Hadina and the State: How States Deal with Populations They Can Neither Co-Opt Nor Eradicate

Areas where the state has weakly penetrated local communities remain underexplored in the study of urban governance. Violence and the production of the socio-political order in such contexts often appears as inscrutable or the caprice of leaders. Through the concept of hadina—an Arabic term denoting “nurturing environments” that sustain opposition—we attempt to render these interactions analytically legible as instances of the co-construction of state and non-state orders. We reconceptualize hadina as a set of relational and material infrastructures: dense networks of trust, attachment to place, and generational reproduction that bind communities together. These urban infrastructures enable forms of ‘commoning’, the solidarity and collective action emerging where state capacity is absent, selective, or predatory. By foregrounding these mechanisms, we unpack interactions of discrete social actors with discrete parts of the state and examine when contention escalates into arbitrary, destructive state violence and when negotiated accommodation becomes the state’s modus operandi. To explicate the concept, we examine episodes of upheaval in the Syrian city of Hama from the 1950s until the present. Though opposition to central political authorities in these episodes variously advanced Arab nationalist, Islamist, and democratic ideologies, we argue that network structures and place-bound solidarities—the hallmarks of hadina—play a key role in both sustaining non-state order and shaping the relational processes through which “the state” itself is enacted and contested in the city.