Between the Square and the Quarter: The Urban Logic of Violence in Syria, 2011

• In Event: Urban Violence and Political Contestation in the Middle East

Abstract

How do people mobilize and sustain mobilization in highly inauspicious contexts, like authoritarian polities that regularly exercise violence against non-violent challengers? The social movements literature highlights weak ties between civil society groups and the rebel mobilization literature highlights strong ties among secretive, often co-ethnic insurgents. But strong ties alone lack the scale needed for mass urban challenge and weak associational ties alone are crushed by arbitrarily violent authoritarian regimes. This article proposes that both are necessary in revolutions against arbitrarily violent authoritarian incumbents. And how the two interact to produce and sustain challenge is intimately tied to the physical environment: dense, informal neighborhoods produce and enable the functioning of strong ties, and weak ties give additional challengers from outside those communities’ access to the resources of those neighborhoods. We develop and empirically evaluate these claims in the case of the city of Damascus during the first year of the 2011 Syrian uprising. Specifically, we use new quantitative data on protest to show that broad patterns of challenge are consistent with this hypothesis and validate the posited causal mechanisms through case studies of three neighborhoods experiencing internally varying levels of mobilization, Midan, Rukneddin, and al-Hajar al-Aswad.

Authors

• Motasem Abuzaid, Oxford University

• Kevin Mazur, Northwestern University