Civilizing Contention

In Civilizing Contention, Rana B. Khoury asserts that to understand civilian and refugee activism in war, we must regard the international actors and organizations that enter the scene to help. When these organizations respond to crises, they work with local actors. In so doing, they facilitate activists' participation in something like a civil society even in the depths of war. Yet as aid imposes its structures and routines, it also leaves activists unprotected from the violence of war and its aftermaths.

Khoury pursues these ideas through analysis of Syria's war that emerged from the 2011 Arab Uprisings. She traces the afterlife of a social movement that did not merely take up arms or capitulate to repression. Interviews with Syrian activists and international aid workers in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon provide insight into action among actors in the war, while original social media data offers additional evidence. Civilizing Contention deepens knowledge of civilian and refugee agency by explaining how ordinary people act in extraordinary ways in a world structured by powerful forces.

Rana B. Khoury is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Civilizing Contention is a pathbreaking book. Rana Khoury explores a side of humanitarianism rarely seen or considered and captures the mingling of politics and ethics in the decision of Syrians to risk their own lives to keep others alive. Khoury has presented a detailed portrait of those who maintained a humanity in the depths of inhumanity.

Dana Moss, University of Notre Dame:

Based on painstaking fieldwork, Rana B. Khoury 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.

Kevin Mazur, King's College London:

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