📝 Description
Robin Yassin‑Kassab and Leila Al‑Shami document the Syrian uprising and war from the vantage point of participants—activists, medics, local council organizers—whose labor is often invisible in grand strategy accounts. The authors combine reportage, archival research, and movement history to argue that the revolution contained a strong civic strand committed to decentralization, pluralism, and self‑organization. Chapters follow the emergence of local councils, media collectives, and relief networks; they also catalog the pressures that constricted these experiments: regime bombardment, jihadist encroachment, and international indifference. The prose is lucid and unsentimental, refusing both cynicism and naivety. Instead, it records concrete initiatives—schools, field hospitals, women’s groups—alongside their destruction, preserving evidence of civic intent. Analytical sections situate these efforts within theories of revolution and counter‑revolution, while an appendix‑like attention to sources makes the book useful to researchers. The authors challenge deterministic narratives that write Syrians out of their own story; they show agency not as triumphalism but as the stubborn, creative labor of community survival. For readers mapping the social history of the war, this book supplies a granular ledger of how ordinary people attempted to build a different Syria under extraordinary duress—and why their space narrowed. It remains one of the clearest windows onto the uprising’s civic imagination.