Revolutions’ afterlives and aftermaths of political violence

© Ali Haj Suleiman

My doctoral thesis titled ‘Of Revolutionary Transformations: Life in Displacement at the Syrian-Turkish Border’ is an ethnography of Syrian revolutionaries who were forced to flee their country to the city of Gaziantep (Turkey) after the Syrian regime’s brutal crackdown on their nonviolent movement. It explores Syrians’ lives in the aftermath of a thwarted revolution and in the midst of war and displacement. The aim of the thesis is twofold: to understand the evolving conceptions, theorisations, experiences, and imagination of what the subjects see as thawra, ‘revolution’, and to analyse the intended and unintended consequences of a defeated revolution for their lifeworlds. The thesis argues that, despite not attaining its initial aims – the overthrow of the Assad regime – the Syrian revolution is a transformational entity that has inflected Syrians’ lives, and has radically reshaped their world. By defining revolution as a multi-dimensional and multi-scalar transformational force, the thesis contributes to the literature on revolution, which has mainly understood it in terms of radical political rupture. Moreover, it inscribes itself in the emergent literature on the Arab Spring, pursuing enquiry into the open-endedness of revolution and shifting focus to the long-lasting transformations that revolutionary processes engender.

Two interconnected levels are developed in order to support this main argument. The thesis traces the ways in which the revolution affected both cosmological and intimate scales, wherein spatio-temporal coordinates and horizons were reshaped and new senses of self emerged. It also maps how the revolution shifted from the political to the social domain as the configurations of relations, everyday life, gender norms, and alliances were transformed. Throughout the thesis, revolution thus appears as an evolving process that affected all dimensions of Syrians’ lives through a series of ruptures and disruptions. I am currently rewriting my doctoral thesis into a full-length monograph titled ‘Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian Displacement, Time and Subjectivity’.

Moreover, my current project ‘Anthropology of defeat: Researching the traces of the Syrian revolution’ focuses on the aftermaths of the Syrian revolution’s defeat proposing to study it through its presence/absence in exile. It thus aims at mapping out the (im)material remnants, ruins and fragments of the revolution looking at the mnemonic, linguistic and material traces it left behind.

 

 

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