Introduction: Origins of the Syrian uprising-From structure to agency

What began as the Syrian Uprising in March 2011 has evolved into one of the world’s most damaging and protracted conflicts. This volume addresses key questions regarding the domestic origins of the Uprising and its early trajectory: 1) what were the causes of the conflict, both in terms of structure (contradictions and crisis within the pre-Uprising order) and agency (choices of the actors); 2) trajectory: a) why did the Uprising not lead to democratization and instead descend into violent civil war with a sectarian dimension? This volume focuses on internal dynamics and leaves to a subsequent second volume treatment of the international dimension of the Uprising. The volume presents a “snapshot” of how the Uprising had developed in roughly the first two to three years (2011-2013). The later development of the conflict will be treated in at least one more subsequent volume. In important respects this volume carries on from an earlier edited volume which examined the first ten years of Bashar al-Asad’s presidency, treating this period in its own right, but also looking for the “seeds” of the Uprising (Hinnebusch and Zintl 2015).