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Accounts of colonial state formation as part of the global expansion of modernity inadequately conceptualise the role of violence in that process. By proposing that violence is a field in which power operates, not a form in which power is embodied, this thesis presents a new interpretation of colonial violence in Syria during the French Mandate. I show that violence is not an anachronistic throwback to "pre-modern" sovereign power, but a strategy of "modern" governmental power. Modern governmentality relies on the creation of free-willed yet acquiescent subjects, whose liberty violence is held to obliterate. Conversely, the spectacular punitive violence which accompanied the pacification of Syria in the 1920s shows how French colonial warfare interpellated the Syrian population to become just such free-willed, rational subjects. Modernity further depends on certain representational arrangements which I identify as present in colonial military practices in Syria, especially in discourses of progress and primitivism, military scientism and operational orders. I show how modernity'S characteristic spatial, temporal and epistemological homogeneity were produced and reproduced in and through organised violence. In contrast, the military practices of Syrian rebel bands embodied distinctly non-modern modes of representation. Rebel military manuals order violence in ways radically different to colonial doctrine. French forces and Syrian rebels had equally divergent visions of how best to conceptualise the space in which they fought. In case studies of the Ghuta, the Jabal Druze, the Syrian Desert and the urban centres of Damascus, Aleppo, Palmyra and al-Qamishll, I show that violence and space were intertwined in colonial state formation. By contrasting and exploring the representational arrangements inherent to the mundane mechanisms of colonial practices of violence, I seek to offer new insights into how the border between "modern" and "non-modern" power is produced in the colonised world.

This thesis is an ethnography of Palestinian political factions in Lebanon through an immersion in the daily life of homes. It explores the nature of factions and faction membership from the vantage point of those who form their very basis. It asks how did Palestinian political factions, which are clearly made of people, come to be seen as autonomous bodies that are studied as a whole and spoken of in the singular (‘Fatah did this’ and ‘Hamas declared that’). Through a detailed account of the everyday practices of Palestinian refugees I problematise the underlying conceptualization of factions in the academic literature as bounded structures defined by their respective ideologies. I explore how factions appear in the daily life of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon; how Palestinians join factions; how their relationship evolves over time; how they demand, and at times obtain, aid; how and whether they participate in events organized by factions; and how factionalism affects their understandings of what factions are. This ethnographic approach reveals that what binds Palestinian refugees to factions is not the ideology or regional or international alliances of the factions. For example, young Palestinians do not join a faction based on whether it is Islamic, Marxist, or nationalist; rather they do so based on where they have friends or family, and sometimes depending on which faction has the closest youth centre to their home. In fact, it is those personal relationships, including those developed with other faction members that keep Palestinians affiliated to factions. Factions appear as a loose network of people held together by different degrees of trust and cohesion. Yet my work does not dismiss the fact that factions also appear as structures, as coherent entities. On the contrary, in the second part of this thesis, I trace another set of practices, that of aid distribution, criticism, physical representation, and factionalism, to show how factions metamorphose from loose networks based on interpersonal relations into impersonal structures defined by ideology. An examination of the everyday practices and representations of Palestinian political factions reveals how those structures come into being, how that operation creates and maintains a certain configuration of power in Palestinian society, and how factions remain the center of political life in the face of widespread condemnation.