Good Rebel Governance

Dipali Mukhopadhyay is Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota. She authored Warlords, Strongman Governors, and the State in Afghanistan (2014), short-listed for the biennial Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award. She is a Senior Expert on Afghanistan at the US Institute of Peace. Kimberly Howe is Assistant Research Professor at the Friedman School and Research Director of Conflict and Governance at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University. She has conducted conflict-focused research in over a dozen countries and regularly provides consultation to governments, international organizations and NGOs on their humanitarian, development and stabilization polices and initiatives.

• 1. Introduction; 2. The good governance bazaar; 3. Reconceptualizing rebel governance; 4. Studying Syria 'From the Verandah'; 5. Raqqa's caliphal social contract; 6. Saraqeb's limited access order; 7. Darayya's fervent enclave; 8. Aleppo city's republican guild; 9. The Syrian interim government as 'Floating' counter-state; 10. Revolutionary possibilities and international imaginings.

'Insightful in its perspectives and provocative in its diagnostic, this book is superb. Through a theoretically sophisticated study of grassroots organizing and concrete local politics in multiple cities, Dipali Mukhopadhyay and Kimberly Howe provide a remarkable analysis of the Syrian uprising and dislodge many taken for granted accounts of it. They remind us why it's indispensable to revisit one of the most tragic episodes of the Middle East in the twenty-first century.' Yassir Munif, Emerson College