Early in 2011 thousands of Syrians took to the streets to demand change and dignity from the authoritarian Syrian regime. The regime responded harshly and soon a bloody conflict took hold of large parts of the country. Millions of Syrians fled the violence andsought refuge in neighbouring countries like Lebanon and Turkey. There they struggle to sustain meaningful lives, while they wait to return to Syria or to find another viable path. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015, the thesis“Migrating authoritarianism” investigates how Syrian authoritarianism, understood as both a form of government and a corresponding set of political logics among citizens, migrates, stands reproduced but is also reshaped among Syrians who now live in refuge in Lebanon and Turkey. The thesis thus conceptualises authoritarianism as a specific kind of state-citizen relationship, and examines how this relationship is reworked as Syrians migrate to neighbouring countries. The thesis shows that while Syrians in both Lebanon and Turkey are still to a large extent living within a shared political matrix in which Syrian authoritarianism is a vector in their lives, the routes through which Syrians migrate can significantly alter the shape of authoritarianism. While Syrian authoritarianism still structures social relationships among Syrians in Lebanon, Syrians in Turkey are more free to refashion themselves as political actors in relation to Syria. This argument contributes to debates on authoritarianism and the constitution of the state the notion that authoritarianism and the state are partially (re-)constituted by the diverse political terrains through which state-citizen relationships migrate. The thesis moreover argues that Syrian authoritarianism is reproduced also as a political logic among Syrian citizens in Lebanon and Turkey that posit the authoritarian regime and its apparatus of state as legitimate and/or a model for proper statecraft. These perceptions of the regime are founded in and simultaneously foundational of specific conceptualisations of the ‘good’ life. The thesis examines how the sense that the regime was instrumental in delivering forms of life that were desirable especially because they allowed Syrians to forge themselves as responsible family members makes intelligible both persistent perceptions of the regime as legitimate and the doubts some Syrians experience about their support for the uprising.