This chapter sets out the book’s main theoretical claims. It argues that understanding the emergence of revolutionary challenge along ethnic lines requires a focus on local-level interactions between social actors and state agents and how they vary over time. This approach directs attention to variation within ethnic groups and, specifically, to linkages between sub-ethnic units and the state. The chapter then presents the book’s main theoretical intervention: state linkages often condition the participation of “ethnically excluded” populations, and incumbent response to challenge is often not focused singly on dividing the population on ethnic lines but includes important forms of conciliation aimed at preserving cross-ethnic clients. This conciliation often fails, however, because informal, ethnically dominated autocratic regimes resort to violence to deal with immediate threats posed by prolonged urban demonstrations and challenger violence, shattering many of the linkages forged across ethnic lines. This view of challenger–incumbent interaction under ethnically dominated rule challenges the dominant view that regimes intentionally polarize their polities on ethnic lines to cling to power; the patchwork of bargains such regimes strike with various elements of the populations they rule can channel contention toward ethnic violence, even when ethnicization is not in the incumbent’s interest.

This chapter sets the political and social context for the events of the 2011 Syrian uprising. It describes the topography of ethnic boundaries and, using original quantitative data, shows that ʿAlawis were disproportionate beneficiaries of state largesse, accessed through informal ties and formal positions in the civil service and military. Nonetheless, substantial segments of the Sunni Arab population were also tied to the state through personalistic ties and public institutions. Then it describes the relationship between ethnicity and state access in historical and theoretical terms, arguing that the Baʿth regime instrumentalized existing social structures in some cases, building ties to local leaders with customary status, and worked to break down these ties in other cases, building new ties with individual citizens through corporatist development and state employment. Finally, the chapter examines the effects of neoliberal policies, enacted after 2000, on these linkages. It argues that these policies exacerbated the suffering of many Syrians already lacking state access but left the cross-ethnic structure of state–society ties intact.

This chapter examines the mechanisms through which revolutionary contention turned increasingly ethnic and violent during the second half of 2011 and early 2012. It argues that ethnicization of challenge was the indirect result of regime violence, used primarily to confront exigencies it could not address through its informal social linkages rather than as a tool to rend the social fabric. The chapter begins with a quantitative analysis of Syrian regime violence, demonstrating that the regime attempted to avoid harming many of its clients. Then it takes a deeper look into how and why the regime used violence when it did, inductively theorizing the exigencies the regime faced and how it dealt with them. The remainder of the chapter examines the second-order effects of this repression, using in-depth studies of localities that exemplify each of the types identified earlier in the chapter. State violence changed the composition of the challenger group and the content of its claims, making the challenger group more ethnically homogeneous, pushing claims to focus on ethnic demands and employ ethnic symbols.

A visitor wandering the streets of Vienna, Belgrade, Berlin, or Bucharest in the penultimate year of the Great War would have witnessed more or less the same scene in each of those cities: men in oversized suits or uniforms and women in dresses that had fitted them perfectly a few years earlier. The same visitor would have also noticed a proliferation of fruit and vegetable gardens, even in front of the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna. The difference between the hinterland and occupied territories was simple: in the former these miniature garden-plots were owned by local residents, whereas on the boulevards of Belgrade or Bucharest they were owned partly by the residents and partly by the occupier’s military units stationed nearby. Life during wartime was hardly better in one’s ‘own’ hinterland than it was in occupied territories.

This concluding chapter summarizes the book arguments and reflects on the legacies of the war, the problems at restoring business as usual after a long period of state of exception, and the difficulties of squaring sovereignty, national interests, humanity and human rights. The war and its aftermath profoundly changed the population structure of vast territories and generated a proliferation of migration control policies and new citizenship claims from those who had fought on the battlefront or suffered because of the war. It reshaped economic relationships and the balance of power and had a big impact on reorienting migration flows. The First World War marked a departure from the quest for the universalism of rights and a shift from individuals to collectivities defined in terms of identity, belonging, language, ethnicity, religion or class. Establishing the equation between aliens and dangerousness, the First World War consolidated the idea that policing borders, selecting those who can live in the territory of a country, expelling the unwanted, preventing them from entering, granting and stripping people of their citizenship were (and after the war continued to be) the main prerogatives of the sovereign state, which had the power to decide whom to accept, expel, grant asylum to, include, exclude and endow with rights.