After 2011, the Syrian opposition took on the Assad government directly through military means and indirectly by establishing pockets of rule beyond the government’s reach. As rebels took control of many government-held locations, they sparked the establishment of insurgent governing institutions in hundreds of communities. Local opposition-run institutions in the form of civilian-led local councils proliferated, dotting the provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, rural Damascus, Raqqa, Hama, and Homs. They worked to deliver basic relief and restore public services, sometimes in collaboration with, but often operating separately from, their armed counterparts. The boundaries of this “political marketplace”1 grew increasingly porous as a number of foreign states and private actors directly championed clients of their choosing, bolstering their favorites with financial and military support.2

The very project of counter-state-building, as conceived in twenty-first-century international relations, required Syria’s opposition leaders to convince prospective foreign patrons of the worthiness of the revolutionary endeavor. For those institutions that became clients of the West, they worked, as Clifford Bob would have it, to market their rebellion with agility.1 To make their case, they attended, paradoxically, to an outward-facing politics at the expense of cultivating an authoritative closeness from within. Still, both donor and recipient engaged one another “as if” the introduction of limited foreign support could do the work of connecting an aspiring commanding heights to the revolutionary grassroots. As such, we interpret this performance of counter-statehood not merely as a product of Syrian opposition politics but rather as a collaboration between the opposition and its foreign patrons.

We turn from Raqqa – a site where the absence of connective ties deprived the Islamic State of citizen trust – to Saraqeb, where the bonds of solidarity heavily informed the local council’s governing model and authority. In late 2012, a Free Syrian Army (FSA) campaign made Saraqeb the first liberated town in northern Syria. Before the war, this small city of 50,000 inhabitants relied on agriculture and iron and oil production industries. Its location was important due to its proximity to Idlib City and its position along the main artery running from Turkey to Hama Governate further south.1 A local FSA affiliate, together with the locally bred Islamist militia, Ahrar al-Sham, succeeded in liberating the town from the Assad regime in November 2012.

We have worked to establish, throughout this book, that institutional closeness is both an important and understudied good for rebels striving to achieve authoritative rule. We explored various forms of closeness through connection and the means by which they mediated the management of coercion and capital in local insurgent-controlled communities. We also considered the possibilities and limits of these social solidarities to compensate for these young institutions’ material deficiencies. But, ultimately, absent the sinews of national institutions capable of binding them to one another, even the most authoritative of local opposition councils, while markers of profound political change, would remain perpetually disaggregated in structure and effect. Therefore, in this penultimate chapter, we move from the local level of insurgent politics up to the national level to examine the opposition institution of the Syrian Interim Government (SIG) that was meant (and failed) to bring the counter-state together.1

Protest in the face of authoritarian rule necessitates a kind of audacity rarely, if ever, called for in daily life. When uprising turns to revolt and revolt to civil war, new questions arise: What comes next? What combination of suffering and joy does the future hold? And to whom should one now turn to manage those matters previously entrusted to the state? Even as new political possibilities arise, the stuff of ordinary life does not disappear but instead must be managed on terms that are both newly expansive and constrained. As people confront the hopes and hardships that come with rebellion, bread must be baked, crimes punished, and garbage collected.

When we turned to the besieged Damascene suburb of Darayya, we found a very different narrative emerging around the production and evolution of rebel governance from those in Raqqa and Saraqeb. Darayya, a mere 8 kilometers from the country’s capital, sat close to the regime’s military airport, the General Intelligence Service Headquarters, and the Interior Ministry.1 The accounts from this place were not of people controlled by an occupying rebel force or an emergent limited access order, but rather a community – rebels included – that had cohered as the target of a sustained, merciless siege by the regime on account of its early and enthusiastic participation in the uprising.

When we turned to Aleppo, we discovered a cityscape that was more complicated than those of Raqqa, Saraqeb, and Darayya. Its battle lines crisscrossed the city, continually shifting during our period of study, making each neighborhood its own unique nucleus in an atomized space. Aleppo is the oldest and second largest Syrian city. Known for its mercantile past and modern industrial present, the city had approximately 3 million residents before the conflict began. The first wave of protests began in 2011, and the city council came into being in March 2013 and was staffed by over 550 personnel by 2016.1

As the Syrian uprising took a violent turn, armed fighters and civilian leaders alike carved out insurgent micropolitical economies across the country’s contested territories. Raqqa City was the first provincial capital to fall from the regime’s control into the hands of opposition forces. The city elected its first opposition council, the Raqqa city council, in early 2014, but the council proved short-lived. By mid-2014, a zealous band of foreign fighters had consolidated control over the city with the aim of establishing a caliphate that would transcend the Westphalian state system and manifest an extreme vision of Islamic rule. These aspiring governors quickly established a monopoly over coercion and availed themselves of a range of capital assets through access to natural resources, looting, and various forms of taxation in the service of their state-building effort. Our close reading of accounts from the city of Raqqa between 2014 and 2016 revealed the corresponding emergence of tight forms of social control as well as the demonstrated capacity to deliver a wide array of key services. In these ways, the so-called Islamic State proved to be a paragon of rebel governance, mobilizing key forms of material power to erect a robust new political order.

The institutions that constitute a rebel government have long been understood and evaluated in comparable terms to those of a state government, the only difference being orientation (i.e. against versus on behalf of the state). Similarly, the doctrine underpinning modern state-building and counterinsurgency campaigns, repurposed in Syria in the service of a “good” rebellion, has emphasized the import of rationalized governance in winning the population’s support, its “hearts and minds.” In this chapter, we consider the limits of employing rational legitimacy as a conceptual outcome and offer our own – institutional closeness – as a theoretical alternative with distinct analytical possibilities for the study of insurgent rule.

This chapter shows how the 2016 Cessation of Hostilities affected both military dynamics and local governance in Syrias southern Daraa governorate. Contrary to findings from the rebel governance field that tend to amplify the role armed actors play in the development of local governance structures, this chapter finds that there are a range of networked systems and actors involved in providing governance in southern Syria that were influenced in various ways by the 2016 ceasefire. While the armed groups in Daraa certainly played a large role in security provision, their influence was circumscribed by the region’s tribal leaders. Additionally, during the ceasefire, the Syrian regime reallocated its military resources away from the south, fighting between more moderate armed groups, extremist groups and specific targeting by the Syrian regime of local civic and rebel leaders increased; power dynamics between the four main local governance actors were recalibrated; and, this realignment shifted the ability of certain actors to provide humanitarian assistance, giving the people of Daraa a significant say in their own governance.

This chapter introduces the book's main theoretical argument: that armed groups are dependent on popular support and accordingly strive to obtain and maintain it, efforts which shape insurgents’ repertoire of contention. It outlines the concept of the 'constituency' (Malthaner 2011) which serves as a relational framework to understand the dynamic relations between insurgent groups and their supporters. It further develops the concept by more explicitly developing its spatial dimensions. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of insurgent movements use of space and how it shapes interactions with their supporters. It embeds this theoretical approach in the broader literatures concerned with insurgent groups’ relations with civilians, ranging from counterinsurgency and social movements to rebel governance. It argues that the paradigm of territorial control (Kalyvas, 2006) is too reductive and cannot account for patterns of support for insurgents in areas they do not control. It also addresses the critical role of the state in shaping insurgent behaviour and how state–insurgent interactions are reciprocally formative. It proceeds to look at issues of insurgent governance, recruitment and civilian agency.

The chapter addresses the launch of the PKK’s rural insurgency in 1984; although the circumstances did not favour armed rebellion, the PKK still managed to launch an armed uprising in rural Kurdistan and survive the challenging initial years to become deeply entrenched across the region by the end of the 1980s. On the ground, the PKK exhibited much ideological flexibility when framing its political project to potential supporters. The chapter also addresses some of the strategic errors the PKK made in this period, such as failed efforts to impose conscription on Kurdish youths and the massacres of civilians associated with the state-backed paramilitary forces, the Village Guards, outlining some the heterogenous motivations for participation in the VG and some of its unanticipated consequences. It also explains how Öcalan came to dominate the movement, through the party education system and the killing of potential rivals within the PKK. It also empirically examines how the PKK obtained local support, through forms of insurgent service provision and intertwining itself into the community by building familial ties and developing a consistent local presence.