Wendy Pearlman conducted interviews with 200 Syrian refugees in Jordan and Turkey. She finds that individuals' narratives about the upheavals in their country coalesce into a collective narrative whose arc emphasizes changes in the sources and functions of political fear. Her talk used Syrians' personal stories to describe four types of fear which together offer a humanistic interpretation of the trajectory of the Syrian conflict, as well as the lived experience of authoritarian rule, popular revolt, civil war, and forced migration.