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Al-Jazira is a transborder steppic area located between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. Divided between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, in the 1970s it became an agricultural pioneer frontier with the implementation of huge hydraulic projects: the Great Anatolian Project (GAP) in Turkey, the Euphrates Project in Syria, the Haditha Dam in Iraq. This paper focuses on the Euphrates Project in the Syrian governorate of Ar-Raqqah. It points out the ideological gap between a Ba’athist political project, fed by pan-Arab and socialist ideals, and the local tribal societies in which ideology is based on honor and the search for autonomy. This ideological gap was a development boundary in the Syrian East. The regime had to adapt to the dominant tribal logic in Al-Jazira. However, it was a dialectic process: for tribal solidarities reappeared even among Ba’athist societal structures.