This chapter investigates how civilians sort truth from lies in the context of the Syrian civil war. In particular, it plumbs a rich batch of semi-structured interviews conducted with Syrian refugees in Turkey that was generously shared by Schon (2020). These interviews include people’s confidence in their truth discernment ability – their ability to distinguish true vs. false information – during the war, along with detailed information on what they heard and experienced while they were in Syria. The chapter analyzes these interviews with a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative analyses show that those who spent longer in Syria, witnessed a wider range of events in the war, and explicitly rely on personal experience to assess new information are much more confident in their truth discernment ability. This is supported by ample qualitative material from the interviews, which demonstrates how Syrian refugees put stock in many of these same factors and drew many of these same connections themselves when discussing informational dynamics in the war.

The Mongol advance is described from an unusual viewpoint in the Hebrew sources. The writers either witnessed Mongol activity, as in the Jewish communities of Iraq and Armenia, or heard of it from afar, as in Sicily, Provence, Spain, and Morocco. The texts, scant in number yet diverse in nature, are traced according to genre – letters, poems, tomb inscriptions, eschatology and Kabbalah, exegesis, and sermons. They touch the early Mongol raids in Iraq and the vast invasion of Eastern Europe, the conquest of Baghdad and the advance into Syria, and the activity of the Ilkhanate and its conflict with the Mamluk Sultanate. Since the Jews had neither state nor army, they were not considered a target or a threat, and their texts therefore provide a sort of neutral, and often positive, description of the Mongols as a raiding force, a conquering army, and a state.

Cultural misbeliefs are false beliefs that are widely spread through social transmission, such as rumors or conspiracy theories. These misbeliefs are often feared to cause much damage, as people engage in costly actions on their basis. However, it is possible for people to hold a belief in such a way that the belief only has limited impact on their thoughts or behavior – if they hold a belief reflectively, by contrast with intuitively. Here, we argue that (i) most cultural misbeliefs are held reflectively and that (ii) they rarely directly cause costly behavior. We note that different cultures use different misbeliefs to justify similar behaviors, suggesting that the beliefs are secondary to the behavior. Moreover, misbeliefs usually do not have the consequences they would have if they were held intuitively, causing other types of (usually less costly) behaviors instead.

This chapter reveals and examines the ways ordinary people expressed, disseminated and exchanged contrary views and subversive opinions. It especially focuses on three avenues through which the people’s voice and opinions were expressed and circulated: daily conversations, rumors and placards. The first and foremost thing the people were involved in was daily chats. The people expressed their contrary views when they came together in relatively safe places free from the state’s control, like houses, coffeehouses or gardens. Daily conversations were generally accompanied by rumors. Everyplace in the country was awash with numerous rumors. Rumors, mostly unfounded, expressed the hopes, desires or fantasies of people discontented with the regime, the government or a specific policy. Rumors challenged and sometimes undermined the credibility of the official propaganda and discourse. Finally, in those public places where open talks were risky, the people aired their grievances, contrary arguments and even criticisms through handwritten papers affixed on walls, trees or doors. All these operated as alternative media challenging the official propaganda of the government and its mouthpieces, the formal press.

This chapter examines how the peasants who were discontented with the state policies, taxes, monopolies, local exploitation and oppression expressed their criticism and made their voices heard through letters to the press, petitions to official authorities, placards, rumors and folk culture. It traces the peasants’ complaints about agricultural prices, agricultural loans, interest rates, landlessness, taxes, monopolies, enclosure of forests and grazing lands, bureaucratic malfeasance, exploitation and oppression by large landowners, village headmen and gendarmes. It also evaluates how popular demands and complaints influenced the state’s decision-making.

First, this chapter analyzes the non-elite socialization places in which anti-secular opinions were produced and expressed such as mosques, Qur’an courses, houses and coffeehouses. It shows the people’s insistence on their religious practices by receiving secret Qur’an courses or by disobeying the Turkish call to prayer. Second, it outlines a wide range of ways people expressed their critical views, ranging from seditious conversations, rumors, placards and anonymous critical letters to authorities, to writing on walls, doors and trees. Third, this chapter examines the rhetoric and discursive strategies anti-secular talks used. Fourth, it reveals how those social groups or individuals who had lost their authority or economic advantages due to secular reforms or those people who were discontented with economic conditions took part in the production and dissemination of anti-secular and anti-regime discourses. This chapter also shows how the non-elite daily socialization places contested the state’s secular propaganda and socialization spaces such as People’s Houses and Rooms.

This chapter reconstructs rumors and demonstrations in 1968 around the death of Gholamreza Takhti, Iran's beloved gold-winning wrestling champion, recentering them in the history of the 1979 revolution and the global 1960s. The account of the demonstrations provided here explains a mobilization tactic used to great effect in the lead up to the 1979 Iranian Revolution: the staging of protests on the fortieth day of mourning. Locating this tactic in 1968, at a moment of global protest, and before ideological disputes between leftists and Islamists congealed in Iran, casts a spotlight on the indeterminate quality of the revolution as a lived event. The authors argue that discussions of “global 1968,” and approaches to global history more broadly construed, must account both for the local specificity and the global echoes signaled by events like the Takhti demonstrations.

Why do only some newly launched rebel groups go on to become viable? This chapter examines all sixteen groups I identified as forming in Uganda since 1986, showing that only those that formed in ethnically homogeneous areas became viable. It then turns to two paired comparisons of rebel groups to understand the mechanisms behind this correlation. Examining why only one group in each pair became viable provides support for several of this book’s key claims about rebels’ rumors better influencing civilian perceptions when kinship networks have certain structures and explains the relationship between those structures and local ethnic demography. In doing so, this chapter shows the inner workings of rebel–civilian interactions at the dawn of a new rebel group forming. It also describes evidence from a field experiment that offers useful support about the role of kinship networks in spreading rebels’ rumors and distinguishes these mechanisms linking ethnicity to rebellion via local networks from those that link ethnicity to rebellion via grievances.

Chapter six sets a counterpoint to this argument, exploring cases in which the Muslim population proved uncooperative with, or openly resisted, state institutions, including the judiciary, police, and local administration. Most of these cases were related to land issues and the fear of forced conversion in the Volga region. In Crimea, where forced conversion was less of a threat and where land had been surveyed and demarcated earlier, most remaining disputes could be fought out in court by the 1870s.