This chapter puts forward a theory to explain how businesses engage in politics following democratic transitions in countries with significant issues with corruption. The most important variable is the centralization of the networks of brokers who supply companies with needed government privileges. If these rent networks are narrow, then businesspeople must work through a single gatekeeper. If they are broad, then business can engage with multiple brokers and obtain rent more easily.

This chapter presents original survey evidence of corporate political action in Egypt and Tunisia. Employing multiple surveys between 2017 and 2020, the chapter shows that Egyptian business were more active politically and more willing to take strong measures such as telling their employees who to vote for. These differences in engagement are a reflection of the presence of the military in Egypt and its strong economic linkages with businesspeople.

This chapter expands on the previous chapter by presenting survey evidence from Morocco, Jordan, Venezuela, and the Ukraine using the same conjoint experiment of business political engagement. The chapter documents that Egypt's military has a higher level of penetration than even other Arab countries. In general, Arab countries seem to have more economically involved militaries than non-Arab countries. An additional pattern is that companies that have had to pay higher bribe costs in the past five years are more likely to engage in political action, suggesting that they are trying to protect their companies and their relationships with the government.

After 2011, the Syrian opposition took on the Assad government directly through military means and indirectly by establishing pockets of rule beyond the government’s reach. As rebels took control of many government-held locations, they sparked the establishment of insurgent governing institutions in hundreds of communities. Local opposition-run institutions in the form of civilian-led local councils proliferated, dotting the provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, rural Damascus, Raqqa, Hama, and Homs. They worked to deliver basic relief and restore public services, sometimes in collaboration with, but often operating separately from, their armed counterparts. The boundaries of this “political marketplace”1 grew increasingly porous as a number of foreign states and private actors directly championed clients of their choosing, bolstering their favorites with financial and military support.2

The very project of counter-state-building, as conceived in twenty-first-century international relations, required Syria’s opposition leaders to convince prospective foreign patrons of the worthiness of the revolutionary endeavor. For those institutions that became clients of the West, they worked, as Clifford Bob would have it, to market their rebellion with agility.1 To make their case, they attended, paradoxically, to an outward-facing politics at the expense of cultivating an authoritative closeness from within. Still, both donor and recipient engaged one another “as if” the introduction of limited foreign support could do the work of connecting an aspiring commanding heights to the revolutionary grassroots. As such, we interpret this performance of counter-statehood not merely as a product of Syrian opposition politics but rather as a collaboration between the opposition and its foreign patrons.

At its heart, this is a book about the social and political lives of Syrians who rose up against the Assad regime and found themselves governing their own affairs for a sustained moment in time. We will consider, in the coming pages, how they understood the new authoritarianism of the Islamic State in Raqqa, the transition from popular protest to a kind of elite consolidation in Saraqeb, the deprivation under siege in Darayya, and the semi-anarchic choreography of violent competition in eastern Aleppo. Before delving into our findings, we will spend a few pages discussing the methods we mobilized in the service of this research and the means by which we designed (and redesigned) our study along the way. While some readers may wish to skip this look behind the curtain, we want to offer transparency about the means employed, the challenges that arose, and the quandaries therein.1

We turn from Raqqa – a site where the absence of connective ties deprived the Islamic State of citizen trust – to Saraqeb, where the bonds of solidarity heavily informed the local council’s governing model and authority. In late 2012, a Free Syrian Army (FSA) campaign made Saraqeb the first liberated town in northern Syria. Before the war, this small city of 50,000 inhabitants relied on agriculture and iron and oil production industries. Its location was important due to its proximity to Idlib City and its position along the main artery running from Turkey to Hama Governate further south.1 A local FSA affiliate, together with the locally bred Islamist militia, Ahrar al-Sham, succeeded in liberating the town from the Assad regime in November 2012.

We have worked to establish, throughout this book, that institutional closeness is both an important and understudied good for rebels striving to achieve authoritative rule. We explored various forms of closeness through connection and the means by which they mediated the management of coercion and capital in local insurgent-controlled communities. We also considered the possibilities and limits of these social solidarities to compensate for these young institutions’ material deficiencies. But, ultimately, absent the sinews of national institutions capable of binding them to one another, even the most authoritative of local opposition councils, while markers of profound political change, would remain perpetually disaggregated in structure and effect. Therefore, in this penultimate chapter, we move from the local level of insurgent politics up to the national level to examine the opposition institution of the Syrian Interim Government (SIG) that was meant (and failed) to bring the counter-state together.1

Protest in the face of authoritarian rule necessitates a kind of audacity rarely, if ever, called for in daily life. When uprising turns to revolt and revolt to civil war, new questions arise: What comes next? What combination of suffering and joy does the future hold? And to whom should one now turn to manage those matters previously entrusted to the state? Even as new political possibilities arise, the stuff of ordinary life does not disappear but instead must be managed on terms that are both newly expansive and constrained. As people confront the hopes and hardships that come with rebellion, bread must be baked, crimes punished, and garbage collected.