Civil Resistance to Military Conscription in Kurdish Areas of Northern Syria: The Untold Story

Al-Jabassini, Abdullah

doi:10.1080/15423166.2017.1371064

Cited by 2 publications

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“…On civilian interaction with rebel governance, see, e.g. Al-Jabassini (2017), who studies conscription by the PYD in northern Syria, and Revkin and Ahram (2020), who study the Islamic State.…”

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confidence: 99%

On-Side fighting in civil war: The logic of mortal alignment in Syria

Schulhofer-Wohl

2020

Rationality and Society

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On-side fighting – outright violence between armed groups aligned on the same side of a civil war’s master cleavage – represents a devastating breakdown in cooperation. Its humanitarian consequences are also grave. But it has been under-recognized empirically and therefore under-theorized by scholars to date. This article remedies the omission. Existing research can be extrapolated to produce candidate explanations, but these overlook spatial and temporal variation in on-side fighting within a war. I provide a theory that accounts for this ebb and flow. On-side fighting hinges on belligerents’ trade-offs between short-term survival and long-term political objectives. Enemy threats to survival underpin on-side cooperation; in their absence, belligerents can pursue political gains against on-side competitors. I evaluate this threat-absence theory using evidence from the ongoing Syrian Civil War’s first years. Fine-grained fatalities data capture fluctuating enemy threats to on-side groups’ survival and situate on-side fighting and its absence. Findings support threat-absence theory and contribute to research on warfighting and political competition in civil wars and to the study of coalition dynamics in other settings, including elections and legislatures.

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confidence: 99%

On-Side fighting in civil war: The logic of mortal alignment in Syria

Schulhofer-Wohl

2020

Rationality and Society

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“…In neighbouring Syria, Abdullah Al‐Jabassini (2017) documented a campaign of civilian resistance against forced conscription in areas controlled by Kurdish rebels. In mid‐2014, Kurdish rebels issued the ‘Self‐Defence Duty’ law (Al‐Jabassini, 2017, p. 105), which obliged every family to designate one member to serve in their armed wing. According to Al‐Jabassini, many young men resisted forced conscription.…”

Section: Does Civilian Resistance Work?unclassified

Between ‘flight’ and ‘fight’: does civilian resistance against rebels work?

Reichhold

2024

Disasters

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Understanding the dynamics of nonviolent action in situations of armed conflict has been labelled the ‘new frontier’ in resistance studies. This article reviews the growing body of literature on civilian resistance against rebel groups. Drawn from a systematic review of academic articles, book chapters and policy documents, examples of civilian resistance are ordered into distinct categories of unarmed action: deception, dissent and defiance. This classification provides the conceptual framework to tackle the main research question: Does civilian resistance against rebels work to protect unarmed populations from violence and harm? By scrutinising the effectiveness of civilian resistance, the article seeks to provide a necessary corrective to the dominant view expressed in the literature, which, as the author argues, is overly optimistic regarding prospects of wringing substantial concessions from armed groups via nonviolent action. The article concludes with a discussion on policy implications, focussing on normative challenges for external actors eager to support civilian resisters.

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Civil Resistance to Military Conscription in Kurdish Areas of Northern Syria: The Untold Story

Cited by 2 publications

References 3 publications

On-Side fighting in civil war: The logic of mortal alignment in Syria

On-Side fighting in civil war: The logic of mortal alignment in Syria

Between ‘flight’ and ‘fight’: does civilian resistance against rebels work?

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