Ordering violence: identity boundaries and alliance

Ordering violence: identity boundaries and alliance formation in the Syrian uprising
Kevin Mazur
[email protected]
Abstract:
Micro-level research on intra-state violent conflict suggests that patterns of contention in
conflicts that appear, at the macro level, to be fought between ethnic groups deviate significantly,
when examined at the ground level, from their ethnic narratives. This paper argues that
“ethnicization” of revolutionary contention is a result of the strategic, interactive process by
which an incumbent regime and its challengers struggle to assemble coalitions of supporters.
Ethnic boundaries are one of several relationships—including networks linkages and other
categorical boundaries such as class—that contenders draw on to shape social actors’
expectations of what the conflict is about and how local actors will be categorized. Violence,
chiefly at the state’s disposal, is a central tool in this process. Drawing on an original dataset of
events in the 2011 Syrian uprising, the paper tests this coalitional theory against extant
psychological and materialist theories of ethnicization. It finds that the coalitional theory best
explains patterns of contention in the Syrian uprising. The Syrian case is often viewed as a
limiting case of minority rule and ethnic conflict, so the finding against this conventional view
provides preliminary evidence for the broad applicability of the relational approach.
September 10, 2015
[please do not quote or cite without author’s permission]
Viewed from afar, the 2011 Syrian uprising looks like a revolution contested narrowly
along ethnic lines. It began with peaceful protests demanding democratic reform, yet within
several months violent exchanges became routine in several areas of the country, with a minority
‘Alawi-dominated state confronting majority Sunni challengers. Eighteen months later, state
violence directed almost exclusively at Sunni communities and challenger violence coming
largely from Sunni communities had become common over entire swaths of Syrian territory.
This macro-level narrative accords with the conventional wisdom about ethnicity in Syria, that
once the thin veneer of secular nationalism is scratched, the ethnic cleavages that dominate all
other divisions in social and political life come out. Dynamics in the south of the country follow
this pattern; minority Druze1 areas remained generally quiet and secure, while Sunni areas like
Dara’a were the first to undertake sustained contention and bore the brunt of regime violence
against demonstrators. Class and urban/rural dynamics were nearly absent there, as peasants,
merchants and the urban poor alike participated in the Sunni Hawran region, while quiescence
was the rule across the Druze state of Sweida’.
Yet this picture of brewing ‘ethnic war’ is hard to square with dynamics in numerous
other parts of the country. In Syria’s north, for example, Sunnis and Druze find their allegiances
reversed; central Aleppo’s majority-Sunni population remained generally quiescent as nearly all
of the Aleppo countryside and neighboring Idlib province erupted into sustained protest and later
violence. The Druze of the north, too, acted at variance from the ethnic macro-narrative, taking
up arms with the Free Syrian Army rebel group and cooperating with their Sunni neighbors (alModon 2013). The closeness of the Aleppine Sunni bourgeoisie to the regime has been
frequently lamented as the cause for the limited protest there. One sign made by protesters in
1
Comprising about three percent of the Syrian population, the Druze identify as ethnically Arab but practice a
syncretistic religion distinct from Christianity and mainline Islam. They should, on the macro-level narrative, ally
with the Syrian government, which is dominated by another syncretistic religious minority group, the ‘Alawi.
1
nearby Kafranbal sniped that “Aleppo won’t rise, even if it took Viagra…” (Lucas 2011). By
contrast, Druze of Birra Kaften, a town in Idlib province, have cited their links to neighboring
Sunni towns as their reason for participating in the uprising.
The regime’s response to protests by its ostensible ethnic enemies also defies simple
ethnic explanation. The state acted along precisely the ethnic lines conventional wisdom predicts
in the central city of Homs, allowing ‘Alawi civilians to attack anti-regime demonstrations and
violently repressing demonstrators. A cycle of retaliation by social actors and disproportionate
state response led to the wholesale destruction of several neighborhoods as major parts of the
city fell out of state control by late 2012 (Bishara 2013). But the regime’s behavior diverged
sharply from this pattern in the eastern cities of ar-Raqqa and Deir az-Zor, which are
overwhelmingly Sunni. Rather than send security services to frighten or bludgeon demonstrators,
the government reached out to local notables to have them contain demonstrations. In an
unprecedented move, Syrian President Bashar al-Asad visited provincial Raqqa to celebrate the
Eid al-Adha festival in November 2011 (Ikteshaf Souriya 2011). There, he underlined the central
the place of the region’s residents in the Syrian nation and the local leaders publicly displayed
their loyalty to the state.
The diverse behavior of social actors sharing an ethnic identification and the varying
strategies of the state towards its supposed ethnic enemies frustrate any narrative mechanically
linking actors’ behavior to their ethnic identification. The claim that a so-called ‘ethnic war’
(Biddle 2006; Kaufmann 1996) cannot be reduced to homogeneous ethnic blocs clashing with
one another is not novel; many scholars have pushed this point so far as to question whether
there is anything distinctive about ‘ethnic wars’ (ex. Mueller 2000; King 2001). Yet ethnic
boundaries seem to play a central role in the Syrian uprising and many other revolutionary
2
situations, which Tilly (1978) defines as periods where the sovereignty of a state is challenged by
a group within its borders. This paper attempts to theorize the ways in which shared ethnic
identification operates in revolutionary situations. It investigates the following questions: Why do
violent intra-state conflicts come to revolve around a single social division, a ‘master cleavage’?
When ethnicity becomes the master cleavage of a conflict, why do some local struggles align
along this cleavage while others do not?
The predominant accounts of how ethnicity works in violent conflicts highlight,
alternately, interests held at the group level and activated by psychological forces or individual
level material incentives that impel instrumental use of identity boundaries. The former approach
sees violence as a manifestation of an essentially symbolic, emotional conflict driven by an
abstract notion of an enemy. The latter approach views the state of nature as a “war of all against
all” and sees large-scale conflict as a simple aggregation of smaller scale violence unconstrained
by a state authority.
Both the group and individual perspectives describe real features of revolutionary conflict
in Syria; ethnic2 fears and passions motivated mass ‘Alawi participation in violent counterdemonstrations in Homs, a callous regime provoked conflict on Sunni-Isma’ili3 lines in towns
populated by both groups in order to gain the obedience of the local communities (al-Arabiya
2012a), and opportunists used Friday protests as cover to add onto their homes in violation of
building code (Bishara 2013:180). Yet the quiescence of minority groups is too regular to be
explained by material, opportunity-based mechanisms alone, while the variation in levels and
2
I use the term “ethnic,” following Wimmer (2008: 973) and Weber, to describe group membership based on a
subjectively felt sense of common culture and descent. Ethnic boundaries are one set of boundaries among many
animating social life. It may sometimes be the case, as symbolic theories of ethnic conflict hold, that ethnic
boundaries come to dominate all other divisions in society, but this must be empirically established rather than
assumed.
3
Isma’ilis practice a different heterodox Islamic faith and constitute around one percent of the population.
3
forms of participation by Sunni communities is too great to be put down entirely to the
mobilizational power of symbols.
These seemingly contradictory accounts can be reconciled by focusing on mechanisms at
the meso-level, those that, in the words of Gorski and Turkmen-Dervisoglu, “mediate between
center and periphery and elites and masses” (2013: 203). This paper argues that “ethnicization”
of violent conflict is a result of the strategic, interactive process by which an incumbent regime
and its challengers struggle to assemble coalitions of supporters. Regime and challenger, on this
account, use both ethnic categories and social networks to recruit allies; heightening ethnic
salience is a reasonable strategy for an actor seeking to attract a coalition partner located
similarly to itself vis-à-vis ethnic boundaries, while downplaying that boundary is necessary for
an ethnically-dominated state seeking to maintain its clients across an ethnic boundary. The
theory’s central claim is that the factors ethnicizing conflict inhere not in the minds of
individuals or a collective unconscious, but in the incentives provided powerful state and social
actors by patterns of social relations (Tilly 1998). Whereas macro level studies of ethnic group
ownership of the state have effectively overturned the consensus on why civil wars begin (ex.
Cederman et al. 2013) and micro level study has shed light on poorly understood patterns of
local violence within civil war (ex. Kalyvas 2006), comparatively little progress has been made
in explaining the relationship between the master cleavages of the macro level, state power and
complexities on the ground (Balcells and Justino 2014). By focusing on the meso level of
relations between state, challenger and local communities, the present paper is aimed at
clarifying these mechanisms.
Empirically, the paper tests the relational hypothesis against individual and group
theories, exploiting variation in state and challenger behavior in the first eighteen months of the
4
2011 Syrian uprising. It draws on newly assembled event and ethnicity datasets and a highly
disaggregated version of the Syrian census to investigate variation in the use of ethnic strategies
by the state and its challengers. The paper is organized as follows. First, it lays out the coalitional
theory of violent ethnic conflict and the extant alternatives, noting the observable implications of
each. Then, it describes the Syrian case on which the theories are to be tested. A third section
presents empirical results demonstrating that the mechanisms posited by the coalitional theory
are at play in the Syrian case. A final section concludes.
I. THEORY
Revolutionary situations begin with the onset of dual sovereignty4 and end when state
authority breaks down and the polity is in all out civil war. Under Tilly’s encompassing
definition, there are many paths through which a revolutionary situation can pass and ultimately
end. But as Kalyvas (2006) points out, the dynamics of violence are fundamentally different
when state authority has evaporated. The period under investigation in this paper, therefore,
spans from challenge has initially broken out until state authority has broken down over wide
swaths of the areas formerly controlled by the state. There are numerous forms of ethnic violence
that each have their own dynamics (Brubaker & Laitin 1998), but any theory of how ethnicity
works in revolutionary situations must take a position on two central questions: (1) what factors
impel ‘groupness’ and (2) what drives violent action. They ways in which rival theories answer
these can be classified along a group level/individualist divide.5
I.A. Individualist and group accounts of ethnic violence
4
Tilly (1973: 441) is not explicit about the sort of declaration that must be made to constitute multiple sovereignty,
but it need not be the formal declaration of an alternate government. What is critical is that a challenger sees itself
and not the government as the ultimate source of authority and attempts to build a coalition of supporters within
society on that basis.
5
Constructivist and perennialist accounts of nationalism, exemplified by the work of Benedict Anderson and
Anthony Smith, are frequently juxtaposed as explanations for any and all identity-related phenomena. Because they
are geared towards explaining the emergence and stickiness of a national idea, however, they offer no prediction for
how or why such an idea helps to generate solidarity and alliance in revolutionary situations (King 2004).
5
Individualist accounts view group ethnic identification as primarily a choice made by
societal actors to coordinate their actions with a view to furthering their material self-interest.
Posner argues that the ethnic “cleavage that emerges as salient is the aggregation of all actors’
individual decisions about the identity that will serve them best” (2005: 2). While Posner limits
his claims to institutionalized, routine politics, Hardin (1995) and Hechter et al. (1982) extend
this logic to social actors responding to an anarchic, potentially violent environment. To explain
variation in levels of ethnic identity salience among communities on the same side of an ethnic
boundary, these accounts highlight the differing material interests of local communities and the
ability of ‘entrepreneurs’ to alter the payoffs to identification. A virtue of this theory is that it
explicitly disavows what Brubaker (2002) calls ‘groupist’ assumptions; any number of identities,
such as class, tribe or region, could be used rather than ethnicity as a basis for coordination.
What materialist theories lack, however, is an account of how state action can structure societal
actors’ choice of identity. Because identity is relational, a state can use violence to force its
subject populations to identify along one particular axis of their multiple identities.
Group level theories, by contrast, highlight the psychological needs that are fulfilled by
an individual’s identifying with an ethnic group. Long marginalized in favor of rationalist
approaches to ethnic and contentious politics, non-material pathways through which grievances
are translated into identification are currently experiencing a renaissance. The ‘horizontal
inequality’ line of research (ex. Cederman et al. 2011) posits a model of mobilization running
through psychological pathways.6 While this line of research has been extremely fruitful in
6
Cederman and coauthors draw on the two-level model of Stewart, who coined the phrase ‘horizontal inequality’.
When “leaders of groups feel politically excluded” and economic inequality at the mass level obtains, “people as a
whole have strong grievances on ethnic lines and are thus likely to be more readily mobilized” (Stewart 2008,
quoted in Cederman et al. 2013: 30). Their theory is avowedly groupist, as they assert that “social psychology helps
us appreciate the extent to which individual actors identify themselves with the group and predicate their values and
motivations on the well-being of the group rather than considering exclusively their own self-interest” (47).
6
revising the claim of the cross-national civil wars literature that “ethnic differences are too
common to help distinguish the countries and years that see civil wars” (Fearon & Laitin 2003:
81), it fails to specify why some grievances rather than others become catalysts for mobilization,
and why those grievances impel mobilization at some times rather than others. Several recent
psychological accounts avoid this pitfall, emphasizing the potential of identity difference itself,
without reference to resource distribution, to produce conflict (Lieberman & Singh 2012, Hale
2004). Yet this move opens such accounts to even greater challenge; these theories give us no
reason that ethnicity rather than another social cleavage—whether ascriptive and below the level
of ethnicity, like tribe, or non-ascriptive, like class—should be the group boundary that channels
grievance into mobilization.
The difficulty in specifying the boundary that will become relevant, faced by group and
individual level theories alike, stems from the fact that both theories view actors and their
interests in isolation of other actors—the group level theory incorrectly imputes a single, shared
set of preferences to each actor sharing the identification, while the individualist theory ignores
the ways in which one actor’s use of an identity boundary to pursue his or her own self-regarding
interests bears upon the interests of other actors. This confusion can only be overcome by
conceptualizing identities as relations that are part of a broader struggle for control.
I.B. A coalitional theory of violent ethnicized conflict
To overcome these limitations, this paper advances a relational perspective on how ethnic
boundaries are deployed in revolutionary struggle. The theory is meant to apply to centerfocused challenges in autocracies where more than half of the population is ethnically excluded,
as there is little boundary work to be done around ethnicity when the bulk of the population
7
shares the same identification.7 I also exclude secessionist challenges, as they provide similarly
little opportunity for boundary work, coming from a territorially concentrated group with a
shared ethnic identification differing from that of the owners of state power. I limit the scope of
the investigation to non-democracies because the dynamics of contention and repression in
democracies differ qualitatively from those in autocracies; the former are reticent to use violence,
which is a central element of the phenomenon under investigation (Davenport 2007).
Leading theoretical accounts of authoritarianism tell us that leaders seek, above all else,
to retain their hold on power (Tullock 1987). These leaders and the regimes around them rule by
assembling coalitions of supporters sufficiently large to goad the rest of society into compliance
(but no larger) and retain their coalition partners by generating the expectation that those partners
will be better off under the current regime than under any challenger (Bueno de Mesquita et al.
2003). The modality by which most non-democratic regimes generate this expectation in their
populations during routine politics is in part programmatic—dispensing public services, often
under the banner of statist development strategies—and in part coercive, but largely occurs
through patron-client networks (van de Walle 2007). The crucial features of these networks are
their personalistic and hierarchical nature. Nested within language of friendship, duty and shared
culture are iterated exchanges contingent on each party benefitting from the exchange (Hicken
2011).
7
I follow the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset definition of exclusion—an individual is ethnically excluded to
the extent that his or her ethnic identity differs from that of the individuals constituting the political regime
(Wimmer et al. 2009). The decision to cut the universe of cases at fifty percent is somewhat arbitrary but a
conservative estimate of the theory’s applicability; ethnic boundaries are clearly not critical to political processes in
a place like South Korea, where power holders share the ethnic identification of practically the entire population, but
they did influence patterns of alliance in the Vietnam War (Kalvyas and Kocher 2007), even though its political
system excluded only 10 percent of the population according to EPR. More than half of the population is ethnically
excluded in 772 of the 7155 total country years in the EPR database, suggesting that this is a widespread
phenomenon meriting our attention.
8
The ties linking social actors to each other in multi-ethnic societies regularly cross ethnic
boundaries and are of varying thickness among actors located on the same side of a given social
boundary (Badwin 2014; Kasara 2007). The persons and networks onto which categorical
identities are mapped combine into contingent and shifting assemblages and not bounded, stable
groups. For these alliances to aggregate into an effective means of ensuring societal compliance,
they cannot work alone, or even primarily, through favoritism directed at ethnic group of the
political regime. Were a regime to openly make ethnicity the defining feature of who has access
to networks providing access to state resources, it would alienate a large segment of the
population and create a structure for mobilization in response to this grievance (Roessler 2011).
These calculations can be observed in official discourse, through what it never discusses:
ethnicity. Nearly all positions of power in the Rwandan government, for example, are today—
following a genocide occurring largely along ethnic lines—filled by people of Tutsi ethnicity. It
rules in an exclusive manner, yet the Rwandan government strenuously avoids reference to
ethnicity in official pronouncements and government directives, pursuing “a policy of national
unity based on ethnic amnesia” (Vandeginste 2014).
The central task in explaining ethnicity’s role in revolutionary situations, therefore, is not
uncovering the historical construction of a given identity’s content but understanding a group’s
groupness: the sorts of members it has and what kinds of collective action its solidarities
motivate (Brubaker 2002). Charles Tilly asserts that a “set of individuals is a group to the extent
that it comprises both a category and a network” (1978: 63). Analytically separating these two
elements allows us to see that ethnic solidarity is not a mechanical result of actors sharing an
identification but a variable to be explained. Group membership, on this line of thinking, is not
an essential property of an individual (something he or she ‘has’) but a relationship constituted
9
by the boundaries that demarcate groups and the networks that bind its members. Group
members cluster on a particular side of one or more social boundaries and the social relations on
either side of as well as across the boundaries have a distinctive character (Tilly 2004). In
practice, these concepts help us to see when the resources and interests of an actor coincide with
those of actors sharing their ethnic identification and when they do not—a critical first step
towards explaining the variation in the behavior of actors ‘within’ an ethnic group.
Social networks have the potential to facilitate or to stifle identification along ethnic
lines, in some cases preventing and in other cases impelling mobilization for contentious action.
Where actors are benefitting from network ties operating on the basis of material exchange or
other solidarities more local than ethnicity, it would make little sense to invoke ethnic categories
absent an external shock to the exchange. Varshney (2002), for example, notes the ways in which
network ties allow some Indian communities to prevent the escalation of ethnic tensions into
riots. The corollary to this observation is that no categorical boundary need be invoked to
mobilize actors when their access to patronage goods is threatened by shocks to network ties (ex.
Gould 1996). In other situations, social networks may promote participation in contentious action
and solidify group identity. Tarrow (1998) highlights the role of “connective structures” like
informal social ties and formal organizations in producing turnout for contentious action.
This picture of social networks and categories suggests that the mere presence of ethnic
divisions is insufficient to push contention to revolve around ethnic divisions, but also that
network ties crossing ethnic boundaries are not independently sufficient to ensure that ethnic
divisions are never utilized in contentious processes. How actors understand their network
position plays a crucial mediating role in determining their stance towards revolutionary
challenge; if a given actor sees itself as disadvantaged by the state due to its location vis-à-vis a
10
class boundary, rather than in need for the state’s protection from a chauvinistic opposition due
to its location with respect to ethnic boundaries, that actor will be more inclined to participate in
revolutionary challenge. Cunning incumbent regimes and challengers alike aware of this fact and
strive to influence social actors’ understanding of their network position in society.
Network positions impel social actors to behave in accordance with one of their possible
identifications because they make actors see themselves as structurally equivalent8 to a group
they believe will behave a certain way, driving identification and behavior. Bourdieu observed
that solidary groups cannot be made out of whole cloth and strung together merely by the fact of
the identity boundary’s existence; work must be done to make actors sharing a categorical
identity a group ‘for itself.’ He writes: “Classes in Marx's sense have to be made through a
political work that has all the more chance of succeeding when it is armed with a theory that is
well-founded in reality, thus more capable of exerting a theory effect—theorein, in Greek, means
to see—that is, of imposing a vision of divisions” (1989: 17). The work of imposing this vision
extends beyond activation of emotional processes (Goodwin et al. 2001) or cognitive frames
(Snow et al. 1986), though these mechanisms are undoubtedly at work; violence alters the
structure of social ties and, correspondingly, a social actor’s evaluation of what other social
actors are situated similarly vis-à-vis the state and thus whether the state’s attempts to frame the
uprising are resonant.
In more concrete terms, the coalitional theory predicts that actors with access to state
patronage networks and sharing its ethnic identification (Q4 in figure 1) will never defect, as
they are likely both to be worse off under any alternate political regime and to naturalize the
symbolic, ethnic dimension of their relationship with the owners of state power due to its overlap
8
Burt observes that “Structurally equivalent people occupy the same position in the social structure and so are
proximate to the extent that they have the same pattern of relations with occupants of other positions” (1987: 1291).
11
with objective power relations. Similarly, actors excluded from state patronage networks that do
not share its ethnic identification (Q2) are unlikely to ever join the state’s coalition because they
are almost certain to be better off under a new regime dominated by the ethnic majority. This fact
makes them unable to commit credibly to membership in the incumbent’s coalition.
[FIGURE 1 HERE]
The other two types of actors in the coalitional theory—those included in terms of the
state owners’ ethnic identification but excluded from its networks (Q1) and vice versa (Q3)—are
potential allies that the owners of state power must work to secure. The state must take opposite
strategies to secure each of these groups as an ally, highlighting the characteristic it shares with
actors in each group. Because of the uneven integration of peripheral areas into a national polity
in most late industrializing states, owners of state power have some latitude to simultaneously
pursue strategies of ethnic boundary activation towards some groups and de-activation towards
others, without an ethnically charged message necessarily being internalized in all areas.9
To secure the allegiance of social actors sharing its ethnic identification but excluded
from its networks (Q1), the regime must heighten the salience of ethnic categories. Making these
actors believe that state and society will deal with them on the basis of their ethnic classification
rather than their (meager) network ties to the state imposes a particular “vision of divisions” that
makes it rational for actors with these characteristics to ally with the regime. The networks of
such actors—both with people on the same side of the ethnic boundary (most of them denied
9
Bates (1983) argues that groups form on an ethnic basis rather than around some other identity cleavage because
resources are concentrated spatially and the latent cultural material that could come to constitute the content of an
ethnic identity, like language, is similarly spatially clustered. The mechanism underlying Bates’ account of why
ethnic groups form is precisely the one that allows states like the Syrian state to individuate parts of an ethnic group;
where two groups have differential access to resources, even those with access to similar identity material (like
groups in Q2 and Q3), will come to understand their interests differently and identify differently. Bourdieu makes
the same point about the instrumental basis of group identification, rooting group solidarity in the returns to
membership that an individual receives: “the profits which accrue from membership in a group are the basis of the
solidarity which makes them possible” (1985, quoted in Portes 1998: 3).
12
access to the largesse of the state as well), and with actors on the other side of ethnic boundaries
(equally excluded or more so)—make them likely to participate in an uprising, regardless of
ethnic identification. Heightening the categorical boundary raises the costs of regime change for
the state and actors in Q1, allowing each party to commit to an alliance. The main tactic regimes
use to this end is violence, which they target at particular groups to heighten the ethnic
boundaries that aid in the formation of social coalitions. Violence is conceived of here as
primarily a state strategy because the state is the actor that has the power to either make the first
move towards or to head off mass violence.10
To keep intact its alliances with the actors in its patronage networks that do not share its
ethnic identification (Q3), the regime must convince these actors that ethnicity is not going to be
a salient feature of social life. To the extent that actors understand themselves as part of a
category of people—based upon their ethnic identification—at war with the state, their network
ties would not be sufficient to sustain a vision of the social world to which that those ties point,
namely a world divided between a protected class receiving patronage from the state, and
everyone else. In these cases, the state will act to assure social actors that the categorical
boundaries separating them from the owners of state power will not be used to determine who is
an ally of the state. Telling bourgeois allies across an ethnic border that the revolution is being
waged by the poor or ideologues (“terrorists” is a perennial favorite of Arab) is tantamount to an
assurance by the regime that the ethnic boundary will not become salient and thereby impair
10
At the beginning of a revolutionary episode, social actors’ violent actions against the state or one another are
almost always carried out with simple technologies such as handguns, knives, farm equipment and hunting
instruments, and with low degrees of coordination. Challengers can use violence to raise the salience of ethnic
boundaries, but these acts are typically localized and have marginal effect until the state decides to get involved. In
contrast to the relative inability of social actors to deploy mass violence at will, the state can prevent violence or
foment it. A state interested in restraining social actors engaging in violence, in the early stages of contention,
generally has the capabilities to meet social demands or police societal violence in a conciliatory manner. To
promote violence, it can respond to small-scale social violence with overwhelming military force or conveniently
‘fail’ to prevent social actors from attacking one another and thereby fuel further violence and give credence to
narratives making sense of the violence with reference to ethnic lines.
13
their access to resources. State produced violence and discursive strategies that target only a
segment of the excluded ethnic group or accentuate other social cleavages like class, tribal and
regional distinctions also help to accomplish this goal. The empirical prediction of the coalitional
theory for state behavior is as follows:
Hypothesis 1: the state should seek to make ethnic divisions more salient for communities
that are excluded from its networks but in an included ethnic category (Q1 of figure 2), and
work to de-emphasize ethnic difference with populations that are included in its networks but
in an excluded ethnic category (Q3).
Given that the decision to escalate the level of violence rests primarily with the state, the
primary question to be asked about social actors is not how vanguard activists frame their
appeals to the general population, but why challenger appeals resonate with different segments of
the population over time. The appeal a given challenger makes is fundamentally relational in that
it asks its target to engage in collective action, along with others who are somehow like the target
of its claims. Who is talking—not just what is being said—is central to the meaning of speech
acts. Whereas little commitment to future action is needed to participate in exuberant, peaceful
rallies to oust a dictator, challengers persisting in the face of state repression must choose
whether to participate in a protracted, potentially violent uprising, accepting the high costs
associated with failure. Violence raises these costs and imposes a vision of divisions that
structures the choices of social actors by altering the bases on which social actors can commit to
any potential political authority. In a low violence context, nothing would stop members of an
opposition coalition based purely on a shared exclusion from state patronage from defecting
when they receive a better offer from the state, whether in the form of new side payments or
simply not being attacked. Ethnically differentiated violence makes commitment across ethnic
lines lack credibility and lower the side payments required to secure alliance on the same side of
an ethnic boundary.
14
The coalitional theory predicts that doubly excluded communities (Q2 of figure 1) should
always participate in challenge, while doubly included communities (Q4) should never
participate. Communities in favored ethnic groups but excluded from networks (Q1) should
participate in early challenge, as they would be better off under the civic vision of governance
articulated by the opposition in a low violence context, while communities in regime networks
but from an excluded ethnic group (Q3) should have low levels of participation, as they stand to
lose their lucrative links to state power following political liberalization. The high violence
context should invert the behavior of communities in the latter two categories. Violence makes
challenger groups unable to credibly commit to the peaceful transition and liberal vision they
initially promise because remaining non-violent means being routed by the state, which makes
the status quo authoritarian state more attractive to communities from minority ethnic groups
(Q1) than the vision of a majority-dominated authoritarian state. Similarly, violence makes the
regime unable to commit credibly to treating its clients from the majority identity (Q3)
differently from the groups of the same identity that it is attacking (the doubly excluded Q2),
impelling the former to behave like the latter.
Hypothesis 2: challenge in the non-violent period should include a wide range of social
actors and narrow to only the excluded ethnic identity in the violent period. Ethnically
included communities with network ties (Q2) to the state should never participate.
I.C. Alternate explanations
The expectations generated by the coalitional theory diverge from those in both the group
and individual level theories. Individual level theories point to a general social harmony or, at
least, equilibrium, prevailing until powerful social actors realize that ethnic mobilization might
further or impinge upon their interests.11 Elites seeking power require supporters who themselves
11
The dominant theory of insurgency argues that challenge is essentially a function of state weakness, and that
social cleavages are epiphenomena, at least as far as contentious action is concerned (cf. Fearon and Laitin 2003).
15
are materially interested; to the extent that salient ethnic boundaries make potential supporters
willing to support elites sharing their ethnic identification to the detriment of their own material
interest, “playing the ethnic card” is a rational strategy. Snyder and Ballantine (1996) illustrate
the ways in which elites can impel ethnic mobilization through propaganda permitted by media
law liberalization. Ethnic entrepreneurship can also aid in demobilizing masses; Gagnon (2004)
argues that elites used violence during the breakup of Yugoslavia to demobilize populations
because non-ethnic, popular rebellion would have hurt their economic interests. The predictions
of these individualist theories accord with the coalitional theory in that they expect within-ethnic
group variation and do not cast mass action as the primary driver of ethnicization. They differ in
one crucial respect, however; whereas ethnic boundaries are central to the structure of social life
in the relational account, their presence constitutes, on the elite theory, a disfigurement of normal
social life. As Gagnon argues,
The violence of ethnic conflicts is thus not meant to mobilize people by appealing to ethnicity—
that is, it does not tap into these relational processes. Rather, its goal is to fundamentally alter or
destroy these social realities. Indeed, given the rootedness of such realities in peoples’ everyday
lives, the only way to destroy them and to impose homogeneity on existing, heterogeneous social
spaces is through massive violence. (2004: 8)
The implication of this position is that the highest levels of violence should take place in the
most ethnically heterogeneous areas, as the most destruction of relations must be done there to
achieve elites’ ends (Gagnon 2004: 28). Similarly, the economic interests of the masses should
On this account, challenge should map onto individual opportunity given by weak security presence, exploitable
resources, and low availability of economic alternatives to looting. While not investigated in detail here, its
observable implications are tested through measures of security presence and terrain roughness in the statistical
models presented in section III. It finds little support in these models.
A similar, stylized rational choice account suggests that conflict should be ethnicized when organizations providing
selective incentives to participants are of an ethnic character (Hechter et al. 1982). Because states facing
revolutionary challenge along an ethnic cleavage often prohibit the formation of ethnically based interest groups (or
the discussion of ethnic difference at all) this formulation does not yield ready predictions for the variation analyzed
here.
16
not influence patterns of violence or ethnicization, as the primary driver of violence is elite
calculation. I derive the following hypotheses from elite-centered theory:
Alternative 1.1: state action should focus on polarizing the central ethnic division in society.
Alternative 2.1: challenge should begin along economic, non-ethnic lines and switch to
ethnic lines following state violence.
Alternative 2.1 differs from the working hypothesis about challenger behavior (H2) in that it
expects ethnic identity to play little to no role in the early period.
Group theories place emphasis on the work symbols do to provoke escalation of conflict.
On this theory, contention is necessarily ethnic from the very beginning and simply seeps out
when the mechanisms suppressing it break down; when this occurs, “one side, then eventually
both sides, come to fear that the existence of their group is at stake” (Kaufman 2001: 31). These
breakdowns include occurrences like the weakening of state capacity or an attack on the symbols
or leader of one group.12 Because of they focus heavily on mobilization of societal forces,
psychological theories do not make an explicit prediction about the behavior of the state.
Kaufman (2001: 12), the leading exponent of this view, is explicit in arguing that symbolic
processes work in conjunction with other mechanisms like elite machinations and economic
rivalry and need to be initiated by some combination thereof. Yet these theories do make claims
about what the factors driving societal action, from which I derive the following hypothesis:
Alternative 2.2: following a catalyzing event involving ethnic symbols, challenger action
should occur primarily along ethnic lines.
II. ETHNICITY IN SYRIA AND THE 2011 SYRIAN UPRISING
II.A. Social boundaries and social structure
12
Group level theories are not mere straw men or the province of a lone scholar. Weidmann (2011) adopts an
“ethnic-based framework,” which assumes that ethnicity is uniformly salient and visible, in studying the Bosnian
civil war. Lieberman and Singh (2012) identify psychological mechanisms that operate in an invariant manner. They
argue that, “Once groups are created and perceived, individuals strive for a positive sense of social identity and,
therefore, are more likely to mobilize if they perceive a threat to the group’s dignity” (2012: 5).
17
The Syrian uprising of 2011 began in the immediate wake of the Egyptian uprising that
toppled President Hosni Mubarak and continues until the time of writing (August 2015). The
analysis presented here covers the period from the initial demonstrations in February 2011 until
the end of July 2012, when contention had spread throughout the country and began to
approximate civil war as Kalyvas (2006) has defined it—armed combat within a political
community once authority structures have broken down.
There are two primary axes along which ascriptive identity varies are religion and national
belonging. Religiously, Syrians can broadly be divided into those adhering to Sunni Islam,
Christianity or one of several heterodox Islamic religions. The latter category includes the
‘Alawis, Druzes and Isma’ilis. In terms of national identity, the majority of the population
identifies as Arab, with significant Kurdish and Assyrian (Christian groups whose identity
predates Arab conquest) populations in the country’s northeast. Figure 2a depicts the location of
each of these groups vis-à-vis ethnic boundaries. The percentages in figure 2b represent a best
guess based on the available literature.13
[FIGURE 2 HERE]
Not all work of building coalitions is accomplished through categorical identities.
Networks falling within and across these boundaries, too, are crucial to the process. The ways in
which members of local communities are related to one another and to the state—what I term
here the local social structure—is a second important dimension of variation across local Syrian
communities. The relevant variation on this measure occurs only within Sunni Arab populations,
13
In line with its secular Arab nationalist ideology (to say nothing of its reluctance to announce the extent to which
‘Alawis occupy positions of power and public employment), the Syrian government does not make available—and
does not even officially collect—figures on ethnicity. I estimate the percentages in figure 2 based upon the work of
Courbage (2012), Balanche (2008), Tejel (2009) and Chatty (2013).
18
between groups with family (‘a’eli) structure and those with clan (‘asha’eri) structure.14 This
distinction is potentially relevant because the state used its strong relations with clan leaders,
many of whom it installed in the Parliament, to help demobilize local populations that otherwise
might have engaged in action against the state (Barout 2013: 146, Pierret 2013: 222, Chatty
2010). The difference between families and clans is in the type of networks present in local
society; it is not a categorical one. Ethnic boundaries like Sunni/non-Sunni impel particular
forms of behavior because they make individuals understand that they will be treated one way
rather than another on the basis of characteristics shared with a large number of others.
Networks, like those between the state and clan leaders, impel behavior because of the sorts of
exchange they enable between one actor and another.
II.B. The Ba’th social contract
Given this topography of social boundaries, we might expect the state to pursue one of
several strategies for distributing public goods. If the sectarian interpretation of postindependence political life in Syria were correct, ‘Alawis should be the disproportionate
beneficiaries of the provision of goods by the state. By contrast, if the ideological, Arab Socialist
state were true to its word, rural locales would be its primary beneficiaries or, at least, benefit on
par with their urban counterparts and without major differences among ethnicities. We would not
observe what Lipton (1977) and Bates (1981) call the ‘urban bias’ of most late developing states.
14
Local communities with clan social structure are those that continue to that practice semi-nomadism or were
formerly nomadic and have been sedentarized in recent generations but continue to maintain, to varying degrees, the
kin networks characteristic of nomadic and semi-nomadic people. The rest of the Sunni Arab population, which
includes the residents of cities and generationally sedentary peasants, is characterized here as having family social
structure. Most work on this subject uses the term ‘tribe’ (qabila) to describe the sets of social actors I call ‘clans’
(cf. Dukhan 2014, Chatty 2010). I use the latter term both because this is how these actors describe themselves (as
‘ashaeri, not qaba’eli) and because tribes are the larger social units that contained multiple clans when nomadism
was widely practiced; tribes no longer function as social units, while clans continue to form this role to varying
degrees.
19
Because the state typically releases data at only a high level of aggregation (stripped, of
course, of all information on ethnicity), the question of just how the state distributed resources to
the population has been long the topic of speculation. By joining a newly released, town-level
version of the 2004 Syrian census with original data measuring ethnicity at the local level
(described in greater detail in section III), I provide in figure 3 a rough but systematic estimate of
how the Syrian state has distributed public goods. While we can never know the exactly the
amount of resources received by individuals close to power15 nor precisely who got what, the
data presented here are helpful for examining the techniques used by the state to achieve mass
compliance and build a coalition of supporters during the long, non-contentious period of Ba’th
rule. Three facts stand out from figure 3. First, ‘Alawis have far greater access to public
employment than all other ethnic groups. Sixty percent of the workforce in majority ‘Alawi
settlements is in state employ, versus thirty percent nationally. Second, public services do not
exhibit nearly as strong an ethnic bias as public employment, and there appears to be little ‘urban
bias’. Finally, the most disadvantaged localities in terms of state employment are Kurdish and
Arab Sunni clan settlements, not the Arab Sunni family settlements that are taken in the macronarrative to be the regime’s greatest enemies.
[FIGURE 3 HERE]
This peculiar set of distributive arrangements reflects the political bargains struck in the
formation of the modern Syrian state and the exigencies faced by the Ba’th party (Waldner
1999). A central reason for the rise of the party in the 1960s and its persistence through conflict
with Islamists in the late 1970s and early 1980s is the fact that it was a container for the
15
What little is known about the president’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf, suggests the scale of regime graft. Informally
known as “Mr. Ten Percent” for the ratio of profits he would require from any new private enterprise started in
Syria, Makhlouf he boasted to a magazine on the eve of the uprising in 2010 that the holding company of which he
was a leading partner, Sham al-Qabeda, controlled sixty percent of total Syrian output (Barout 2012).
20
aspirations of downtrodden rural people in general, not merely ‘Alawis. Based on this evidence,
it seems that the claims of the regime and its defenders that it extended basic services to all ends
of the country, as well as the claims of its detractors that it favored ‘Alawis heavily, are at least
partially correct. Statistical testing carried out in the next section will use these data to assess the
extent to which such state linkages motivated action in the uprising.
III. EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS
Adjudicating between the coalitional theory advanced here and its material and
psychological rivals requires not just sub-national variation, but variation within ethnic
categories on the key variables of interest—types of state/challenger action and state linkages.
Only a “de-ethnicized” research design, which defines units of analysis in non-ethnic terms, can
provide this sort of variation (Wimmer 2013:42). Taking as its unit of analysis the Syrian Central
Bureau of Statistics’ listing of all settlements in the country down to the community level,16 this
paper employs a dataset containing highly detailed information about both local communities
and the spatial and temporal structure of contentious events in the 2011 Syrian uprising.
III.A. Data sources and descriptive statistics
The outcome variable tracks several types of action taken by the state, its allies and
challengers drawn from daily news records. It is constructed from a newly collected dataset
tracking public gatherings with more than 50 participants and episodes of violence committed by
challengers, the state and its allies. The database draws on three news sources—the Associated
Press, the daily releases of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (aligned with the
opposition), and ath-Thawra (the state political daily)—selected from across the political
16
The unit of analysis for this statistical test is the community level census unit (n=5204), using maps obtained from
the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA 2013). Settlements range in size from
the capital and largest city (Damascus and Aleppo, respectively, each with over one million inhabitants) to hamlets
consisting of several small farming settlements of several hundred people (Balanche 2008).
21
spectrum to minimize bias in the coverage of events. It records three types of actions by
challenging groups and four by the incumbent government (see the appendix for further detail on
the data and coding procedures).
The state strategies are as follow: (1) crowd control actions directed at dispersing
demonstrators without inflicting high levels of damage on protesters or monitoring them
extensively; (2) tactical control of cities involving coordinated violence and surveillance
directed at only a specific segment of a city or town’s population; (3) confrontation entailing
security or military forces clashing with armed opposition fighters; (4) town destruction targeting
entire towns or major neighborhoods of large cities indiscriminately. Challenger strategies are of
three sorts: (1) non-violent action, where a group gathered to make demands on the regime and
no violent action was reported; (2) spontaneous violent action, with crowds initially amassed to
demonstrate non-violently shifting towards the use of violence, such as throwing rocks or beating
state allies; (3) coordinated violent action, involving groups described as “rebels” or “defectors”
engaging in coordinated attacks on state forces.
The theories being tested suggest four sets of independent variables that potentially bear
on the actions the state and its challengers: (1) the ethnic identification of a local community and
those around it, (2) the links the local community has to the state, (3) the capacity of the state to
suppress challenge and (4) actions taken by state and challenger in previous periods. Ethnic
identification is measured at the community level using a new dataset collected for this project
(see the appendix for further detail). State-society linkages are measured through (1) levels of
public service provision and the percentage of the workforce in state employment; (2) an
indicator of whether a community has clan or family social structure; (3) whether the locality
received new investment under the neoliberal government formed under Bashar al-Asad in 2005.
22
State capacity is measured by security base presence in a locality and terrain roughness; prior
challenge is measured in the event database.
The patterns of state, challenger and ally action visible in aggregate data closely follow the
master narrative of Sunni challenge, Alawi state reprisal and minority quiescence. When events
are disaggregated by time, type of action and locality, this narrative appears correct with few
exceptions for ‘Alawi and other minority areas. But disaggregation reveals considerable variation
among Sunni populations that is hidden in aggregate measures. Figures 4 and 5 present the
actions of the challenger and state, respectively, over time, stratified by majority ethnicity of the
locality where the action occurs. The trends in figures 4a and 5a show that the overwhelming
number of state and challenger violent actions occur in Sunni areas, and that there is no
challenger action of any sort, nor state action taken, in homogeneously ‘Alawi areas; the
challenger events recorded in the ‘Alawi panel of figure 4a all occurred in large, ethnically
mixed cities like Tartous and Lattakia, where the Sunni population was the main instigator or
target of action.17 Moreover, every observation that records challenger or state violence in
homogeneously minority localities, when re-checked in the database’s original sources, is the
result of spillover from fighting (or government shelling) in neighboring Sunni areas.
[FIGURES 4-5 HERE]
In contrast to those in ‘Alawi and other minority areas, patterns of contestation and state
response in Sunni diverge from the master narrative. For one thing, patterns of challenge and
state response for Kurdish and Arab clan settlements look entirely different from those of Arab
family settlements. Arab family settlements had high initial levels of non-violent challenge that
escalated gradually over time to coordinated violence (i.e. clashes with government forces). Arab
17
‘Alawis and other non-Sunnis did participate regularly in demonstrations against the regime, but their
participation has came on an individual or small group basis and within mixed settlements, so it does not get
recorded as having occurred in an ’Alawi or other minority community (Bishara 2013: 144; Abbas 2011).
23
clan areas initially produced non-violent challenge, but levels of spontaneous violence are far
lower throughout the period of study and regular clashes (displayed as ‘coordinated violent
action’ in figure 3) begin to occur there regularly only from June 2012, when violent clashes
have already become widespread throughout the country.
The case of Kurdish settlements, too, diverges widely from the pattern for Arab family
settlements. Non-violent contention took place in many Kurdish cities during the first six months
of the uprising, but just as contention was becoming more violent in Arab family areas in mid2011, it was beginning to disappear in all forms in Kurdish areas. Similarly, state tactics were
noticeably more conciliatory when directed at Kurds than at Arab families.18
III.B. State strategies
This section investigates the observed actions of the Syrian state. The bivariate plots of
ethnicity and state action in the previous section make it clear that state repressive actions occur
almost entirely in Sunni communities. Because this pattern is consistent with the coalitional
theory as well as its individualist and group level alternatives, adjudicating between these
theories requires a closer examination of variation in state action towards localities within the
Sunni category. I use two empirical strategies to investigate this variation. First, I sketch the
mechanisms by which the state executes its strategies through in-depth exploration of the state’s
behavior in one minority settlement that engaged in contentious action, Salamiya. Second, I
perform multivariable statistical analysis on the universe of state actions gathered in the event
database. This exercise lends support to the notion that the mechanisms identified in the case of
Salamiya are operating in the Syrian case, generally.
Qualitative evidence from Salamiya
18
The only two instances of state ‘destroy’ tactics being used in a Kurdish area occurred in towns on the Turkish
border, and were directed at opposition fighters (almost certainly of Sunni Arab background) passing through the
town while sneaking back into Syria. Events 1000898 and 1002048 in database.
24
Salamiya, a city of about 70,000, is the center of the heterodox Muslim Isma’ili sect in
Syria. The majority of the city’s population is Isma’ili, with small Sunni Arab and ‘Alawi
populations, as well. Because it falls off the “equilibrium path” of quietism by non-Sunni groups,
Salamiya provides significant insight into the Syrian state’s techniques for constructing
coalitions. The state pursued two strategies in Salamiya: first, it used different types of repression
according to the ethnic identity of its target population, and second, it held up the non-violent
demonstrations in Salamiya as an example to the rest of the country of acceptable dissent.
Varying tactics by ethnic identity is consistent with both the coalitional theory (H1) and the elitecentered theory (A1.2), but only the coalitional theory can account for the conciliatory stance
taken by the state while it repressed numerous other communities contemporaneously.
Following the use of disproportionate violence to clear central squares in Homs and
Damascus in April 2011, major demonstrations began in both Salamiya and Hama. Hama, a city
of around 300,000, sits 20 miles east of Salamiya and is a bastion of Sunni Arab resistance to the
Ba’thist state; Hama was the a focal point of the Islamic insurgency of the late 1970s and early
1980s and bore the brunt of the state’s reprisals. Demonstrations in both Salamiya and Hama
made calls for reform to the Syrian state—an implicit plea to be categorized as members of a
Syrian citizenship community (SyrianFreePress 2011). One activist described the selfunderstanding informing the participation of Salamiya residents in the uprising:
The important thing is the joining of the people of Salamiya in the Syrian revolution—inwardly
and outwardly (qalban w qaaleban)—and the one reason for their doing so is the dignity of the
variegated (mulawwan) Syrian people, regardless of any social or economic circumstance...The
religious sect is something personal and faith [should be] practiced between the person and his
god, or with symbols of faith, but civic and community life [should be] as far as possible from
religion. And Salamiya cut the string with which the regime played its most dissonant recitals,
which continually separated it from the city of Hama.19
19
Anonymous Syrian activist, in comments written at http://the-syrian.com/archives/29204.
25
The residents of Salamiya of Isma’ili identity who participated in these demonstrations
understood themselves as members of a national Syrian community participating in a movement
to renegotiate the citizenship bargain for all of its members. Had they understood themselves as
members of a privileged sect in an uprising about winning the rights of a subjugated majority,
their joining would have been irrational (and symbolic theories positing irrational behavior
predict behavior on ethnic, not civic, lines). To say that the activists in Salamiya identified
‘against’ their ethnic identity presupposes a heightened salience of ethnic boundaries that did not
obtain uniformly (though these boundaries were salient from the beginning in other locales such
as Homs, which is discussed in the introduction). This self-understanding does not exist merely
in the realm of ideas20 or emotions—it is based upon interpretation of tangible social ties the
actor holds. In Salamiya, for example, Sunni and Isma’ili religious leaders accompanied each
other to their respective places of worship and made a display of exiting with their hands linked
and chanting a slogan heard throughout the early phases of the uprising: “one one one, the Syrian
people are one” (wahid wahid wahid, ash-shaab as-souri wahid, al-Arabiya 2012b). The idea of
a citizenship community impelling Isma’ili residents of Salamiya to participate was made
plausible by the similarity of their structural situations (in particular, vis-à-vis the state) to that of
their neighbors interpretation of relations with their Sunni neighbors.
The government response, too, evinces work to define the identity of actors and
allegiances in the conflict. The state took two very different strategies in dealing with similar
forms of challenge erupting at the same time in Hama and Salamiya. A defected army officer
recounted that, whereas the army and police dispersed protests in Salamiya without firing a
20
Ideas are not entirely irrelevant, however. One legacy of the urban-rural conflict of the post-colonial period is a
history of strong leftist politics in Salamiya; leftist activists were critical in organizing the protests that began in
early May 2011 (ash-Sharq al-Awsat 2011a).
26
single shot or inflicting a single injury, the official orders in Hama were to “open fire on
[demonstrators] without restraint” (al-Arabiya 2012b).
The primary difference between demonstrations in Hama and Salamiya was the ethnic
identity of the people in the street, and state actions towards the two sites are consistent with a
categorization strategy sparing minorities from repressive state action. Yet in Salamiya, the state
did more than just treat protesters with kid gloves to indicate how residents, as Isma’ilis, would
be treated by the state. State security leaders are reported to have informed Isma’ili community
leaders that their Sunni neighbors were planning to tear down signs of the community’s leader,
the Agha Khan, at the city gate. Groups of Isma’ilis rushed with sticks and knives to the city’s
main entrance to defend the signs, and military leaders set up a security detail, ostensibly to help
the Isma’ili civilians defend their symbols from their Sunni neighbors. State officials also
reportedly warned Sunni leaders that the city’s Isma’ili residents were planning to attack Sunni
mosques (al-Arabiya 2012b). Violence in surrounding areas eventually increased the plausibility
of the state interpretations, but this action took time and significant work on the part of the
government to re-figure the relations of the countryside.
This re-figuration consisted of more than the disfiguration that the elite-centered theories
(A1.1) predict. The state did not merely try to end protests and divide the local population in
Salamiya; it also set out to invert the meaning of demonstrations in Salamiya as an example for
the whole country of how the state relates to its loyal subjects. The official government
newspaper portrayed demonstrations—which were, in reality, aimed at widespread political
change, if not overthrow of the regime—as being against ‘terrorists’ and supportive of the
incumbent government and its vague, newly announced course of reform:
The city of Salamiya in Hama governorate witnessed a crowded demonstration organized by
youth, popular and social groups after their obtaining the necessary official authorizations. It was
organized to express the support of the people of the city for the path of reform in Syria and to
27
protect its security and stability and to denounce the conspiracies aimed at harming the unity of
the Syrian people...The participants clarified the importance of supporting the path of reform in
many different fields, referring to the fact that the homeland is built on work and effort and not
slogans. The sons of the city denounced the killing, crimes, destruction of public property and
frightening of citizens done by terrorist organizations, just as they denounced Western attempts
to interfere in the internal affairs of Syria. They also expressed in this respect their appreciation
for the stance of the countries supporting Syria and its people in facing the conspiracy (athThawra 2011).
The regime’s effort to portray Salamiya as a model of legal, civic protest is the quintessential act
of categorization. The Salamiya of the regime’s depiction illustrates a responsive, if paternalistic,
state enacting the will of its people and facing violent fanatics, whose tactics justify the state’s
use of violence against them.21 This effort at recasting forms of challenge would not be
sustained—over time, depictions of ‘terrorism’ dominated descriptions of desirable forms of
protest in the narrative fashioned by the state. This change accompanied increasing overall levels
of violence in the uprising, suggesting the discursive categorization strategies must respond to
and operate in concert with the changes in social relations on the ground that make them
resonant. The fact that the state continually made this sort of appeal indicates that it was engaged
in work of categorization most consistent with the coalitional theory.
Quantitative evidence
To test these predictions for the whole of Syria, I fit an ordered logisitic regression of
various forms of state action and a binary time series cross-sectional (BTSCS) model of state
violence over time. The results of these tests confirm the general trends visible in the bivariate
plots; ethnic heterogeneity does not to reliably predict where the state attacks challengers most
severely, suggesting that it is not focused on destroying inter-ethnic bonds in homogeneous areas
21
The state’s effort to alter the meaning of demonstrations was not limited to minority settlements—it seeded proregime demonstrations in the center of Hama by coordinating marches by residents of the city’s western (‘Alawi
majority) countryside into the town. Hama residents met the demonstrations at the gates of the city, however,
blocking them and turning them back (Bishara 2013: 144).
28
(contra A1.1) and observed patterns of state behavior are most consistent with the coalitionbuilding strategies predicted by the coalitional theory (H1).
The most straightforward test of state behavior is simply to see whether state action,
given the state is doing something towards a locality, uses a high level of violence or is
conciliatory. I fit an ordered logistic model regressing the type of state action on characteristics
of the localities in which the action occurred.22 Table 1 presents the results of the ordinal logistic
regression, and they support the coalitional theory. Specification (1) fits the full model on all
challenger event observations in the database. The population measure in this model absorbs
most of the relevant variation, though the Kurdish and clan variables remain statistically
significant predictors of conciliatory action, which is consistent with the coalitional theory.23
When population size is excluded, the posited relationships are seen more clearly. A site
receiving new investment post-2005 is 1.4 times more likely to be treated with a less harsh state
tactic than a site that did not receive new investment.24 Specifications (3) and (4) divide the
sample by settlement size to address the risk that the findings of specification (2) are driven by
this omitted variable. The effect of new investment is even clearer when major settlements are
22
The state action variable comes from the event database and codes the highest level of violence on a given
community-day, ranging from crowd control to tactical control to destroy tactics. State confront events were
excluded from this coding of the dependent variable because they entail fighting with organized rebel groups that are
mobile and often have little connection to the locality in which they are fighting. They are included here a control
variable because nearby fighting might influence the way the state treats the settlement in question.
23
The national difference between Arab and Kurdish Sunnis means that the state should treat the Kurds in a
conciliatory manner vis-à-vis other Sunni groups. This prediction may seem surprising given the history of state
persecution of Kurds in Syria, but it follows from the coalitional theory for two reasons. First, the mere fact that a
boundary separates this group from the doubly excluded population of (Arab) Sunnis, provides a lever the state
might use to fragment the group whose solidarity poses the greatest threat to it. Second, in the years following the
brutal repression of the Kurdish uprising in 2004, the Syrian government had begun a rapprochement with Kurdish
leaders and increasingly tolerated the use of Kurdish language and cultural symbols in the northeastern Jazira region
(Tejel 2009: 130). On the eve of the uprising, in 2010, it went as far as to allow celebrations of the Kurdish holiday
of Newruz in Damascus (al-Jazeera 2010).
24
This interpretation derives from the .71 odds ratio on the new investment variable in specification (2). Ordinal
logisitic regression is equivalent to a series of simple logistic regressions comparing all categories above a certain
threshold to all of those below it (e.g. the probability of the state using the destroy tactic versus the probability of
using either the tactical control or crowd control tactics). See Long and Freese (2014).
29
excluded; state attacks on cities with between 20,000 and 200,000 residents are 2.4 times more
likely to be violent if a city had not been favored for investment from 2005-2010 (specification
(3)). The odds ratio greater than one for ‘Alawi encirclement in specification (4), as well as the
non-statistically significant coefficient of the new investment variable, are driven by one
influential site, Homs, which makes up over half of the observations in this specification (217 of
420). Because the database measures the entire city as one data point, it aggregates many
processes that ethnographic accounts of Homs (ex. Nakkash 2013) find to be consistent with the
coalitional theory.25 The other variables expected by material theories to be associated with state
attacks are signed in the wrong direction. The fine-grained measure of heterogeneity, ‘Alawi
encirclement, has an odds ratio of 0.482, implying that a Sunni site’s being more encircled by
‘Alawi settlements makes the state less likely to use violent tactics there, directly contradicting
the elite-centered theory (A1.1).
[TABLE 1 HERE]
A perennial concern in employing ordinal logistic regression is that a model may fail to
satisfy the parallel slopes assumption. Because ordinal logistic regression is equivalent to a series
of binary logistic regressions, the coefficients of each individual regression must be the same,
making their probability curves parallel each other. To test this assumption, I use a graphical
procedure, following Harrell (2001) and presented in the appendix, to assess whether the two
binary regressions comprising the ordinal regression have coefficients for each regressor that are
roughly equal. Based on this test, the model satisfies the parallel slopes assumption.
25
More generally, the large cities suppress high degrees of heterogeneity because they are counted in the census and
event database as a single unit; all of Aleppo, a city of two million, is coded as receiving new investment because
some neighborhoods have major new investment projects. Its peripheral neighborhoods, however, are among the
country’s most neglected spontaneous settlements and generated relatively high levels of violence (Hallaj 2012).
30
Because the ordinal logistic model abstracts from time processes and compares across
types of state action conditional on any action being taken, I fit a binary time series crosssectional model to investigate the determinants of action versus inaction over time. The model is
a binary logistic regression of state action with time-spatial units of analysis measuring whether
an event occurred in a locality in a given week. Three specifications, (1) through (3), use only the
highest level of state violence, destroy, as their outcome variable, while the remaining three use
any state violence, including destroy or tactical control, as their dependent variable. To model
the effect of time on the propensity for state action in a given community, I include a time
polynomial.26 In addition, because spatially and temporally proximate contentious action is likely
to increase the propensity of state action, I include dummy variables measuring lagged
challenger actions and nearby violent actions by the state.
The results of this regression, presented in table 2, are most consistent with the
expectations of the coalitional theory. Kurdish identity, for one, is consistently a negative
predictor of state attacks. Having a greater proportion of Sunni families is a positive predictor of
state attacks, but the new investment variable is a negative predictor of state destroy violence
(specifications (1) through (3)), suggesting that the dynamic posited by the coalitional theory is
operating in the Syrian case. When the outcome variable is broadened to be any state violent
action (specifications (4) through (6)), the coefficients on new investment cease to be statistically
different from zero but remain negative, suggesting that while the state refrains from using its
harshest tactics against networked populations, it will use some degree of violence to control
challenge among Sunni populations previously included in its coalition. The coefficients on the
Sunni clans variable also support the coalitional theory; when compared against all localities,
26
The method for the time polynomial follows Carter and Signorino (2010), who recommend including a count
variable for time elapsed, its square and its cube (with the latter divided by 1000).
31
including ‘Alawi, Kurdish and other minority communities, clans are more likely to receive state
violent action (specifications (1) and (4)), but when compared only among Sunni groups, they
are less likely to see violence (specifications (2) through (5)).
[TABLE 2 HERE]
The results also suggest that the alternate explanations of state action are not supported;
the security presence variable is not statistically different from zero in any specification,
suggesting that the reach of the state is not a limiting factor in determining its action. Moreover,
the lags for challenger violent and non-violent action are equally good predictors of both state
action variables, impugning the notion that the state responds in direct proportion to the level of
challenger violence. The elite-centered material theories (A1.1) imply that ethnic heterogeneity
should be positively associated with the most destructive forms of state violence. The coefficient
for the heterogeneity measures is negative or not significant in specifications (1) through (3),
which concern state destroy actions.27
III.C. Societal response
This section investigates patterns of societal quiescence and participation in challenge,
which provide a window into how social actors expect to be classified by the state and challenger
organizations vying to rule them. The case study of the city of ar-Raqqa and multivariable
statistical evidence presented here suggest that the coalitional theory best explains social
behavior. Network ties to the state demobilized many Sunni Arab communities in the early,
mostly non-violent phase of the uprising, and ethnic considerations came to dominate all others
once violence became widespread.
27
The coefficient on the heterogeneity variable in specification (4) is marginally significant in the opposite
direction. However, specification (1) uses the same sample as (4), but only the restrictive definition of state violence
that matches the prediction of A1.1. Since the coefficient on the former is about zero, this suggests that the tactics
driving the finding in specification (4) are the more conciliatory ‘tactical control’ actions not predicted by material
theories.
32
Qualitative evidence from ar-Raqqa
The trajectory of events in ar-Raqqa, a medium size city in the steppe east of Aleppo,
tells us much about how network linkages between local communities and the state work to
channel contentious behavior. ar-Raqqa is a poor city of almost exclusively Sunni Arabs that was
deeply neglected by the state. Yet ar-Raqqa saw no violence and almost no anti-regime protests
during the first year of the uprising because of its clan social structure; the strong linkages
between the state and the leaders of clans impelled local notables (wujuha’, s. wajih) to
demobilize the local society. When youth activists finally disobeyed their local leaders and
organized demonstrations on the first anniversary of the uprising—in March 2012—state
reprisals led to the deaths of several local residents and compelled the wujuha’ to allow
demonstrations, if not support the uprising. State linkages had effectively demobilized social
actors up to the point where the state used violence against the community in the manner that it
had been using violence against other localities sharing the Raqqawis’ excluded ethnic identity
(Bishara 2013: 219). Both the demobilizing potential of network linkages and the propensity for
violence to impose an ethnic vision of divisions on society underscore the explanatory power of
the coalitional theory for the Syrian case.
The city of ar-Raqqa, in many ways, was the ideal candidate for early and forceful
participation in the Syrian uprising. Its roughly 220,000 residents are of Sunni Arab ethnic
identity and have among the worst human development indicators in the country. The city itself
has a 28 percent illiteracy rate, the lowest for all governorate capitals and the lowest rates of
secondary school completion. Thirty two percent of its workforce was employed by the state;
only the doubly excluded cities of Aleppo and Hama—punished for their participation in the
33
Islamic uprising in the 1980s—had lower levels among governorate capitals (Central Bureau of
Statistics 2004).
Yet the city saw almost no demonstrations against the regime in the first year of the
uprising. Youth activists of the city sought in mid-2011 to organize demonstrations against the
regime, as activists were doing at that time throughout the country, but the city’s wujuha’
prevented activists from assembling in the central square. For the first year of the uprising,
demonstrations were limited to nighttime “flying demonstrations” (tadhahourat tayyara), where
small groups met in central locations for less than a half hour and dispersed before authorities
arrived; these demonstrations were so short that they were hardly covered in the media and do
not appear in the event database (al-Akhbar 2012).
By February 2012, the edict of city notables not to engage in contentious challenge had
worn thin. Activist youth formed Local Coordinating Committees and planned in secret to
disobey the wujuha’ and make small demonstrations away from the city center. These small
demonstrations went off for several weeks without any injuries or police repression. This calm
was shattered, however, when a procession to the city’s central square on March 15, 2012, to
mark the one year anniversary of the beginning of the uprising in Daraa, began to pull down a
statue of former President Hafez al-Asad. Security forces fired randomly into this crowd and
killed one person; a funeral procession the next day brought thousands back to the center of the
city, where they again tried to pull down the statue and faced live fire that killed three.28 The next
day, 100,000 people turned out to protest, constituting what Bishara (2013: 219) estimates to be
the largest demonstration in Syria during 2012. In spite of these demonstrations, however, only
sporadic and mostly peaceful protests would characterize the next six months in ar-Raqqa. In
28
Videos of demonstrations on March 16th and 17th, respectively, accessed at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyHpZNN-2T8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXNetPtcyYI. See also
al-Akhbar (2012).
34
fact, until the state lost the city to rebels in March 2013, ar-Raqqa functioned as a safe haven for
people of the city’s countryside and neighboring governorates seeking refuge from fighting
between the state and rebel groups.29
What accounts for this long delay in the onset of challenge in Raqqa? It was not
overwhelming security presence in the city—Raqqa lacks the major security bases of other large
cities like Homs and Hama that engaged in early challenge—nor the quality of public services in
the city. Rather, the combination of clan-based social structure and the relationships the Syrian
regime developed with local leaders gave these leaders both the power and incentive to suppress
challenge. Wujuha’ staved off the uprising’s arrival to ar-Raqqa because their material interest
lay in the preservation of their intermediary position and their location in networks of societal
and state power enabled them to do so.
While clans in contemporary ar-Raqqa hold little in common with the formerly nomadic,
camel-herding populations found deeper in the desert until the 1960s,30 kinship ties continue to
be relevant to patterns of political obedience; nearly all residents are members of a clan (‘ashira),
an extended kinship network. Because economic and social life continue to flow through clan
linkages to some degree, these bonds remain useful for commanding the solidarity of clan
members (Khalaf 1990). Though its socialist ideology denounced them as retrograde,31 the
29
The Islamic State would not take full control of Raqqa and make it the group’s de facto headquarters until over a
year later, in May 2014. This development occurred well after all state authority had broken down and is beyond the
scope of this investigation.
30
In contrast with the camel-herding groups to the northeast and south of Raqqa that remained mostly nomadic into
the 1960s, the people of Raqqa come from primarily from tribal groups that had practiced a mix of dryfarming and
sheepherding since at least the 1920s (Rabo 1999: 176). While some scholars draw a sharp distinction between the
sorts of solidarity the formerly camel-herding ‘noble’ (‘asil) tribes and the sheep-herding ‘common’ (sha’awi) tribes
(ex. Chatty 1986), this distinction has become less relevant as tribes have ceased to be nomadic. The critical feature
of clan-based society is the presence of intermediaries that the state can work with, and this distinguishes noble and
common tribes alike from groups with family structure.
31
Article 43 of the Ba'th constitution stated: "Nomadism is a primitive social state. It decreases the national output
and makes an important part of the nation a paralysed member and an obstacle to its development and progress. The
party struggles for the sedentarisation of nomads by the grants of land to them [and] for the abolition of tribal
custom" (quoted in Chatty 2010: 39).
35
Ba’thist Syrian state has to a great extent worked through clan linkages rather than destroy them;
the comparably meager level of public services and development are evidence of one side of the
pincer movement used by the state to control these communities. The other side is the set of
perks and power granted by the state to wujuha’. Quantitative data on the benefits individual clan
leaders received from the Syrian state are impossible to come by, but Bishara (2013: 218) notes
that long-standing state-wajih linkages were strengthened following the US invasion of Iraq in
2003. The regime increased the admission of Raqqa clan leaders’ sons into the military and
allowed them to carry weapons—a right formerly granted to nomadic tribal populations but
denied by the Ba’thist state. A saying common to the Raqqa area describes the state policy
toward the wujuha’: “give loyalty and do as you please” (‘atey wila’ w ifa’l ma tesha’).32 The
state called upon this loyalty when the Islamic uprising of the late 1970s and early 1980s was
spreading across Syria’s major cities; when youths tried to force shops to close in solidarity with
the general strike in going on in Aleppo, Homs and Hama, police went to the local leaders and
enjoined them to restrain their eager clan members, which they did (Rabo 1999: 181).
The government again called on this loyalty in November 2011. President Bashar al-Asad
visited Raqqa on an important Islamic holiday—‘Eid al-Adha—to pray at the central mosque and
meet with local notables. He emerged from the prayers and was greeted by a cheering crowd of
tens of thousands. During this trip, the President reinforced state-intermediary linkages,
proclaiming that the tribes “were always the national repository of the traditions and authentic
stances [of the Syrian people] in their wataniyya and qawmiyya dimensions” (Ikteshaf Souri
2011).33 In January 2012, just before youth-led protests and the violent state response would
32
Personal interview, Beirut, October 17, 2013.
al-Asad’s use of both qawmiyya and wataniyya to laud the national belonging of clan structure populations is
characteristic of the regime’s opportunistic approach. Wataniya refers to nationalism at the level of the modern
territorial state, whereas qawmiyya typically refers to pan-Arab nationalism but also carries the connotation of kin33
36
compel clan leaders to back away from their support of the state, many of the city’s most
prominent leaders attended meetings with state officials aimed at developing strategies to end the
uprising (al-Arabiya 2012a).
Why, then, did local activists finally disobey their leaders and engage in demonstrations?
Slow-moving social change before the uprising had linked Raqqawi youth to sites beyond their
local community to a degree far greater than that of previous generations.34 As demonstrations
spread throughout other parts of the country and the state’s response became increasingly
violent, activists vision of themselves as structurally equivalent to other protesters dominated
that of being members of their clan. This is evident in one activist’s description of his tribe’s
shaykhs as shabiha (a derogatory term for regime allies usually reserved for muscular thugs from
the ‘Alawi sect), for repressing members of their own tribe (ash-Sharq al-Awsat 2011b). Another
impugned the right of clan leaders to represent the Raqqawi community, remarking that, "the
concept of tribes is retrograde—they have only lately begun to confront [the regime]. Those
shaykhs are, in the end, only people who inherited a name, or have some money. They have no
real influence, especially with the fighters" (al-Akhbar 2012). Violence—supplied mostly by the
state—pushed Raqqawis to participate in the uprising on two counts. First, the increasing levels
of violence in other areas of the country made the vision of divisions offered by the wujuha’
dissonant with the conditions local social actors faced, rendering any commitment the state
based, tribal belonging. The Syrian state has never given up its official position of seeking the unity of all Arab
peoples, yet the project to which it is trying to bind the clans—preserving the modern territorial Syrian state – stands
in direct contradiction to this official rhetoric.
34
Clan linkages continued to form the basis of social and political life in Raqqa on the eve of the uprising, but this
structure was not immune to change in the decades leading up to the uprising; increasing educational opportunities
in the capital and work opportunities in the Gulf gave individuals access to resources and skills that made them less
dependent upon influential members of the local society. These changes had also begun to make members of the
local community—particularly the youth—understand themselves in terms of their membership in a national
citizenship community rather than a clan linked to the state. Personal interview, Beirut, November 2013. This
development represents a continuation of a long range trend whereby exclusively clan-based solidarities are giving
way to broader, more territorially based solidarities (Lewis 1987: 195; Batatu 199: 22).
37
offered to local communities via these intermediaries no longer credible. Second, when local
social actors did finally turn out on the street, state attacks reinforced this vision of divisions in
such a public manner that even the intermediaries were compelled to revise their positions.
Quantitative evidence
Multi-variable regression analysis of the event data provides further support for the
coalitional theory. To provide a general picture of where challenge occurred, I first fit a logistic
regression with the outcome a binary of whether challenger action occurred at all in a given
locality. Because the coalitional theory predicts that the introduction of violence should affect
challenger behavior, I split the data into an early, non-violent period and a later, violent one, at
September 29, 2011, 240 days from the initial event.35 The results of these tests are presented in
table 3. The identity variables take the signs expected by the coalitional theory; a settlement
being populated by ‘Alawis, other minorities or Sunni Arab clans is negatively associated with
challenger action under all circumstances. The values taken by the Kurdish identity variable, too,
accord with this theory. It is not a significant predictor in specifications (1) and (2), meaning that
Kurds are not different from Sunni Arab families (who are the reference category) in their
propensity to engage in challenge during the early, low violence period. In the late period, when
violence has become widespread, however, Kurdish locales are significantly less likely to engage
in challenge (specifications (3) & (4)). This reduced propensity is a result of the successful
efforts of the Syrian state to make the Kurdish/Sunni Arab boundary salient and hive Kurds off
from the uprising.
[TABLE 3 HERE]
35
Clashes between defecting soldiers and the Syrian Army began during the preceding week, so the state sharply
stepped up attacks against both civilian communities and rebels following this day.
38
Alternate explanations are inconsistent with the values taken by the ethnicity variables.
First, psychological accounts (A2.2) predict that the fact of ethnic difference should have a
uniform effect on mass behavior once some symbolic event breaks out. The killing of hundreds
of demonstrators in Damascus and Homs in late April 2011, on this theory, should have pushed
all Sunni groups to engage in challenge, with little change from the low to high violence periods.
What we see, in fact, is that a large segment of the Sunni Arab group—that with clan social
structure—is far less likely to engage in challenge than the rest of the group and Kurds become
less likely to engage in contestation as violence intensifies. State-centered explanations of
ethnicization (A2.1) predict that conflict should be ethnicized only following the introduction of
violence, yet challenge events are significantly less likely to occur in non-Sunni communities at
all time periods.
Another critical test of rival theories of challenger action lies in the behavior of ethnically
excluded social actors included in the state’s networks (Q3, figure 2). The relational (H2) and
state-centered theories (A2.1) make divergent predictions about the behavior of ethnically
excluded groups. Whereas elite-centered theories predict that society-regime network ties should
have no effect on the propensity of local groups to challenge the state, the coalitional theory
holds that links to the state should depress early participation among ethnically excluded
communities but cease to attenuate their participation following the introduction of sustained
violence. In terms of the Syrian case, the coalitional theory predicts that all Sunni Arab clan
communities and those Sunni Arab family communities with network linkages to the regime
(measured by the percentage of a locality’s workforce in government employment) should be
quiescent in the early period but active at a level indistinguishable from non-networked Sunni
Arab communities once violence has become widespread. Adjudicating the issue of how network
39
ties to the regime affect Sunni Arab family communities requires further testing beyond model 3,
which by its functional form assumes that state employment has a uniform effect on communities
of all ethnic identities.
To eliminate this causal heterogeneity and provide a more focused test of the relationship
between ethnically excluded, network included actors and the state, I fit a count model of
challenger action for Sunni Arab family cities only. A more conventional strategy would entail
simply adding interaction terms to the existing model, but interaction terms are often unstable
and do not lend themselves to straightforward interpretation in this case. I instead ‘control’ for
causal heterogeneity by choosing a subset of the data likely to have homogeneous causal
properties and introduce only the independent variables needed to adjudicating between rival
theories, following the recommendations of Achen (2005). In this case, the relevant subset of the
data is medium and small size cities of majority Sunni Arab family background only.36 I employ
a negative binomial regression because the quantity of interest is the frequency of challenge and
the data are overdispersed (because about half of the units of analysis have no events and some
have over twenty, making the standard error 1.75 times greater than the mean).
The negative binomial regression results, reported in table 4, suggest that the coalitional
theory’s predictions for ethnically excluded, network included communities best match the data.
The government worker variable is statistically significant for all forms of challenge in the early
period but ceases to be significant for the later period. This figure has substantive import, as
well. Simulating the change in state employment from 69 percent public employment to 17
percent in the early period (specification (1)) increases the number of expected challenger events
36
I created a variable for small and medium size cities by excluding the settlements in the Syrian census with the
highest and lowest administrative distinctions (governorate capital and hamlet), keeping only the district and subdistrict capitals. Governorate capitals, because of their size and dynamics of rapid in-migration in the last several
decades, have multiple causal dynamics and average over very heterogeneous areas (see footnote 25).
40
from 0.6 to 3.0.37 In the later period (specification (3)), the same change in public employment is
associated with an increase from 2.5 to 4.2 events, but the estimate is not statistically different
from zero, suggesting that the effect of government employment is mediated by other
considerations once violence becomes widespread.
[TABLE 4 HERE]
The effect of ethnic heterogeneity in the model casts further doubt on the veracity of the
elite-centered theory, which predicts that heterogeneity should not influence challenge in the
early period but become a positive predictor of challenge in the late period, as state violent action
focuses on inciting the resentment of the excluded group only when it is near communities of the
included ethnic group. Yet the heterogeneity variable in table 4 has marginal positive statistical
significance in the early period (specifications (1) and (2)), but is not different from zero in the
later periods (specification (3)).
In sum, the statistical tests performed in this section suggest that the coalitional theory
best explains the observed patterns in the data. State attacks on Sunni communities are focused
on localities excluded from its networks, not merely areas of ethnic heterogeneity (contra A1.1).
Ethnic boundaries structure contention from the outset, with ‘Alawi and other minority
communities less likely to challenge the state and more likely to engage in counter-mobilization
(contra A2.1). However, boundaries do not do so invariantly, and can be instrumentalized by
powerful actors; Kurdish settlements engaged in early non-violent challenge but became
quiescent once the state activated the Kurdish-Arab boundary (contra A2.2). Finally, the
behavior of Sunni Arab communities was mediated by network relations; localities with clan
37
Simulations carried out using the Zelig software package (Imai et al. 2015). Sixty-nine percent is the level of
public employment of Qatana, a suburb of Damascus, which is the 98th percentile of public employment in the
sample and in the 87th percentile in the full national sample. Seventeen percent is the level of employment in
Muarret al-Nuaman, a city in the countryside of Idleb, which is in the 15th percentile of the sample and the 44th
percentile of the full national sample.
41
structure or high levels of state employment had depressed levels of participation in the early
period of the uprising but began to behave like the network-excluded Sunni Arab communities as
violence became more widespread.
IV. CONCLUSION
“Brothers and sisters, this might be a blessing in disguise. But we are humans and we
cannot like what happened. We cannot like sedition, we cannot like killing, we cannot
like tension, but crises are a positive condition if we can control them and get out of
them victorious. The secret of Syria’s strength lies in the many crises it faced
throughout its history, particularly after independence.”
- President Bashar al-Asad, in a nationally televised speech, March 30, 201138
This paper documents the process by which the 2011 Syrian uprising became ethicized
using statistical evidence from a newly constructed database of contentious events in the Syrian
uprising and their local community level covariates. It shows that while ‘Alawi and other
minority communities largely conform to the master narrative of non-Sunni quiescence, there is
considerable variation in both state treatment of and societal behavior among Sunni
communities. Conciliatory state action taken towards Kurdish communities prevented them from
allying with their Arab neighbors challenging the state, while state violence towards challenger
groups eventually pushed even regime-linked Sunni Arab communities with network ties to the
state to behave like the network-excluded communities sharing their ethnic identity.
The picture that emerges from this fine-grained look into the Syrian uprising has a
paradoxical quality. The owners of state power have a vested interest in holding onto power and
extinguishing all forms of challenge, yet by repeatedly responding to challenger action with
disproportionate violence, these same actors constituted the central force pushing the uprising in
the violent and ethnicized direction it ultimately took. The above remarks by Syrian President
Bashar al-Asad, delivered in his first speech following the onset of the uprising, provide some
38
Accessed at http://www.al-bab.com/arab/docs/syria/bashar_assad_speech_110330.htm.
42
guidance towards resolving this paradox. The Syrian state continually faced crises in its postindependence history precisely because it did not tower over society; rather, it maintained an
intricate set of relationships—most of which are, at best, tangentially linked with ethnic
identity—to cement alliances and neutralize challenges. Only when all of the crisis management
techniques that had sustained the Ba’th regime for nearly fifty years failed did it resort to the
Pyrrhic strategy it has taken since the outbreak of the uprising.
The master cleavage in revolutionary contention is neither a product of mechanically
activated, group level enmities nor the design of a cunning state rending its otherwise
harmonious society. Rather, the theory proposed here suggests that violent conflict becomes
ethnicized through the strategic use of networks and categories by a challenger and incumbent
regime struggling to build coalitions of supporters. Ethnic boundaries became a focal point of
these efforts because they are the only bases of alliance from which coalition members cannot
defect. Little attention has been paid to date in the study of violent ethnic conflict to the meso
level, relational processes that implicate identity boundaries in violent conflict. By directing
attention to linkages between the state and specific segments of society in ethicized conflict, this
paper builds on a growing literature detailing the role of networks in periods of revolutionary
challenge and civil war (cf. Staniland 2012, Parkinson 2013, Viterna 2013). In particular, it helps
scholars of ethnic processes move from elucidating the multiple potential identifications that
local communities have and the cases in which ethnic boundaries have in fact hardened towards
specifying the conditions under which contenders for state power will draw on ethnic boundaries
to recruit communities into a winning coalition. The vitriolic, ethnic character of much
revolutionary violence stems, on this view, neither from the psychological properties of the
43
masses nor the machinations of elites but the violent “conversation,” in Tilly’s (2003) felicitous
turn of phrase, between challenger and incumbent.
44
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Figure 1 – State strategies predicted by the relational theory
networks
excluded
categories
included
included
excluded
)**********************make*ethnicity*
(group*will********* defining*cleavage*
never*defect)*******
of*conflict***********
Q4
Q1
make*class*or*civic*
)*********************
community*
(group*will******************
defining*cleavage*
always*defect)***$$$$$$
of*conflict$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Q2
Q3
1
Figure 2 – Identity boundaries and population sizes
(a) ethnic boundaries
ARAB%
SUNNI%
Alawis%
Arab%
Sunnis%
Druzes%
Kurds%
Arab%Chris/ans%
Circassians/%
Turkomans%
Ismailis%
non,Arab%Chris/ans%
(b) percent total Syrian population (Sunni groups in gray)
10
72
8
5
2
1
Druze
Alawi
Sunni Arab
59
Kurd
Arab
Christian
1
1
Ismaili
Non−Arab
Christian
Chechen/
Turkoman
13
clans
families
Notes : Population size estimates in panel (b) taken from multiple sources ; see footnote 13.
2
Figure 3 – Public goods and state employment by population and sect
(a) services by population size
(b) services by sect
1.0
1.0
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0.8
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% population with state provided public services
% population with state provided public services
●
0.8
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n = 328
n = 1107
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0.6
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0.4
●
0.2
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0.0
●
0−5th
percentile
50−55th
percentile
0.0
95−100th
percentile
n = 929
n = 1012
n = 291
Alawis
Sunni Arab clans
Kurds
other min. Sunni Arab families
settlement size (total population per census unit)
(c) public employmentby population size
1.0
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1.0
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% workforce in public sector
% workforce in public sector
0.8
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0.2
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n = 981
n = 1224
n = 374
Alawis
Sunni Arab clans
Kurds
0.0
0.0
0−5th
percentile
50−55th
percentile
95−100th
percentile
n = 353
n = 1207
other min. Sunni Arab families
settlement size (total population per census unit)
Notes : Services measure averages percent population with water, sewage and electricity, per
locality. Each bar in panels (a) and (c) represents 5 percent of all localities. Data on services
and employment come from 2004 census, ethnicity data from author database.
3
Figure 4 – Challenger action by type and time
(a) with aggregate Sunni category (Arab families and clans, Kurds)
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6/11
Alawi
10/11
2/12
6/12
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Notes : An event is recorded as occurring in the settlement of a given ethnic identity when the
majority of its residents have that identity, as determined by the ethnic datase. Settlements
are recorded at the census community levle and the number of settlements per ethnicity are
as follow. Panel (a) : Alawi 1104, other minorities 427, all Sunni 3673. Panel (b) : Sunni Arab
clans 1646, Kurds 654, Sunni Arab families 1373.
4
Figure 5 – State action by type and time
(a) with aggregate Sunni category (Arab families and clans, Kurds)
2/11
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Alawi
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Sunni
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2/11
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time (months)
Notes : An event is recorded as occurring in the settlement of a given ethnic identity when the
majority of its residents have that identity, as determined by the ethnic datase. Settlements
are recorded at the census community levle and the number of settlements per ethnicity are
as follow. Panel (a) : Alawi 1104, other minorities 427, all Sunni 3673. Panel (b) : Sunni Arab
clans 1646, Kurds 654, Sunni Arab families 1373.
5
Table 1 – Ordinal logistic model of state action
(1)
all obsv.
log(population)
new investment
security presence
terrain ruggedness
’Alawi encirclement
Clan majority
Kurdish majority
Lagged chall. viol.
n
AIC
(2)
all obsv.
(3)
small cities
0.84
(0.77 0.91)
0.99
(0.71 1.37)
0.75
(0.5 1.15)
0.49
(0.18 1.35)
0.43
(0.24 0.79)
0.6
(0.35 1.01)
0.12
(0.02 0.56)
3.48
(2.48 4.91)
0.71
(0.53 0.95)
0.64
(0.42 0.95)
0.7
(0.26 1.91)
0.48
(0.27 0.88)
0.6
(0.35 1.01)
0.12
(0.02 0.57)
3.16
(2.26 4.43)
0.41
(0.25 0.66)
2.5
(1.12 5.58)
3.41
(0.71 16.68)
0.22
(0.09 0.54)
1.04
(0.35 3.15)
0.04
(0
0.31)
4.85
(2.89 8.31)
1347
1736.36
1347
1749.99
576
689.41
(4)
big cities
0.91
(0.58 1.44)
1.46
(0.54 3.94)
(1.59
2.7
4.69)
15.59
(6.77 38.31)
420
582.22
Notes : Coefficients reported as odds ratios, with 95 percent confidence intervals (i.e. if the
interval contains the number one, this implies that the variable’s e↵ect is not statistically
di↵erent from zero). Outcomes are in order of increasing severity, from crowd control to tactical
control to destroy . Small cities in specification (3) are those with population between 20,000 and
200,000 ; large cities in specification (4) have more than 200,000 residents. ’Alawi encirclement
for specifications (1) through (3) is a binary measure of whether 3 of closest 10 settlements are
’Alawi. For specification (4), it is a binary measure of whether at least the settlement has an
’Alawi population ; four variables are dropped in this specification because they are invariant
across the units in the sample.
6
Table 2 – Binary time series cross-sectional (BTSCS) regression of state action
DV :
sample :
all sites
state destruction
any Sunni
Sunni families
all sites
any state violence
any Sunni
Sunni families
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
new investment
0.647⇤⇤
(0.265)
0.725⇤⇤⇤
(0.271)
0.478⇤
(0.289)
0.085
(0.097)
0.145
(0.099)
0.018
(0.109)
security presence
0.352
(0.276)
0.308
(0.277)
0.318
(0.294)
0.125
(0.106)
0.113
(0.107)
0.013
(0.113)
percent Sunni families
2.061⇤⇤⇤
(0.598)
percent Kurdish
17.219⇤⇤⇤
(4.185)
16.836⇤⇤⇤
(4.211)
6.367⇤⇤⇤
(1.165)
6.353⇤⇤⇤
(1.105)
percent Sunni clans
0.497
(0.718)
1.485⇤⇤⇤
(0.469)
1.196⇤⇤⇤
(0.274)
1.053⇤⇤⇤
(0.162)
ethnic polarization
0.005
(0.431)
0.983⇤⇤⇤
(0.355)
0.291⇤
(0.174)
0.815⇤⇤⇤
(0.140)
2.320⇤⇤⇤
(0.237)
percent Alawi
1.333⇤⇤
(0.611)
0.624
(1.237)
public water supply
0.049
(0.924)
0.109
(0.931)
0.956
(1.211)
1.612⇤⇤⇤
(0.419)
1.677⇤⇤⇤
(0.423)
1.112⇤⇤
(0.494)
log(population)
0.868⇤⇤⇤
(0.160)
0.888⇤⇤⇤
(0.161)
0.262⇤⇤
(0.117)
0.803⇤⇤⇤
(0.063)
0.844⇤⇤⇤
(0.062)
0.544⇤⇤⇤
(0.050)
0.195⇤⇤⇤
(0.071)
0.201⇤⇤⇤
(0.071)
0.175⇤⇤
(0.073)
0.280⇤⇤⇤
(0.035)
0.288⇤⇤⇤
(0.035)
0.221⇤⇤⇤
(0.038)
lag. challenger viol.
0.217⇤⇤
(0.089)
0.226⇤⇤
(0.089)
0.302⇤⇤⇤
(0.088)
0.289⇤⇤⇤
(0.060)
0.303⇤⇤⇤
(0.060)
0.368⇤⇤⇤
(0.061)
lag. clash
0.579⇤⇤⇤
(0.100)
0.627⇤⇤⇤
(0.100)
0.739⇤⇤⇤
(0.104)
0.585⇤⇤⇤
(0.059)
0.627⇤⇤⇤
(0.059)
0.588⇤⇤⇤
(0.063)
adjacent state viol.
0.023
(0.068)
0.013
(0.071)
0.034
(0.078)
0.172⇤⇤⇤
(0.027)
0.171⇤⇤⇤
(0.027)
0.209⇤⇤⇤
(0.029)
week
0.144⇤⇤
(0.060)
0.137⇤⇤
(0.061)
0.141⇤⇤
(0.063)
0.239⇤⇤⇤
(0.028)
0.247⇤⇤⇤
(0.029)
0.214⇤⇤⇤
(0.030)
week2
0.005⇤⇤⇤
(0.002)
0.005⇤⇤⇤
(0.002)
0.005⇤⇤
(0.002)
0.007⇤⇤⇤
(0.001)
0.007⇤⇤⇤
(0.001)
0.006⇤⇤⇤
(0.001)
week3
0.039⇤⇤⇤
(0.015)
0.037⇤⇤
(0.015)
0.038⇤⇤
(0.016)
0.055⇤⇤⇤
(0.006)
0.056⇤⇤⇤
(0.007)
0.049⇤⇤⇤
(0.007)
Constant
16.272⇤⇤⇤
(1.830)
14.416⇤⇤⇤
(1.806)
8.476⇤⇤⇤
(1.646)
17.847⇤⇤⇤
(0.767)
16.072⇤⇤⇤
(0.755)
12.042⇤⇤⇤
(0.729)
19,418
537.301
1,106.603
14,600
522.666
1,075.331
7,957
458.126
942.252
19,418
2,308.700
4,649.400
14,600
2,239.636
4,509.271
7,957
1,854.097
3,734.195
time-varying controls
lag. challenger non-viol.
Observations
Log Likelihood
Akaike Inf. Crit.
Note : The unit of analysis is the site-week, time lags are 4 weeks, time period ofr adjacent
action is the prior week. Ethnic polarization is measured using the formula given in Montalvo
& Reynal-Querol (2005). Constructed using software by Hlavac (2015).
⇤ p<0.1 ; ⇤⇤ p<0.05 ; ⇤⇤⇤ p<0.01
7
Table 3 – Logistic regression of challenger action, by type and time period
DV :
sample :
non-viol.
any challenge
early period (<240 days)
any challenge
late period all periods
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
log(population)
2.286⇤⇤⇤
(0.175)
2.022⇤⇤⇤
(0.142)
1.357⇤⇤⇤
(0.072)
1.456⇤⇤⇤
(0.075)
Kurdish majority
0.591
(0.687)
0.306
(0.627)
2.389⇤⇤⇤
(0.600)
1.528⇤⇤⇤
(0.452)
Non-Sunni majority
2.390⇤⇤⇤
(0.735)
1.668⇤⇤⇤
(0.564)
1.759⇤⇤⇤
(0.271)
1.769⇤⇤⇤
(0.265)
Arab clan majority
2.271⇤⇤⇤
(0.577)
2.248⇤⇤⇤
(0.534)
2.027⇤⇤⇤
(0.265)
2.003⇤⇤⇤
(0.261)
Ethnic heterogeneity
0.464
(0.692)
0.157
(0.607)
0.702⇤⇤
(0.324)
0.792⇤⇤
(0.315)
State employment
1.346
(1.045)
0.610
(0.902)
0.769
(0.475)
0.644
(0.462)
Security presence
0.176
(0.352)
0.126
(0.318)
0.264
(0.170)
0.148
(0.170)
Terrain ruggedness
0.419
(1.002)
0.060
(0.914)
0.881⇤
(0.494)
0.988⇤⇤
(0.486)
Constant
22.950⇤⇤⇤
(1.785)
20.171⇤⇤⇤
(1.450)
11.751⇤⇤⇤
(0.659)
12.526⇤⇤⇤
(0.673)
Observations
Log Likelihood
Akaike Inf. Crit.
4,816
161.105
340.211
4,816
198.158
414.316
4,816
572.541
1,163.082
4,816
585.410
1,188.820
Note : The break between the early, low violence period and late, high violence period is at 240
days after first event (on February 1, 2011). Constructed using software by Hlavac (2015).
⇤ p<0.1 ; ⇤⇤ p<0.05 ; ⇤⇤⇤ p<0.01
8
Table 4 – Negative binomial regression of challenger action, mid-size Sunni Arab family
sites only
DV :
sample :
any chall.
non-viol chall.
early period (<240 days)
any chall.
late period
(1)
(2)
(3)
State employment
3.098⇤⇤
(1.333)
2.686⇤⇤
(1.336)
1.177
(1.002)
% 10 nearest ’Alawi
1.952⇤
(0.110)
1.930⇤
(0.113)
1.121
(0.096)
Security presence
1.323⇤⇤⇤
(0.411)
1.417⇤⇤⇤
(0.417)
0.656⇤⇤
(0.310)
Terrain ruggedness
0.890
(0.987)
1.129
(1.008)
1.427⇤
(0.779)
Constant
0.847⇤
(0.510)
0.873⇤
(0.517)
1.579⇤⇤⇤
(0.386)
100
181.613
0.360⇤⇤⇤ (0.080)
373.226
100
191.948
0.335⇤⇤⇤ (0.072)
393.896
100
235.043
0.567⇤⇤⇤ (0.104)
480.087
Observations
Log Likelihood
✓
Akaike Inf. Crit.
Note : Constructed using software by Hlavac (2015).
⇤ p<0.1 ; ⇤⇤ p<0.05 ; ⇤⇤⇤ p<0.01
9
APPENDIX – Data sources and coding procedures
Newspaper event database
The database contains 4424 observations and follows the structure of Tilly’s (1995) dataset
on contention in nineteenth century Great Britain. It records a set of subject-verb-object
sequences for actions taken by the state, its challengers and the state’s allies at the level of the
town-day, with 4424 events occurring in 449 different localities (of 5204 localities total). The
dataset is based on multiple, diverse sources to minimize bias in event reporting. It draws on all
relevant articles from the Associated Press Newswire (obtained via Lexis-Nexis), the daily
digests of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (http://www.syriahro.org/), an oppositionleaning activist organization, and ath-Thawra (http://www.thawra.sy/), the political daily
newspaper of the official Syrian Ba’th Party.
To create the discrete event coding, I reduced the subject-verb-object strings to nine types
of action. The typology of actions was developed inductively, based upon descriptions of state
action gathered from secondary sources, the newspaper articles themselves and personal
interviews. Categorizing actions in this manner facilitates assessment of whether and how
violence is deployed strategically to push confrontation along a particular track.
The state strategies are as follow: (1) incumbent crowd control, which captures actions
directed at dispersing demonstrators without inflicting high levels of damage on protesters or
monitoring them extensively1; (2) tactical control of cities, which involves an organized form of
violence and surveillance directed at a specific segment of a city or town’s population, but not
the whole town or major neighborhood of a large city2; (3) confront, which describes security or
military forces clashing with armed opposition fighters3; (4) town destruction, events that target
entire towns or major neighborhoods of large cities indiscriminately.4
Distinctions among the three challenger actions are: (1) non-violent action, meaning
simply that a group gathered to make demands on the regime and no violent action was reported;
(2) spontaneous violent action, where crowds initially amassed to demonstrate non-violently and
shifted towards the use of violence, such as throwing rocks or beating state allies; (3) coordinated
violent action, involving groups such as “rebels” or “defectors” engaging in coordinated attacks
on state forces.
Allies are any actors without an official affiliation to the state that act to support the
incumbent or harm its challengers. They can take two sorts of actions in the coding scheme: (1)
violent action or (2) non-violent action. When gathered to voice support the state, whether as a
counter demonstration or on its own, ally actions count as non-violent. Any sustained physical
1
Crowd control captures actions directed at dispersing demonstrators without inflicting high levels of damage on
protesters or monitoring them extensively. This category encompasses actions of far more force than one would
expect from crowd control in an industrialized democracy, ranging from barricading, non-violently dispersing
protests and arresting demonstrators to tear gassing and beating demonstrators and firing into the air when it causes
fewer than two casualties.
2
These tactics appear to be geared at separating a contentious population from the rest of the town/city or punishing
a specific subset of the city’s residents. Examples include raiding a neighborhood to make arrests, encircling a
neighborhood and cutting power and water for several days, storming a neighborhood, opening fire randomly on
demonstrations or using snipers to kill people out on the street.
3
The confrontation category describes security or military forces clashing with armed opposition fighters, whether
as a formal battle between armies, skirmishes with deserters or scrambling attacks following an ambush.
4
They inflict heavy damage, either mass property destruction or the killing of 20 or more people. Actions in this
category include the siege of entire cities, shelling of a neighborhood and burning of homes.
1
attack—from throwing stones at and using knives against anti-incumbent demonstrators to
organized militias destroying villages assisting challengers—counts as ally violent action.
Using multiple sources with conflicting agendas requires the researcher to make coding
decisions sometimes based upon explicitly contradictory reports. These decisions often involved
rejecting obvious government fabrications (e.g. “terrorists are using smoke bombs to make it
look like the government is shelling the city center” when the government is clearly shelling the
city center). In these and more ambiguous situations, the researcher consulted of third party
reports, including the scholarly monographs of Barout (2012) and Bishara (2013) and the reports
of international organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty international. In addition, I
address the issues raised by aggregating reports from multiple sources highlighted in Weidmann
and Rod (2015), following their advice to code events in view of all relevant reports and make
the original reports available along with the database for replication (in forthcoming online
appendix).
Newspaper-based event data have come under criticism for ignoring events in small and
remote locales (selection bias) and for misrepresenting those events they do report (veracity bias)
due to the agenda of the newspaper (Ortiz 2005; Weidmann 2014). Davenport (2010) argues that
the use of diverse sources spanning the spectrum of political agendas on the conflict reduces the
risk of veracity bias. The opposed political agendas of Thawra and the Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights make it highly unlikely that both would miss covering a major event unflattering
to the other camp. Undoubtedly, the database misses events with low levels of participation and
violence, particularly in peripheral areas of the country. Because the main variation to be
explained is in the types and sequencing of events in different locales (their “internal
regularities”), rather than aggregate counts or individual incidents, the selection bias against
small events and those in remote areas is thus unlikely to affect results (Tilly 2008). As an
additional robustness measure, models are re-fit after dropping the most remote locales and
excluding excluding reports from Thawra, the source most likely contain outright fabrications
due to its linkage to the Syrian government.
Ethnicity and region characteristic database
With the help of research assistants, I used structured interviews and secondary materials
to ascertain the ethnic background of the residents of every settlement in Syria; for the purposes
of statistical analysis, I reduced over twenty ethnic categories to the four presented here: Sunni
Arabs, Kurds, Alawis and other minorities. Ethnic identity categorization is based upon the
identification of the majority of the population in a given locality. Approximately 10 percent of
settlements—including 12 of the 13 largest cities—are mixed ethnically. Statistical models using
the community (the level of greatest disaggregation, n=5204) as the unit of analysis employ
dummy variables for presence or majority of a given ethnic group (models 1, 3, 4). For model 2,
the unit of analysis is the sub-district (n=266, one level up from the community), which enables
measurement of ethnic heterogeneity using the standard measures of polarization and
fractionalization (Montalvo and Reynal-Querol 2005). Unlike the other models in this chapter
that use binary variables at the locality level, the ethnic identity variable in this model is a
percentage for the entire sub-district.
The Sunni Arab family versus clan social structure variable was gathered along with the
ethnicity variables and is measured at the community level (n=5204). Other measures collected
alongside ethnicity assess whether security and military bases are present in the region of the
locality (a binary indicator) and whether region saw new investment under the post-2005
2
government (also binary). The latter two measures were collected on the sub-district (n=266)
level, because they are coherent measures only on a more aggregate level; their effects radiate
over a broader region than the immediate locality in which they are sited.
Sources for other independent variables
Additional independent variables, including population, percent workforce employed by
the state and percent of population with access to state-provided water, are taken from the 2004
Syrian census (http://www.cbssyr.sy/). Terrain roughness is calculated from the ASTER Global
Digital Elevation Map (NASA 2013).
Ordinal logit—parallel slopes assumption
I check the parallel slopes assumption graphically, following the procedure suggested by Harrell
(2001). Figure A1 suggests that this assumption is satisfied. This method is preferable to the
Brant method and other standard tests because these are too likely to reject models that in fact
satisfy the parallel slopes assumption (Harrell 2001). The two binary logistic regressions used to
check the parallel slopes assumption have the following dependent variables: (1) crowd control
versus tactical control and destroy outcomes and (2) crowd and tactical control versus destroy
outcomes.
References
Montalvo, Jose G., and Marta Reynal-Querol. 2005. “Ethnic Polarization, Potential Conflict, and Civil Wars.”
American Economic Review 95(3): 796–816.
NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC). 2013. “ASTER L1B.”
https://lpdaac.usgs.gov (January 12, 2014).
Ortiz, David, Daniel Myers, Eugene Walls, and Maria-Elena Diaz. 2005. “Where Do We Stand with
Newspaper Data?” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 10(3): 397–419.
Tilly, Charles. 1995. Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press.
———. 2008. Explaining Social Processes. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Weidmann, Nils B. 2014. “On the Accuracy of Media-Based Conflict Event Data.” Journal of Conflict
Resolution: 0022002714530431.
Weidmann, Nils B., and Espen Geelmuyden Rød. 2015. “Making Uncertainty Explicit Separating Reports and
Events in the Coding of Violence and Contention.” Journal of Peace Research 52(1): 125–28.
3
FIGURE A1 – COEFFICIENTS OF BINARY LOGISTIC MODELS NESTED IN MODEL 1
(ORDINAL LOGISTIC REGRESSION OF STATE ACTION)
N
l3_newinv
No
646
Yes
701
l3_anysec
No
200
Yes
1147
rugg_s
[0.0129,0.0761)
490
[0.0761,0.0985)
196
[0.0985,0.1955)
367
[0.1955,0.8192]
294
al_encirc
No
1276
Yes
71
badawibin
No
1251
Yes
96
l3chslag
No
329
Yes
1018
Overall
1347
−3
−2
−1
0
logit
N=1347
4
1
2
3