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

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.

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.

When we turned to the besieged Damascene suburb of Darayya, we found a very different narrative emerging around the production and evolution of rebel governance from those in Raqqa and Saraqeb. Darayya, a mere 8 kilometers from the country’s capital, sat close to the regime’s military airport, the General Intelligence Service Headquarters, and the Interior Ministry.1 The accounts from this place were not of people controlled by an occupying rebel force or an emergent limited access order, but rather a community – rebels included – that had cohered as the target of a sustained, merciless siege by the regime on account of its early and enthusiastic participation in the uprising.

As the Syrian uprising took a violent turn, armed fighters and civilian leaders alike carved out insurgent micropolitical economies across the country’s contested territories. Raqqa City was the first provincial capital to fall from the regime’s control into the hands of opposition forces. The city elected its first opposition council, the Raqqa city council, in early 2014, but the council proved short-lived. By mid-2014, a zealous band of foreign fighters had consolidated control over the city with the aim of establishing a caliphate that would transcend the Westphalian state system and manifest an extreme vision of Islamic rule. These aspiring governors quickly established a monopoly over coercion and availed themselves of a range of capital assets through access to natural resources, looting, and various forms of taxation in the service of their state-building effort. Our close reading of accounts from the city of Raqqa between 2014 and 2016 revealed the corresponding emergence of tight forms of social control as well as the demonstrated capacity to deliver a wide array of key services. In these ways, the so-called Islamic State proved to be a paragon of rebel governance, mobilizing key forms of material power to erect a robust new political order.