This chapter narrates the events of the first year of the Syrian uprising, drawing on an original newspaper event catalog, activist-generated databases of non-state actor fatalities, and numerous town-specific reports composed by Syrian and other Arab research organizations. In doing so, it describes the outcome to be explained in subsequent chapters: variation in forms of challenge to the Syrian regime over time and space. The picture of contention in Syria presented in this chapter suggests that there was no lockstep progression from nonviolent, urban civic protests to ethnic insurgency in the countryside during the first year of the Syrian uprising. Rather, violence erupted almost immediately following the onset of challenge at some sites, while remaining absent at others throughout the entire first year of the uprising. Claims advanced by challengers varied similarly; they remained focused on civic demands throughout the first year in some areas, while quickly jumping from local to ethnic grievances in others.

Chapter 1 establishes the Human–Environmental–Climate Security (HECS) framework and the context that links climate change and the Syrian conflict. Over the past few decades, a climate–conflict nexus has emerged drawing on narratives of collapse, and it has more recently been applied to the Syrian case. The author questions this line of reasoning given Syria’s history of climate, water, and food insecurity, arguing that government policies were at the heart of Syria’s vulnerabilities in the buildup to the uprising. To evaluate this central claim, the book introduces a new theoretical approach: the HECS framework. This introductory chapter shows that a new multidisciplinary framing is needed to examine the claim that climate change caused the conflict in Syria.