Charlotte Al-Khalili, Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian Displacement, Time and Subjectivity (UCL Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Charlotte Al-Khalili (CAK): I started my research in anthropology around the time the Arab revolutions began. I was then researching alternative politics and decolonial thought and practices. Something radically new and different seemed to be happening in Syria with the emergence of new form of political actions, imaginations, and structures, which made me want to look at it more closely. What interested me was that it seemed that through the Syrian revolutionary experiences and events, revolution was itself being redefined or had to be redefined for it did not necessarily fit the most widespread definition—a definition that remains quite Eurocentric and is inherited from Enlightenment philosophy.
The research began with questions such as: What new political forms of action and imagination are being invented in the Syrian uprising? What does it mean to take part in a revolution, to be forcefully displaced as a result of mass political violence, and to see one’s utopic project shattered and defeated? How does the Syrian experience redefine what a revolution is and can be in Syria and more widely? Moreover, what remains of the 2011 revolution and its defeat, and where might it be located? In other words, how can it be ethnographically seized?
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
CAK: Waiting for the Revolution to End is an ethnographic study of life in the aftermath of a thwarted revolution and in the midst of war and displacement. It explores the 2011 revolution in Syria, its roots, actors, legacies, and impacts on displaced Syrians. It gives an emic description and analysis of the revolution’s evolution into an armed rebellion from 2012 onwards and a conflict that quickly became internationalized after 2013. It also depicts the main unexpected consequence of the revolution’s repression: mass displacement inside and outside the country since 2012, and thus analyses the rich nexus between revolution and displacement.
The book’s main question is: What traces does a revolution, its repression, and its defeat leave on people’s bodies, selves, and social and gendered norms, as well as lifeworlds? Such an ethnographic endeavor turns out to be an attempt to locate the silenced revolution’s traces in different domains and on various scales of Syrian lifeworlds—in other words, to draw a fragmented picture of the revolution’s afterlives through the (re)collection of linguistic, mnemonic, material, and bodily marks. It does so through the ethnographic exploration of revolutionary Syrians’ stories of involvement in the 2011 revolution and through the recounting of the transformations of their lifeworlds in displacement. This ethnography of the Syrian revolution and its defeat thus suggests the rethinking of anthropologists’ methodological tools of enquiry as well as anthropological concepts, and proposes to walk away from an ontology and epistemology inherited from the Enlightenment (Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2016; Trouillot, 1995) and open up to its subjects’ conceptions and perceptions of al-ghayb (the invisible) (Bubandt et al., 2019; Mittermaier, 2019).
The book’s main argument is that despite the revolution’s overall defeat—that is, the Assad regime was not overthrown at the scale of the state—revolution survives its defeat in the present in exile. Throughout its ethnographic exploration, the Syrian revolution appears as a process that has a powerful and lasting impact on all aspects of Syrians’ lifeworld: it is an ongoing and unfinished process that has deep roots in the local and regional histories and that is conceptualized as espousing a cyclical rather than a linear temporality. In this sense, al-thawra (the revolution) does not fit classic definitions of revolution that are inherited from the European Enlightenment philosophy and historiography. Such definitions gloss over the transformative potential of apparently defeated and failed revolutions.
The ethnographic enquiry of the Syrian revolution thus calls to an expanding of our conceptual framework and methodological tools to fully grasp what revolution, and in particular a defeated one, is and can be. Arguing that revolutionary transformations outlast revolution’s defeat, this book maps out the ruptures (intended changes) and disruptions (unexpected shifts) that the revolution engendered beyond what is usually defined as the political field. This includes within the self; in the intimate sphere of the home; in Syrians’ everyday lives, social relations, and sense of time; and in their experience of Islamic cosmology—thereby shifting the analytical focus to the revolution’s long-lasting and in-depth consequences. Revolution becomes a multi-layered and multidimensional entity: it affects Syrian lifeworlds in all domains and scales. These very transformations are themselves being interpreted in ways that evolve as Syrians’ theorizations, experiences, and imaginations of al-thawra are themselves being transformed. This book thus has two overall aims: the location of the traces of the early stage of the 2011 revolution through my interlocutors’ narratives, memories, activities, and artefacts; and the mapping of the transformations that revolutionary moment, space, and experience create in exile.
Waiting for the Revolution to End ultimately offers a reflection on the ways in which anthropology can study a defeated revolution in displacement—a revolution whose very existence is contested, for it did not reach its primary objective of toppling the existing regime. It proposes that an anthropology of defeat has to simultaneously be an anthropology of traces (Napolitano, 2015): an anthropology of defeat becomes a tracing of life in the aftermaths of mass political violence, a tracing of the erasure of revolutionary utopia since there has been a partial deletion of the Syrian 2011 revolution. The book can thus be read as an archive of the invisibilized Syrian revolution and of its non-violent defeated actors: those who opposed the militarization of the revolution and the Islamist and jihadi factions that appeared on the ground afterwards. It is also an invitation to look at the realities of revolutionary actors and subjects that often appear on the margins, for example pious and conservative middle-aged housewives. Moreover, and maybe most importantly, through the act of showing what is being erased and forgotten, it suggests to enhance and broaden the collective political imagination in learning from Syrian revolutionary political experience.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
CAK: Prior to this research project I conducted fieldwork in Siberia, where I looked at the relation between religious and political things in a post-revolutionary context focusing on repression of shamanism during the Soviet era and the dealing with murdered shamans in present time. The research focused on the political and shamanic discourses around these violent deaths and mass political violence since the 1930s—including displacement of dissidents to the small town where I conducted research. The two projects thus explore political violence in revolutionary and post-revolutionary contexts albeit in very different settings. The research focus of the book also departs from my prior research in philosophy that focused on alternative and decolonial politics and thoughts.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
CAK: I am hoping for a readership as wide as possible to read Waiting for the Revolution to End. I have written it as an ethnographic archive of the Syrian revolution that brings long ethnographic descriptions and testimonies alongside anthropological theory. Although it remains an academic book, it can be read by non-specialists and will hopefully be read by Syrian revolutionaries themselves. I hope that they will feel that the book does justice to their experiences and conceptualizations of the revolution. My wish is also for the book to inspire students and scholars of revolution and political violence. I hope it opens up a discussion about the theoretical and methodological tools available to anthropologists to research the aftermaths of mass political violence and, more generally, events and phenomena that have happened elsewhere and else-when. Most importantly, I hope that this book will render Syrian revolutionaries and their projects more visible.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
CAK: I am currently working on two research projects. The first is on the material traces of multiple forms of political violence, its religious understandings, and the everyday effects of polycrisis among impoverished communities in and around Beirut. The second is on the Assad carceral system, its gendered experience, and the legal potential of survivors’ testimonies. These initiatives depart from my work towards understanding the theoretical and methodological challenges of studying political failure and its consequences. The first project is based on twelve months of fieldwork in Beirut, while the second is being developed in collaboration with Syrian former political detainees and aims to compile a collective volume of auto-ethnographic texts.
In addition, I am in the process of designing a research program that proposes a comparative anthropology of the afterlives of revolution and war, bringing together Syria and Ukraine. It will study the past revolution, ongoing war, and forced displacement to Europe. The aim of the program is to study political defeats, religious understandings of them, future aspirations, and everyday impacts in displacement. It also brings to the fore epistemic questions about anthropology’s methods: how does one research what has passed, disappeared, been destroyed or erased? How does one study what is no longer observable or accessible?
Excerpt from the book (from pp. 1-3)
‘Look! All the paths are closed!’ Hanan tells me, pointing at the pattern made by the grounds of the coffee we have just drunk from small white cups decorated with a blue eye. She continues to lament while turning her cup in her right hand: ‘Everything is closing down, everything is dark. There is no hope! There is nothing good coming. There isn’t even a small path!’ It is early morning in the autumn of 2015; the two children are still asleep on the floor of the living room, undisturbed by our morning coffee reading. Hanan has been obsessed with coffee reading for the past couple of weeks as she is looking for signs and answers to the conundrum of her future. Will she stay in Turkey? Will she go back to her parents’ village in Syria? Or will she cross into Europe?
We turn to look at Dina’s cup. Hanan asks me what I see in it. I see a lot of people running towards a place that is white and open. Bearing in mind her recent preoccupations and the news, I suggest that the space is an open road for refugees to Europe, but Hanan does not agree. She sees a lot of people standing together, which to her represents the protest we are attending later that day. ‘The white opening is the positive outcome of today’s protest’, she says, pointing to the part of the cup that is clear of coffee grounds. This references the weekly protest in which we participate, replicas of those that used to occur in the early days of the revolution in Syria. Hanan also sees two people hugging one another behind a dark shape. She reads the same shape at the bottom of the cup after pressing her thumb on it, saying that they are friends reunited after a long time apart.
Hanan, a former civil servant in her fifties, and I are living at Dina’s, a former teacher in her forties. Hanan is a Kurdish woman who comes from a small village near the Turkish border but used to live in a city in the north of Syria. Dina, although originally from eastern Syria, used to work in a city in the centre of the country. Hanan shares Dina’s room and I sublet the second room of the apartment in Gaziantep, a city near the Turkish–Syrian border. The two boys sleeping on the floor of the living room, aged 10 and 12, are Dina’s nephews, recently arrived from their war-torn city in eastern Syria, where the situation is deteriorating. Their mother sent them to stay with her sister while they wait for visas to join their father in Europe.
For a week I have been woken by Hanan’s early Skype calls with relatives and friends, either in Europe or in Syria, and daily we drink and read – literally ‘open’ (iftah) – coffee together. Since the summer of 2015, the number of Syrians fleeing to Europe has increased greatly, and every day she reports that a relative, friend, or acquaintance is on her way to, or has arrived in, Europe; this paralleled the opening of the ‘Balkan road’. For Hanan, however, leaving the border town where we live means abandoning her country and, most importantly, giving up hope that the Assad regime will eventually fall and the revolution succeed. ‘As long as I can stay here I will, but as soon as the border opens I will be on my way home’, she once told me, referring to her in-between situation. In order to be able to stay in Turkey, however, she must find a job, since she will not be able to survive for long on the modest savings she brought out of Syria when she fled.
We follow Hanan to the kitchen where she elaborates on her reading by flipping the cup in the saucer above the sink. She observes the designs again, but she cannot identify any relevant pattern so we decide to leave it there for the day. In this morning’s cup, rather than offering direction or wide openings as it does sometimes, the coffee has just shown that the future is dark and without much hope. ‘Let’s see what we have tomorrow,’ she concludes as we go back to the living room. By the time we finish our morning ritual it is already late but the boys are still asleep and will probably not wake before the early afternoon as they usually go to bed in the early morning hours.
Smuggled through the border, which had been closed for several months, they arrived with three of Dina’s siblings and now spend most of their days indoors, watching the news, archive videos of the revolution, or television series on Arabic channels. They were not admitted to school, as they do not have a kimlik, a document all Syrians in Turkey must have but which is no longer distributed in the city in which we live. Their lives have thus become little more than enforced and indeterminate waiting, as they do not know how long it will take for their visas to be delivered. Their everyday is shared between memories of the past and Skype or WhatsApp calls with their parents in Syria and Europe respectively. When I am home, I often find them watching videos of the revolution’s first protests, one of their (and their aunt’s) favourite pastimes – along with participating in the weekly protests – or trying to find an adequate connection so they can speak with their mother and younger siblings in Syria.
(…)
When I left Gaziantep in autumn 2019, the Syrian revolution was largely overshadowed by descriptions and analyses of what was called a ‘civil war’, a ‘never-ending conflict’ and a ‘humanitarian crisis’. In this book I invite the reader to go back to a different timespace. This is an ethnography of a clearly bounded period of the Syrian revolution and its associated displacement: a moment that has now disappeared, a moment characterised by hope and a sense of community among Syrian revolutionaries and the displaced. The fieldwork for this research is inscribed in a context of ongoing war inside Syria and displacement of its people to neighbouring countries. It cut across different phases of the revolutionary process: from a peaceful revolution (2011) to a proxy war and mass displacement (2015), and from local victories of the FSA and the establishment of liberated areas (2012) to the regime’s taking over most liberated areas (2016). This moving landscape forms both the ethnographic and analytical background of the book.