Lisa Wedeen draws on her decades-long engagement with Syria to offer an erudite and compassionate analysis of an extraordinary rush of events: the revolutionary exhilaration of the initial days of unrest and then the devastating violence that shattered hopes of any quick undoing of dictatorship. Developing a fresh, insightful, and theoretically imaginative approach to both authoritarianism and conflict, Wedeen asks, What led a sizable part of the citizenry to stick by the regime through one atrocity after another? What happens to political judgment in a context of pervasive misinformation? And what might the Syrian example suggest about how authoritarian leaders exploit digital media to create uncertainty, political impasses, and fractures among their citizens? Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Wedeen lays bare the ideological investments that sustain ambivalent attachments to established organizations of power.

Previously issued in print: 2019.