External Support and High-Risk Mobilization: Evidence from Syria

• In Event: Civil Resistance, Causes and Trajectories

Abstract

Why does opposition mobilization sometimes persist despite extreme repression, and why do some resistance movements remain nonviolent, while others embrace armed rebellion? Whereas existing scholarship attributes variation in high risk-mobilization to a number of domestic factors, this paper directs attention to the international environment in which contentious politics occurs. I theorize a troubling relationship: because the expectation of foreign support encourages persistent nonviolent mobilization even against violent autocracies, movements emboldened by the promise of external support are also more likely to experience excessive exposure to repression, and are consequently at greater risk of violent radicalization. To substantiate this argument, I conduct a process-tracing analysis of the 2011 Syrian Revolution that illuminates how the expectation of international intervention helped to shape the Syrian opposition’s trajectory from absolute quiescence to sustained nonviolent mobilization and ultimately to armed rebellion. My findings are based on 130 in-depth interviews with Syrian activists, an online activist survey, and a wealth of other primary and secondary sources on the Syrian conflict.

Author

• Matthew Cebul, US Institute of Peace