5 - Initial Forms of Challenge

Summary

This chapter examines the causes of initial mobilization against the Syrian regime. Contention in the first weeks of the Syrian uprising followed multiple logics. Urban activists organized demonstrations in central public squares, making demands focused overwhelmingly on how power is exercised in the center and on establishing a new citizenship contract. At the same time, challenge broke out in smaller localities, independent of that occurring in other sites, and focused primarily on the grievances of local populations. The emergence of citizenship-focused challenge was the result of activists’ utilization of public spaces, with initial demonstrations encouraging the formation of new networks in the early weeks of contention. Parochial challenge, by contrast, developed on the basis of preexisting dense networks within local communities. Demands were articulated largely in a local idiom and went primarily through preexisting channels of state–society communication; when state agents violated shared understandings of the terms of these interactions by using violence against community members, challengers often responded with violence of their own.