Regular price £86.76 GBP
Regular price Sale price £86.76 GBP
Sale Sold out
Free UK Shipping

Freshly Printed - allow 7 days lead

Civilizing Contention
International Aid in Syria's War

Rana B. Khoury (Author)

9781501784101

Hardback, published 15 November 2025

210 pages, 1 b&w halftone, 4 maps, 7 graphs - 4 Maps - 7 Graphs - 1 Halftones, black and white
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.907 kg

In Civilizing Contention, Rana B. Khoury asserts that to understand civilian and refugee activism in war, we must regard the international actors and organizations that enter the scene to help. When these organizations respond to crises, they work with local actors. In so doing, they facilitate activists' participation in something like a civil society even in the depths of war. Yet as aid imposes its structures and routines, it also leaves activists unprotected from the violence of war and its aftermaths.

Khoury pursues these ideas through analysis of Syria's war that emerged from the 2011 Arab Uprisings. She traces the afterlife of a social movement that did not merely take up arms or capitulate to repression. Interviews with Syrian activists and international aid workers in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon provide insight into action among actors in the war, while original social media data offers additional evidence. Civilizing Contention deepens knowledge of civilian and refugee agency by explaining how ordinary people act in extraordinary ways in a world structured by powerful forces.

Introduction
1. How Aid Civilizes Contention
2. Contention, Conflict, and Crisis in Syria
3. Filtering Process
4. Formalizing Process
5. Filtering Process
6. Comparative Cases
Contention, Civilized

View full details