Replication Data for: Ethnicity and Strategic Repression of Protest during the 2011 Syrian Uprising

Why do incumbent governments carry out harsher repression against some opposition groups than others? Drawing on research on the coalitional nature of revolutions, we con- tend that governments target repression at segments of the challenger group they perceive as most threatening to fragment the challenger coalition. We illustrate this argument by analyzing protest repression during the 2011 Syrian uprising. We find that protests in majority-Kurdish towns in Syria’s Northeast were significantly less likely to face lethal repression than nearby Sunni Arab towns protesting at the same rate. Qualitative evidence from interviews and the Arabic-language secondary literature demonstrate that the Syrian regime shaped its strategy of repression around diverting Kurdish protests from the regime- focused demands of the revolution, separating Kurds from the primarily Sunni Arab opposition. These findings have implications for how ethnic and other identities can be utilized by incumbents and how incumbent regimes communicate with their populations through the selective deployment of violence.