State security maps, repression and popular challenge in the Syrian uprising

• In Event: Legitimacy, Repression and Mobilization

Abstract

One of the few robust findings in the literature on state repression is also its most puzzling; repression has mixed and often counterproductive effects on challenger behavior. If it does not work, why do states continue to respond to contentious action with repression? Recent work has begun to provide answers for stable democratic contexts, where the survival of the regime is not threatened by the challenger, but the strategies behind state repression in revolutionary contexts, where the challenge calls into question the sovereignty of the state, are less well understood. This paper examines the modalities by which states respond to revolutionary challenge. It argues that repression is undertaken by authoritarian states primarily to build coalitions of supporters to end revolutionary episodes. By drawing boundaries among government supporters and opponents within the population, repression facilitates the commitment of social actors to the state when they might otherwise be inclined to support the challengers. The state attacks some sites and spares others on the basis of a ‘security map’, a detailed picture of the society gathered in the period preceding the contentious episode. Using a new city-level dataset on patterns of challenge and repression in the 2011 Syrian uprising, the paper quantitatively tests the ‘security map’ hypothesis against extant explanations drawn from the literatures on repression in insurgencies and in democratic contexts. This unique dataset, built from multiple Arabic-language newspaper sources, records the varying levels of violence in state tactics over space and time and pairs them with detailed data on the ethnic, economic and social composition of localities. Whereas prevailing interpretations of the Syrian uprising highlight ethnic identity as the central social division structuring contention, the paper finds that ethnicity alone is insufficient to explain patterns of repression. Among ethnically excluded populations, the regime structures its attacks according to localities levels of connectedness to the state and their social structure—the factors that make communities likely to commit to the state in spite of their ethnic identity.

Author

• Kevin Mazur, Nuffield College