Ora Szekely is associate professor of political science at Clark University. She is the author of The Politics of Militant Group Survival in the Middle East: Resources, Relationships, and Resistance (2017), coauthor of Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (2019), and coeditor of Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Columbia, 2020).
A wonderfully nuanced and insightful account of how struggles to dominate the fractured narrative landscape of Syria’s civil war have shaped the conduct of warring parties. As markers of how combatants define what they are fighting for and whom they are fighting against, conflicts to determine whose narratives prevail have played a crucial role in Syria’s civil war, both in understanding how violence becomes organized and in how the broader conflict is defined. A compelling case for the importance of conflict narratives, and conflicts over narratives. Szekeley’s book is an important contribution to scholarship on the Syrian civil war and on civil war more broadly. It deserves to be widely read. -- Steven Heydemann, Janet Wright Ketcham 1953 Professor in Middle East Studies, Smith College Ora Szekely’s fine book combines keen analytical insight with a wealth of empirical information on the Syrian civil war. She brilliantly exposes how a war of incompatible narratives—fight for dignity, against terrorism, for an Islamic state—had material consequences—by affecting recruitment, financing and outside intervention—for the power balance on the ground. -- Raymond Hinnebusch, director, Centre for Syrian Studies, University of St. Andrews