ABSTRACT
The Syrian Uprising is a complex, ongoing global humanitarian crisis, which has been hijacked by both regional and international players, and is often interpreted as a sectarian power struggle. This chapter aims to answer the questions set by this book on how and why the Syrian Uprising, which started out as a peaceful demand for reforms, turned violent and sectarian (and was then labeled as such), and also seeks to determine the extent to which sect identities were silent or silenced before and during the Uprising. In addition, this chapter builds on the inherited power structures from the colonial era and the subsequently updated but flawed state system as depicted in Chapter 4, and then illustrates the eruption of the 2011 Uprising and navigates through the pertinent factors of regional and international interventions and the sectarianization of the conflict, thereby going beyond the Uprising's domestic causes and trajectories. An analysis of the Uprising's timeline is vital with respect to demonstrating the securitization of the struggle and the mechanisms used by the regime in order to survive and remain in power, in spite of pressure from domestic, regional and international actors. The analysis covers the regime's established system and its discourses during the Uprising. The sectarianization of the struggle arose courtesy of actors, whether it be the regime and its loyalists or even militant opposition groups, and has been supported and sustained by motivations based on material and ideational interests affecting audience receptivity. This argument is based on an analysis of the deployment of sectarian rhetoric in the discourses of both the regime and opposition groups in the course of the Uprising. The regime used sectarianism in its rhetoric to secure its power within its established governance system, yet it also claimed somewhat hypocritically that sectarianism was a foreign tool being used in order to divide the country, and condemning its rivals as sect-identity-centered terrorists or foreign agents seeking to divide the country.
