How do allegiances shift from incumbent rulers to rival authorities? Political actors, from rebel groups to state authorities, take extreme measures to ensure the loyalty of their subjects. Those who are labeled as defectors or `traitors' may be ostracized, imprisoned, tortured or killed. But the expected consequences of such punishments remain disputed by an established body of scholarship on state repression, civil wars, and criminal behavior. Either the labeling of people as defectors deters undesirable behavior, leading to widespread conformity with rules set by authorities. Or it intensifies defection from political orders, as the labeled shift support to rival authorities who support their behavior. This project relies on a mixed-methods approach to investigate popular allegiance in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), drawing on archival research, a lab experiment, semi-structured interviews, and a computational model. Overall, groups in conflict construe quotidian behavior as indicative for exceptional disloyalty. Labeling individuals as defectors questions their group membership, pushing the labeled and their peers to change behavior in order to either prove their loyalty or intensify their defection. The project contributes to our understanding of conflict by viewing the stability of political order through the quotidian behaviors of `ordinary' individuals, and the relationship between international rivalries and domestic repression. And it introduces a novel perspective on the defiance of authoritarian rule in the GDR, as well as on `collaboration' with Israel in Palestine today.