The up-close view of the Syrian case suggests, as Justin Schon surmises, the enormous difficulty of sustaining a broad coalitional challenge to a regime that rules through a patchwork of alliances and instrumentalizes ethnic identity. My book dwells on pre-uprising techniques of governance because decisions taken in the moment of contention are so often heavily constrained by the networks and resources available to incumbents ruling in this manner. The question of uniting diverse segments of the population also hangs over attempts to build new governance arrangements out of the wreckage of civil wars in these polities; the hope is that understanding the historical exigencies that sustained such patchworks before revolution, as well as the processes that undid them, will contribute to building more equitable and durable arrangements for the future. However, the trajectory of the postrevolutionary states of the Arab region is not promising in this regard.

One of the book’s contributions is to highlight the heterogeneity of networks tying social actors to an ethnically dominated regime. The prevailing model in the literature on ethnic exclusion and conflict treats state–society networks as a chain linking the regime to social elites to local communities. I found that this model accurately captures state ties to some segments of the population but bears little resemblance to many others; much of the work of accessing state power in Syria and many other informal regimes is about navigating the overlap of generationally reproduced social structures, state institutions, and economic opportunities arising from economic opening (e.g., “wasta” cousins holding civil service jobs rather than customary notables; patronage jobs and no-bid tender processes in newly privatized, formerly state-run industries). Because the messiness of these existing social relations was a crucial facilitating condition for both initial patterns of challenge and regime response, I sacrificed a degree of parsimony for veracity in characterizing these networks.

How exactly incumbent regimes ruling through a patchwork of intra- and cross-ethnic alliances go about instrumentalizing ethnic identity is a complicated matter. Although they have incentives to promote an ethnic interpretation of events among members of their ethnic group (and potentially others), simply pushing conflict along ethnic lines would be self-defeating—particularly in the case of regimes dominated by members of a small ethnic group. This is why the (minority) Alawi-dominated Syrian regime took a multifaceted stance toward (majority) Sunni Arab populations during the uprising. Schon is right to point out that the regime painted demonstrators as Sunni extremists, but it also made great efforts to compartmentalize this accusation to a small part of the overall Sunni population and used a range of material and symbolic forms of outreach to many segments of the Sunni population.

The response by some segments of the Sunni Arab population to regime entreaties was positive, even as many other Sunni Arab communities engaged in challenge. This differential reception by subsegments of an ethnic group is one of the crucial revisions my book adds to theories of active incumbent ethnicization; for ethnically dominated regimes that rule through a patchwork of informal ties, shoring up those ties is one important strategy for defeating revolutionary challenge. Pushing segments of the population to understand the situation in ethnic terms is another. Incumbent regimes often deploy both strategies simultaneously, and in the Syrian case, this allowed the regime to survive but set the stage for a civil war, largely fought on ethnic lines, that has destroyed the country’s physical and social fabric.