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Part of the TRAFO series “Reconstructing Neighborhoods of War”By Kevin MazurPredatory capitalism and central authorities’ acts ofmisrule feature prominently in accounts of contestation, violence, andreconstruction in the contemporary Middle East. And for good reason—decay ofwelfare systems, arbitrary force exercised by security forces, and real estate projectsof regime allies were central factors pushing average citizens onto the streetacross the region in the wave of uprisings beginning in 2011. Syria is noexception; reduction of fuel and agricultural subsidies, widespread propertyexpropriation in the Damascus suburbs, and the entry of cheap Turkish productsdue to free trade agreements are among the many economic factors pushingaverage citizens toward revolt. Yet the state’s economic mismanagement and intrusionsinto the lives of average citizens are not the only factors setting the stagefor prolonged, violent conflict; this is true even in Syria, where a case ofparticularly egregious state-encouraged predatory capitalism and callous use ofviolence against civilians. Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, was the site of some ofthe earliest and most intense violence as the 2011 uprising turned into a prolongedintrastate war. But in Homs, neither neoliberal expropriation nor stateviolence were the primary factors pushing towards violent conflict. Thegovernor’s plan to expel historic residents of the city center and rebuild withGulf financing languished for years and was cancelled within weeks of the firstprotests, and violent conflict between neighborhoods in Homs broke out in earlyApril 2011, while security forces were largely trying to manage tensions,rather than stoke them.Patterns of urban development in Homs suggest an additionalfactor structuring conflict and violence: the state’s willingness to tolerate violationsof formal urban planning rules and accommodate the communities breaking thoserules. Patterns of informal settlement tolerated by the regime reproduced dense,closed networks of villages and old urban quarters, now in close proximity toone another. These networks enjoyed differential access to state resources andpower; networks sharing the regime’s ʿAlawi identity tended to have far greateraccess than the city’s generational Sunni residents and more recent Sunni migrants.Spatial Expansion of Homs, 1918-2010.This differential access to state resources and power setthe stage for conflict among social actors. Once demonstrators turned out on thestreets of Homs in March 2011 to demand political reform and express solidaritywith challengers in other parts of the country, it took little outsideprovocation for interactions between challengers and state supporters torevolve around local divisions. Regime violence directed at challengers was, byfar, the greatest factor in the city’s dramatic descent into violence in late2011, but clashes on neighborhood lines, sectarian discourse, and kidnappings hadalready appeared in Homs in the early months of the uprising—to a far greaterextent than in much of the rest of Syria over the same period. How the statestructured (or, more properly, did little to structure) patterns of urbandevelopment played an important role in this legacy.Following the 1963 military coup that brought the Ba’thParty to power, the bureaucracy and public sector industry expanded greatly;this rapid expansion in employment opportunities, combined with public servicesand cultural attractions, drew many migrants from the countryside. The populationof Homs increased by over 150 percent between 1961 and 1980, with the bulk ofthis increase resulting from rural to urban migration. City officialsrecognized the need to manage this growth, and commissioned multiple urbanplans in the 1960s aimed at limiting the city’s spatial expansion intosurrounding countryside.Consistent with its corporatist, Arab Socialist approach to industrialization,the Syrian state vested in itself responsibility for housing new urbanresidents. Laws passed in the 1970s and early 1980s made the state andstate-affiliated cooperatives the only legal developers for any lands outsidethe master plan. Yet the state was unable to build sufficient housing to keepup with the rapid migration from the countryside as early as the 1970s.The result was that migrants from the countryside began buying agricultural land on the city’s periphery and building homes in an unplanned fashion. Chain migration would accentuate this tendency, with subsequent waves of migrants settling in the same area as relatives and acquaintances from the from the same village. Local government in Homs adopted a particularly conciliatory approach to spontaneous settlements, overlooking these settlements’ violation of zoning rules and providing generally high levels of public services such as electricity and water. As a result, mostbuilding in Homs since the 1970s has been done by individuals in anunorganized, spontaneous fashion in areas on the city’s periphery, outside themaster plan and technically in violation of it. This form of buildingreproduced dense networks on the city’s periphery. A seniorgovernment housing official describes the residents of these quarters as “families without links to the city orany belonging to it in the first place, who arrived and lived there and havethe particularities of the localities and communities that they arrived from… [who]begin to have a cultural and social patrimony particular to each of theseneighborhoods.” Though these local communities were not densely linked toone another, some did have robust ties to the state, and these ties were highlystratified by religious identity. ʿAlawi communities—understood here asnetworks based upon extended family ties or shared village identity—and had farmore numerous and consequential ties to the state than Sunni communities; thecity and its economic life were historically dominated by urban Sunnis, while semi-nomadic(Sunni) tribes lived on its outskirts and sold animal products to urbanites,and ʿAlawis were historically peasants with little presence in the city. Withthe advent of mass migration in the 1960s, employment in the military, thebureaucracy, and state industry were the main avenues open to ʿAlawi migrants;they lacked the skills, networks, and cultural practices of the historicallypowerful actors in the city, but disproportionately held the family and villagelinkages that would prove central to obtaining public sector employment. This ʿAlawipreponderance in public employment did not mean that an ʿAlawi could obtain oneof these lucrative positions just by showing up to a state ministry andindicating his or her sect. Personal connections, typically through immediatefamily members, cousins, or uncles, were critical to this process; complaintsrecurred among my Alawi interviewees about their inability to obtain such a jobfor lack of those connections. Prior to 2011, these patterns of settlement and differentialaccess to state power intermittently manifest themselves in social conflict.When Hafez al-Asad died in 2000, youths from an ʿAlawi neighborhood went to theedge of the abutting Sunni neighborhood with knives and sticks, setting off aconfrontation that killed one and injured ten. Several years later, a Sunniresident of a spontaneous neighborhood killed an ʿAlawi resident of an abuttingneighborhood; tribal leaders and the governor of Homs had to intervene to preventfurther bloodshed.Demonstrations for civic reform in 2011 gave way to violent conflict for similar reasons. In the first major demonstration in Homs, on March 25, 2011, protesters could be heard primarily chanting slogans of inclusive, anti-sectarian rhetoric (e.g. “one, one, one, the Syrian people are one”) but sectarian chants (ex. “we want to speak openly, we don’t want to see ʿAlawis here”) appeared on the margins and some demonstrators screamed insults in the face of security officers (e.g. “curse your soul, Hafez al-Asad, and the donkey you spawned”). ʿAlawi civilians accompanied police and security forces to these early demonstrations and, though the latter exercised restraint, they allowed ʿAlawi civilians to throw rocks at protesters and beat them with sticks (interviews with Homs residents). Growing state repression in the following months pushed some challengers to begin bearing arms. By July, armed clashes and kidnappings along sectarian lines became widespread, dividing Homs into Sunni neighborhoods and Alawi neighborhoods. The regime undertook an extended siege of several neighborhoods in January 2012 and in March began shelling Baba ʿAmr, one of the residential neighborhoods to which it had laid siege. State violence is the main culprit in the destruction of several of the city’s neighborhoods, but it accentuated separations and conflicts preceding the 2011 uprising, rather than creating them out of whole cloth (interviews with Homs residents).The factors behind the outbreak and escalation of conflictare more than just a historical question in Homs and other cities that aresites of war—understanding what pitted social actors against one another andfacilitated their mobilization for violence can help clarify how reconstructionmight ameliorate (or accentuate) the factors that caused conflict in the firstplace. The case of Homs underscores the centrality of state-driven violence toconflict, while also drawing attention to the state’s more passive strategiesof rule; tolerating spontaneous settlement and providing informal access topower set social actors against one another in ways that facilitated the rapidtransformation of demands for political reform to violent conflict occurringprimarily across religious lines.References and Further ReadingBishara, Azmi. 2013. Sūrīyā, DarbAl-Ālām Naḥwa Al-Ḥurrīya: Muḥāwalah Fī Al-Tārīkh Al-Rāhin [Syria, a Path toFreedom from Suffering: An Attempt in Contemporary History]. Beirut:al-Markaz al-ʿArabi lil-Abhath wa-Dirasat al-Siyasat.Dayeri, Eyas al-. 2007. “مناطق السكن العشوائي في سوريا وربطها معخصائص الأسر والسكن[Neighborhoods of Spontaneous Housing in Syria and Their Linkages withSpecificities of Families and Residents].” Damascus: Public Housing Institutionfor Planning Affairs and Housing Studies.Dbiyat, Mohamedal-. 1995. Homs et Hama en Syrie Centrale: Concurrence Urbaine etDéveloppement Régional. Damas:Institut Français de Damas.Fares, Walid al-. 2015. Ḥimṣ,Al-Ḥiṣār Al-ʻaẓīm: Tawthīq Sabʻamiʼat Yawm Min Al-Ḥiṣār [Homs, the Great Siege:A Chronicle of 700 Days of Siege]. Beirut: al-Markaz al-ʻArabī lil-Abḥāthwa-Dirāsat al-Siyāsāt.Zaman al-Wasl. 2007. “حلم حمص التفاصيل الكاملة مع الصور [Homs Dream: complete details withpictures].” Zaman al-Wasl, December 25, 2007. www.zamanalwsl.net/news/article/2612.Zamanal-Wasl. 2011. “إعلان وفاة حلم حمص رسميً[Announcement of the Death of the Homs Dream].” Zaman Al-Wasl, July 24,2011. https://www.zamanalwsl.net/news/20564.html.Kevin Mazur is a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research examines the role of ethnic identity and social structure in creating and contesting political order in the Arab world. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Middle East Report. He holds a PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Kevin Mazur has been a visiting fellow at the Orient Institute Beirut in 2019.Further articles in the series “Reconstructing Neighborhoods of War” on TRAFO:Birgit Schäbler, Introduction: The Importance of Being Earnest About Neighborhoods, 28 August 2019.Citation:&#160;Kevin Mazur, Not Just Neo-Liberalism: Spontaneous Settlement and Violent Conflict in Homs, Syria, in:&#160;TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 04.09.2019 https://trafo.hypotheses.org/19572. 