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The 2011 Syrian uprising looks, from afar, like a paradigmatic example of ethnically exclusive rule giving way to civil war. The ruling regime is drawn almost exclusively from the Alawi minority and the challengers were drawn heavily from the Sunni majority. But many Sunnis remained quiescent or actively supported the regime. This article argues that variation in revolutionary participation among members of an excluded ethnic group is best explained in terms of the networks states construct across ethnic boundaries. It identifies several forms of linkage that regimes can develop with their subject populations and relates them to variations in local social structure. Drawing on an original dataset of ethnic identity and challenge events in the Syrian uprising, the article quantitatively tests the state networks hypothesis. Its findings suggest that the mechanisms commonly associated with ethnic identity and 'ethnic exclusion' frequently operate upon social boundaries below the ethnic group level.

In cross-national studies, ethnic exclusion is robustly associated with the onset of violent challenge to incumbent regimes. But significant variation remains at the subnational level—not all members of an excluded ethnic group join in challenge. This article accounts for intra-ethnic group variation in terms of the network properties of local communities, nested within ethnic groups, and the informal ties that regimes forge to some segments of the ethnically excluded population. Mobilization within an excluded ethnic group is most likely among local communities where members are densely linked to one another and lack network access to state-controlled resources. Drawing on a case study of the Syrian city of Homs in the 2011 uprising, this article demonstrates how the Syrian regime’s strategies of managing the Sunni population of Homs shaped patterns of challenge. On the one hand, the state’s toleration of spontaneous settlements on the city’s periphery helped to reproduce dense network ties. On the other hand, the regime’s informal bargains with customary leaders instrumentalized those ties to manage local populations. These bargains could not withstand the regime’s use of violence against challengers, which meant that these same local networks became crucial factors in impelling and sustaining costly antiregime mobilization.

This special section of City and Society is dedicated to de-exceptionalizing the study of Middle Eastern cities. The introduction argues that the study of Middle Eastern cities has been constrained in its analytical and methodological focus by a genealogy shaped by a triad of regional exceptions-Islam, oil, and authoritarianism-and that the three pieces curated for this special section move beyond those constraints in important ways. Focusing on geographical places and time periods that have remained peripheral to the study of Middle Eastern cities, the three articles ethnographically historicize the planned and unplanned processes through which cities in the region transform to transcend a genealogy of exceptionalism and the constraints it has created. They highlight the global and local connections that shape these processes to offer new perspectives on the study of scale, verticality and sensoriums in the shaping of urban transformation around the globe. The section developed from a conference on Middle Eastern cities convened at Princeton University in May 2013.

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