Praise

Rana Khoury's Civilizing Contention is an original, pathbreaking, and necessary book that teaches much about the inner life of activism during civil wars, humanitarians and humanitarian action, and the Syrian civil war.  The background is how international aid provided the opportunities for and constraints on how everyday Syrians did the extraordinary as they attempt to meet the needs of others.  The foreground is a story of how Syrian activism that erupted in 2011 found an outlet and purpose in the civil war in humanitarian action.  In doing so, she explores a side of humanitarianism rarely seen or considered, and captures the mingling of the politics and ethics in the decision of many Syrians to risk their own lives to keep others alive.  Meticulously researched and compellingly written, Khoury has presented a detailed portrait of those who maintained a humanity in the depths of inhumanity. 

- Michael Barnett, author of Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism

Civilizing Contention constitutes an important contribution to the literatures on social movements, charting their afterlives and the potential for their reemergence, and on international intervention, highlighting the agency of local actors where international money and specialists are typically thought to dominate.

- Kevin Mazur, author of Revolution in Syria: Identity, Networks, and Repression 

This book addresses a critically-important question: when and how are activists able to pursue nonviolent, humanitarian goals when faced with lethal threats and repressive violence in wartime? By taking up the case of the Syrian war in the 2010s, Khoury deftly explains how local activists become embedded in a field of contention that is “civilized” by the relations, rules, and resources of international non-governmental organizations. Based on painstaking fieldwork, she shows how the process of "civilizing contention," in turn, both enables and constrains peaceful resistance in important ways. Khoury's scholarship is essential reading for anyone interested in the dynamics of aid, activism, war, and the Arab Spring uprisings.

- Dana Moss, author of The Arab Spring Abroad: Diaspora Activism Against Authoritarians

Summary

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.