Corinna Jentzsch’s generous review eloquently captures the core arguments of my book. More importantly, she shines a light down several pathways for future research that will advance the study of social relationships and civil conflicts. I fully agree with her assessment that these were not fully explored in the book and represent important next steps. I will use this response as an opportunity to reflect on what initial ideas the book offers in these areas and where scholarship might go next.

Jentzsch rightly notes that not all social ties are created equal. While the book emphasizes the quantity of social ties, it spends relatively little time assessing their quality. We might wish to think about the “strength” of social ties: presumably stronger ties would be more powerful in galvanizing high-risk collective action. But as Granovetter famously observed, the strength of social ties often comes at the expense of their breadth. For a movement considering a strategy based on mass participation, breadth might be more important than strength. Another way of thinking about the “quality” of ties might be to further differentiate among ties to different types of groups. The book starts this by differentiating between what it calls “grassroots” versus “regime” ties. But each of these types can and should be disaggregated further. In several of the case studies in the book, especially those from Syria, ties to members of security forces prove especially important. And given the centrality of mass protests in capital cities, social connections to populations that live in these cities might be especially crucial (I am indebted to Janet Lewis for this observation).

In thinking about the strategic decision-making of dissident organizations, I imagined the idea of rebel leaders sitting around a table debating their options. This was meant as a theoretical construct, and the types of strategic calculations I envisioned could happen in both implicit as well as explicit ways. I was surprised to find in my research how often these meetings actually occurred: a secret meeting between Druze leaders and Damascus-based nationalists in Syria in 1925; an actual vote by the Nepali Congress in the basement of a Calcutta cinema hall in 1949; and a summit of Nepal’s Maoists in the village of Chunbang in 2005, among others. Leaders at these meetings did not explicitly discuss social ties per se. Rather, they looked back at the outcomes of recent contentious events—outcomes that I argue were shaped by their social ties—to try to anticipate the consequences of future actions. The language used by leaders I interviewed was often along the lines of “We tried something like that, and it showed us it could (not) work.”

One of my goals for the project was to try to bridge the study of civil resistance and civil war to highlight how these two forms of conflict interact, sometimes as alternatives and sometimes as precipitants to each other. Several of the case studies feature groups that take up arms after considering and rejecting nonviolent tactics. But violence is far from the only option for groups that lack the social ties needed for a strategy of civil resistance. Some give up and accept the status quo. Most interestingly, others engage in movement-building in the hopes of being better prepared for resistance in the future. I think that when and how this kind of movement-building is possible is one of the most important avenues for future research that Jentzsch raises. I hope the case studies on South Africa and India near the end of the book offer a springboard for this inquiry. My aim with the book was not simply to identify a structural constraint on the ability of socially isolated groups to engage in nonviolent resistance, but to suggest that we need to think about an alternative set of strategies of organization and mobilization for these groups, distinct from what has been set forth as a standard “playbook” for mass nonviolent action.