The Introduction outlines crucial intellectual contexts and frameworks for thinking about how Cicero's Brutus is a crucial intervention in the the civic crisis and the writing of literary history. It also surveys the scholarship to date and examines how Cicero's project reflects general trends in academic inquiry and civic government.

Chapter 3 examines the Brutus as an intervention in contemporary politics. It begins by revisiting the preface but focuses on its discussion of the contemporary civic crisis and the immediate history of the civil war (1–25). In both the preface and the digression on Julius Caesar (254–57) Cicero presents an alternative civic vision as a response to the crisis. The chapter concludes by considering the portrayal of the younger generation of orators: Curio (filius), Caelius, Publius Crassus, and Marcellus. The last figure merits special attention because Cicero’s oratorical canon includes only two living figures: Marcellus and Caesar. Marcellus is accorded a prominent role as part of Cicero’s attempt to offer a coherent vision of the republic, one based on the restoration of the senatorial elite and the reinstatement of the traditional institutions of government.

After 2011, the Syrian opposition took on the Assad government directly through military means and indirectly by establishing pockets of rule beyond the government’s reach. As rebels took control of many government-held locations, they sparked the establishment of insurgent governing institutions in hundreds of communities. Local opposition-run institutions in the form of civilian-led local councils proliferated, dotting the provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, rural Damascus, Raqqa, Hama, and Homs. They worked to deliver basic relief and restore public services, sometimes in collaboration with, but often operating separately from, their armed counterparts. The boundaries of this “political marketplace”1 grew increasingly porous as a number of foreign states and private actors directly championed clients of their choosing, bolstering their favorites with financial and military support.2

The very project of counter-state-building, as conceived in twenty-first-century international relations, required Syria’s opposition leaders to convince prospective foreign patrons of the worthiness of the revolutionary endeavor. For those institutions that became clients of the West, they worked, as Clifford Bob would have it, to market their rebellion with agility.1 To make their case, they attended, paradoxically, to an outward-facing politics at the expense of cultivating an authoritative closeness from within. Still, both donor and recipient engaged one another “as if” the introduction of limited foreign support could do the work of connecting an aspiring commanding heights to the revolutionary grassroots. As such, we interpret this performance of counter-statehood not merely as a product of Syrian opposition politics but rather as a collaboration between the opposition and its foreign patrons.

At its heart, this is a book about the social and political lives of Syrians who rose up against the Assad regime and found themselves governing their own affairs for a sustained moment in time. We will consider, in the coming pages, how they understood the new authoritarianism of the Islamic State in Raqqa, the transition from popular protest to a kind of elite consolidation in Saraqeb, the deprivation under siege in Darayya, and the semi-anarchic choreography of violent competition in eastern Aleppo. Before delving into our findings, we will spend a few pages discussing the methods we mobilized in the service of this research and the means by which we designed (and redesigned) our study along the way. While some readers may wish to skip this look behind the curtain, we want to offer transparency about the means employed, the challenges that arose, and the quandaries therein.1

We turn from Raqqa – a site where the absence of connective ties deprived the Islamic State of citizen trust – to Saraqeb, where the bonds of solidarity heavily informed the local council’s governing model and authority. In late 2012, a Free Syrian Army (FSA) campaign made Saraqeb the first liberated town in northern Syria. Before the war, this small city of 50,000 inhabitants relied on agriculture and iron and oil production industries. Its location was important due to its proximity to Idlib City and its position along the main artery running from Turkey to Hama Governate further south. 1 A local FSA affiliate, together with the locally bred Islamist militia, Ahrar al-Sham, succeeded in liberating the town from the Assad regime in November 2012.

We have worked to establish, throughout this book, that institutional closeness is both an important and understudied good for rebels striving to achieve authoritative rule. We explored various forms of closeness through connection and the means by which they mediated the management of coercion and capital in local insurgent-controlled communities. We also considered the possibilities and limits of these social solidarities to compensate for these young institutions’ material deficiencies. But, ultimately, absent the sinews of national institutions capable of binding them to one another, even the most authoritative of local opposition councils, while markers of profound political change, would remain perpetually disaggregated in structure and effect. Therefore, in this penultimate chapter, we move from the local level of insurgent politics up to the national level to examine the opposition institution of the Syrian Interim Government (SIG) that was meant (and failed) to bring the counter-state together.1

Whereas rents in conquest petrostates have been a source of relatively peaceful authoritarianism, this has not been the case in many Muslim countries that do not produce oil. Muslim non-oil producers – many of whom were also exposed to the institutional legacy of Muslim conquest – have tended to experience more frequent and violent political upheaval since the 1960s. This chapter leverages a quasi-natural experiment of oil price driven foreign aid disbursements to show that buoyant levels of foreign aid receipts strengthened dictatorship in Muslim non-oil producers, but their subsequent decline led to heightened political instability in the form of civil war. However, despite this greater political upheaval (during periods of lower aid inflows), Muslim recipients remained staunchly non-democratic

Protest in the face of authoritarian rule necessitates a kind of audacity rarely, if ever, called for in daily life. When uprising turns to revolt and revolt to civil war, new questions arise: What comes next? What combination of suffering and joy does the future hold? And to whom should one now turn to manage those matters previously entrusted to the state? Even as new political possibilities arise, the stuff of ordinary life does not disappear but instead must be managed on terms that are both newly expansive and constrained. As people confront the hopes and hardships that come with rebellion, bread must be baked, crimes punished, and garbage collected.

When we turned to the besieged Damascene suburb of Darayya, we found a very different narrative emerging around the production and evolution of rebel governance from those in Raqqa and Saraqeb. Darayya, a mere 8 kilometers from the country’s capital, sat close to the regime’s military airport, the General Intelligence Service Headquarters, and the Interior Ministry.1 The accounts from this place were not of people controlled by an occupying rebel force or an emergent limited access order, but rather a community – rebels included – that had cohered as the target of a sustained, merciless siege by the regime on account of its early and enthusiastic participation in the uprising.

When we turned to Aleppo, we discovered a cityscape that was more complicated than those of Raqqa, Saraqeb, and Darayya. Its battle lines crisscrossed the city, continually shifting during our period of study, making each neighborhood its own unique nucleus in an atomized space. Aleppo is the oldest and second largest Syrian city. Known for its mercantile past and modern industrial present, the city had approximately 3 million residents before the conflict began. The first wave of protests began in 2011, and the city council came into being in March 2013 and was staffed by over 550 personnel by 2016.1

As the Syrian uprising took a violent turn, armed fighters and civilian leaders alike carved out insurgent micropolitical economies across the country’s contested territories. Raqqa City was the first provincial capital to fall from the regime’s control into the hands of opposition forces. The city elected its first opposition council, the Raqqa city council, in early 2014, but the council proved short-lived. By mid-2014, a zealous band of foreign fighters had consolidated control over the city with the aim of establishing a caliphate that would transcend the Westphalian state system and manifest an extreme vision of Islamic rule. These aspiring governors quickly established a monopoly over coercion and availed themselves of a range of capital assets through access to natural resources, looting, and various forms of taxation in the service of their state-building effort. Our close reading of accounts from the city of Raqqa between 2014 and 2016 revealed the corresponding emergence of tight forms of social control as well as the demonstrated capacity to deliver a wide array of key services. In these ways, the so-called Islamic State proved to be a paragon of rebel governance, mobilizing key forms of material power to erect a robust new political order.

This final chapter briefly summarizes the book’s central argument and evidence. The chapter then discusses some implications of the book’s two key independent variables: rents and conquest. The former is situated in a broader discussion of economic and political development. This discussion introduces the concept of a political transfer problem. For the latter variable, the chapter discusses the muted possibility of political and economic liberalization in Muslim societies that experienced conquest.

The founding father of the laws of armed conflict, Hugo Grotius assumed a ceasefire to be a temporary state of affairs that did not alter the legal state of war. He wrote that if hostilities resumed after a ceasefire is declared, there is no need for a new declaration of war to be made since the legal state of war is ‘not dead but sleeping’. While the official legal state of war may be sleeping’, Grotius’ metaphor perhaps does not imply that nothing happens. Even during sleep, much can and does occur that we are temporarily unaware of. However, ceasefires continue to be largely considered in relation to how to better bring warring parties to the negotiating table, hostilities to a halt and/or their influence on peace processes. The argument advanced in this book is that ceasefires in fact rarely only ‘cease fire’. Consequently, the book offers a more nuanced examination of two core questions: what ceasefires actually are and what areas they affect.

This final chapter examines the early Stuart period in the years leading to the Civil War. This ending point, though necessarily arbitrary, has been chosen because of the entwinement between centralised royal power and the origins of the common law described in previous chapters means that it can be said that the common law had reached a level of maturity when it was able to survive for an extended period of time without a monarch. The Civil War further provides an appropriate conclusion to our survey given that it was the culmination of the conflicts between the king and his advisers, which date back centuries to Magna Carta and beyond. The chapter explores this final time period by exploring the work, behaviour and legacy of Sir Edward Coke, who has been likened to the Shakespeare of the law, and who is often seen as the bridge between the medieval and the modern laws.

On the Ides of March 44 BC, a momentous occasion took place in the history of Rome: Julius Caesar was assassinated in a crowded meeting of the senate.1 Almost immediately the scramble to define, legitimize, and record the act was set in motion. Marcus Junius Brutus, we are told, raised his dagger in the air and called on Cicero, presumably hoping he would be the ideal advocate for their deed; after all, Cicero had spoken out vigorously against tyranny in his published works, and this is the line they wanted to take now: that Caesar was a tyrant justly slain. For the same reason, the assassins took control over their image by rebranding themselves as ‘Liberators’ – that is, as the men who had freed Rome from Caesar’s rule. On the afternoon of the Ides, Brutus and Cassius attempted to address the people of Rome in a contio – a public meeting hastily convened in the forum. But there was little public support either then or in the meetings that followed.