9. The Opposition’s Three Territories

Territoriality plays an important role in understanding Syria’s heterogeneous opposition movement, as it has in understanding the Syrian conflict more generally. Much like other parties to the conflict, the Syrian opposition has engaged in military contests for control of territory in a very tangible sense. But territory is also at the center of important symbolic contests for legitimacy within the wider field of Syrian politics. This paper examines the territorial imaginaries in circulation within the Syrian opposition, focusing on three such classifications in particular: the liberated territories, laboratories, and safe zones. It argues that these help constitute distinctive—if anomalous—forms of political order (Jeffrey et al. Geoforum 66: 177–183, 2015), and that their dynamics shed light on how the opposition labors to justify its political project and navigate its relationships to external actors. Consequently, they offer insights into the broader geographical imagination of the opposition and its changing international entanglements as the conflict enters its seventh year. Exploring the Syrian opposition’s three territories thus reveals the evolving forces shaping the political geography of Syria in the twenty-first century.