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This chapter frames the role of the Alawis within the context of the identity challenges of state formation in Syria. It examines the formation of Alawi political identity, their involvement in and impact on the rise of the Ba’ath Party, intra-Ba’ath politics and the consolidation of the Hafiz al-Asad regime. It also looks at the impact on the Alawis of the Muslim Brotherhood Uprising of the 1980s and the post 2011 Uprising against Bashar al-Asad. While the chapter highlights the Ba’ath regime's reliance on Alawi assabiyya which cost it legitimacy among the Sunni majority; yet its Alawi core allowed it to survive repeated assaults from domestic and external opposition. Reliance on the Ba’ath regime enabled the Alawis to break out of poverty and get privileged access to power and economic opportunity. But conversely, grievances against the regime tended to taint the whole community and, insofar as the regime alienated the majority Sunni community, it put the security of all Alawis at risk

This chapter examines the principal themes addressed in detail and in depth by the contributors to this volume, highlighting the formative points in the Alawi community's contemporary experience in Syria, and analysing some of the challenges the Asad regime faced in its struggle to maintain power during 2011-14. Leading Syria experts present new perspectives on contemporary Alawi history, politics and sociology, analysing the Syrian state system, its political economy and governing elites, and the Alawi community's differing responses to the civil war which, to a large extent, have been overshadowed by the regime's focus on harnessing this community's fate to its own survival. Placing the contemporary Alawi experience in its historical context this volume offers readings of its journey from rural obscurity in late Ottoman times, political autonomy under the French Mandate system, migration and socio-economic development in independent Syria, the assumption of political supremacy under the leadership of former President Hafez al-Asad and his efforts to consolidate a secular Arab nationalist state, the unravelling of this state in the context of the recent Arab uprisings, and President Bashar al-Asad's approach to the early years of Syria's civil war.

This chapter draws on debates in social movement theory and activism as well as on an analysis of a select number of narrative practices circulated on Syrian digital ‘protest websites’ and created by activists and ordinary people to contest power structures and repressive rule. A feature of the complex transformations in the contemporary Arab world is the reversal in popular perceptions of political agency and participation. This is manifest, in its most dramatic forms, in collective public acts of disruptive politics, and, in its most expressive forms, in the plethora of individual and collective voices engaged in creatively telling, witnessing, and constructing alternative modes of being. These narratives invite co-identifications with real, lived sociopolitical situations and ways of knowing, as well as with alternative collective memories. While these narratives do not necessarily change the status quo, they may, and can, propel activism, and help explain why people who are not formally affiliated with political parties or organized in social movements move from cultures of political disengagement to cultures of political agency and public dissent.