Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria’s War

During war, repression, exhaustion, and violence narrow the pathways for nonviolent activism on behalf of a cause or community. Yet, astonishingly, local actors often continue to participate in civil action during war. Civilizing Contention asserts that to fully understand civilian and refugee activism in war, we should look toward the international actors and organizations that enter the scene to help. When international aid organizations enjoy autonomy to respond to crises, they work with and through local actors to achieve their objectives. In so doing, they enable and constrain civil action in war: they facilitate activists' participation in something like a civil society, yet constrain their politics and collectivity. Aid imposes structures and routines on war, but it cannot protect activists from the violence that unfolds during war and its aftermaths.

Informed by insights on institutions and organizations, this theory is developed through inductive analysis of Syria's war that emerged from the 2011 Arab Uprisings. It traces the afterlife of a social movement that did not merely take up arms or capitulate to repression, as a popular narrative suggests. Interviews and immersive observation with Syrian activists and international aid workers in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon provide fine-grained insight into action and meaning-making among actors in the war, while original social media data provides additional evidence. Civilizing Contention deepens our knowledge of civilian and refugee agency by explaining how ordinary people act in extraordinary ways in a world structured by powerful forces.