Ethnicity and Strategic Repression of Protest during the 2011 Syrian Uprising

Why do incumbent governments carry out harsher repression against some opposition groups than others? Drawing on research on the coalitional nature of revolutions, we contend that governments target repression at segments of the challenger group they perceive as most threatening in order to fragment the challenger coalition. We illustrate this argument by analyzing protest repression during the 2011 Syrian uprising. We find that protestors in majority-Kurdish towns in Syria’s northeast region were significantly less likely to face lethal repression than those in nearby Sunni Arab towns protesting at the same rate. Qualitative evidence from interviews and the Arabic-language secondary literature demonstrate that the Syrian regime shaped its strategy of repression around diverting Kurdish protests from the regime-focused demands of the revolution, thereby separating Kurds from the primarily Sunni Arab opposition. These findings have implications for how ethnic and other identities can be used by incumbents and how incumbent regimes communicate with their populations through the selective deployment of violence.