Mechanisms of mobilisation under authoritarian rule: the Druze protest movement of 2023 in Sweida

This article explains how the Druze protest movement in Sweida emerged in August 2023 and why it endured. Sweida had long been seen as a stable minority enclave in regime-held Syria, so its defiance was striking. The article asks what sequence of interactions and accumulated grievances explains the movement’s rapid shift from socioeconomic protest to explicit political demands, including calls for regime change and the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254. It draws on McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly’s mechanisms-and-processes approach and on semi-structured Arabic-language interviews conducted between January and June 2025 with respondents in Sweida and the diaspora. It traces five mechanisms: brokerage, attribution of similarity, elite defection, selective repression, and escalation and diffusion, which shifted contention from contained to transgressive forms. The article’s contribution is that these mechanisms work differently in a minority enclave. Brokerage runs through clerical rather than secular networks. Elite defection carries religious weight. Regime restraint is read through a longer history of communal autonomy. Read alongside securitisation accounts of the same case, the mechanisms approach supplies the relational foundations of the community’s shift from ‘subjects to agents’, showing how moral authority and clerical certification can substitute for organisational infrastructure that social-movement theory presumes.