Much of the dialectics involving revolutionary movements and counter-revolutionary responses gravitate around protagonists’ grand narratives, or master frames, making unyielding claims about the origins, evolution, cleavages and nature of their conflicts. Five years into the Syrian conflict competing master frames have proven to be as powerful as they are inadequate, incomplete or outright inaccurate. Noticeably, and despite the conflict having gone through numerous mutations from a mass uprising into an internationalised civil war, the essence of two key master frames has not significantly changed; the regime and its supporters still purport that they are fighting a necessary war against a violent jihadist conspiracy fuelled by sectarianism, and despite their differences otherwise most opposition activists of various denominations insist on what they see as a revolution against oppressive, authoritarian rule by a regime whose violent intent to persist has no bounds.

That such stories fail to capture the complex dynamics of the conflict should not come as a surprise. They are largely meant to mobilize and muster support behind, respectively, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary agendas; not to accurately document and analyze the conflicts fuelled by them. Yet the “trouble with stories” 1