest base of support and actively used social media to organize and advance claims in central public spaces (pp. 123–29). Parochial challenge only occurred in Sunni Arab communities and often involved mediation through existing, informal channels to state authorities. This form of challenge thereby occurred in communities with dense horizontal network ties and strong vertical ties with state authorities (p. 129). Hybrid popular challenge also only occurred in Sunni Arab communities, but it involved a wider array of mobilization strategies and goals (p. 139). Mazur’s discussion of this type is very interesting for readers, thanks to his case study of challenge dynamics in Homs (pp. 139–51): it draws from an especially wide variety of evidence to make his case. The spatial analysis informing the maps (p. 142) could potentially motivate several research articles in and of itself.
Chapter 6 meanwhile examines nonparticipation, highlighting four pathways (p. 161): (1) regular state access and fear of marginalization under Sunni rule; (2) vertical ties between state authorities and local notables that limited participation; (3) active relationship building between state officials and individual Syrian citizens that dissuaded people from participating; and (4) combined heavy state security presence and linkages between the regime and local population in Damascus and Aleppo.
Chapters 7 and 8 follow the transformation from a largely nonviolent, civic uprising into a full-fledged civil war that became ethnicized. Chapter 8’s focus on Syria’s Kurdish population in the northeast will be particularly jarring for readers reflecting on Kurdish armed groups battling with ISIS and other armed groups in more recent years, but it is an important precursor to those dynamics. Finally, the concluding chapter looks beyond March 2012 and identifies several threads of continuity between the first year of the uprising and its escalation into civil war. These insights will most certainly be useful for those considering postconflict reconstruction and governance.
The book is particularly strong in explaining how an antigovernment movement that wants to build a broad-based coalition becomes ethnicized. Mazur expertly walks the reader through the revolution that began with nonviolent mobilization, the government’s violent reaction to opposition mobilization, and then the opposition’s ethnicization that followed. Anyone who is broadly interested in how protest movements escalate into civil war, as well as conflict scholars pushing back against arguments framing war or its ethnicization as inevitable, will value this approach.
This argument incorporates discussion of how prewar network characteristics led to some Syrian neighborhoods mobilizing earlier than others. Prewar network characteristics also feature as important factors in explanations of behavior during war in books such as Evgeny Finkel’s Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (2017) and my own book Surviving the War in Syria: Survival Strategies in a Time of Conflict (2020). The network characteristics in Mazur’s book specifically refer to the vertical ties that link community members with local elites who serve as intermediaries with the state (which individuals in my book identified as wasta), as well as the density of network ties within communities. These two network factors highlight one relational network characteristic (vertical ties) and one structural network characteristic (degree density) as critical for understanding the timing of when a given community mobilized and when that community’s mobilization became organized along ethnic lines. Mazur’s book presents vertical ties and density as existing together, so it is unclear whether one or both of these network features actually drove opposition trajectories, but identifying the importance of these two network features is valuable nonetheless.
My main critique is in how the book characterizes the regime response to the Syrian uprising. Mazur draws from a variety of examples of regime behavior to support his point (e.g., p. 155): that the regime used ethnicization because it lacked other options (a point made most explicitly at p. 185). This lack of options arguably existed when communities did not have strong vertical ties with state authorities and dense social networks that would have allowed state directives to reach all community members. This is a critical point for the reader to consider carefully because it is key to understanding the book’s argument about regime behavior. Under Mazur’s view, ethnicization was more of a last resort than a deliberate plan.
However, this argument does not sufficiently acknowledge the regime’s role in actively inciting ethnicization. Examples from Baniyas (pp. 136–38) highlight regime restraint, but Mazur states that restraint was accompanied by ethnicization: “While the regime stoked ethnic fear among local Alawis to ensure their loyalty, it continued to reach out to Sunni local notables” (p. 138). More broadly, Mazur observes that regime agents actively created suspicion of Sunnis among non-Sunnis through state media, even when the opposition tried to resist ethnicization (pp. 161–64). These tactics included labeling Sunni protestors as Islamic radicals, drug smugglers, and terrorists. Consistently, the regime highlighted the role of extreme and sectarian members of the opposition (p. 199). In short, the regime strongly preferred that the uprising be understood as a struggle along ethnic lines, rather than a broad interethnic coalition advocating for improved and more democratic governance (p. 200). These details, which Mazur himself provides, suggest that ethnicization was an intentional and deliberate regime strategy, preferable to making concessions that would satisfy the opposition. Clearly, regime violence facilitated ethnicization, but the civil war cannot be properly understood, even with a narrow focus on the first year of contention, without framing ethnicization as an intentional regime strategy.
Fortunately, if the argument is relaxed to the point that ethnicization was not the regime’s first choice (even if not its last resort), then the book’s argument still works. Ethnicization is not inevitable. If the regime’s first choice of using its preexisting ties with local elites to calm unrest had worked, then it may have been able to stop the uprising before it grew into a civil war and ethnicization occurred. That preferred scenario, however, is quite difficult to achieve if too much violence takes place.
Mazur’s book provides extremely valuable insights into how an uprising attempting to build a broad interethnic coalition in a country with governance built on elevating specific ethnic groups is likely to fail. The role of violence in breaking preexisting ties between the regime and local elites and between those elites and their fellow community members is clearly critical. The book also adds to a growing body of work showing that prewar social networks strongly influence behavior during war. It pushes the reader to ponder how antigovernment movements ever build broad interethnic coalitions, a question I suspect Mazur would be delighted to encourage his audience to consider.
