Charlotte Al-Khalili spent three years embedded with Syrians displaced to the Turkish border after the 2011 uprising. She found a people continuing to resist and evidence of a ‘permanent’ revolution. The voices she presents in this ethnography have deep resonance now Assad has fallen.
In light of recent events in Syria, going back to Syrians’ understanding and conception of revolutionary change is important. Now the Assad regime has finally fallen, 13 years after the revolution started, one can wonder how these events are linked. Since Sunday 8 December, I have received many messages from my friends and interlocutors who are central figures in my ethnographic monograph of the revolution. Most expressed their immense joy at finally seeing the regime fall, the detainees freed and the brutal oppression exposed in plain light with the opening of its prisons. My interlocutors see the downfall of the regime as part of the revolutionary process and cycle I have described in my book, and as part of this cycle it is not an end in itself, as the revolutionary spirit that emerged in 2011 must continue to inform the changes that will happen now the regime has ended.
The fieldwork for this book was conducted between 2013 and 2016, to reflect on the aftermath of the 2011 uprising that appeared to have been defeated. The book’s thesis is that the Syrian revolution was in fact an unended process and my interlocutors were still hoping to see it succeed at the scale of the state in the political domain. They were conscious that a revolution is a long-term process rather than a single event and that their revolution would take time to be fully completed. The ethnographic concept of al-thawra proposes that we think of revolution as a long-term process that is cyclical and can be defeated on the scale of the nation-state in the political sphere, but still has deep effects in the social domain and in exile. Even when the Syrian revolution was widely perceived as defeated, many of my interlocutors still conceived it as permanent (al-thawra mustamera), a conception of revolution that opens up to the potential that the 2011 defeat was only temporary. The idea that the revolution was still ongoing throughout my fieldwork inside and outside Syria was illustrated by my interlocutors through examples of everyday resistance to new forms of oppression (zulm) in the territories liberated from regime control. They were not ready to submit to any new illegitimate authorities, as exemplified by Nura in the first extract from my book.
Resistance as a way of life (from Chapter 5)
‘How long did it take for the French revolution to succeed? A hundred years?’ I was often asked rhetorically, before one of my interlocutors would conclude, ‘We still have a long way ahead of us!’, referring to the four years that had passed since the beginning of the Syrian revolution. The possible success of the revolution was thus located in a distant future that will be a different repetition of the past. However, I was also often given the example of liberated areas that had rejected the zulm (oppression/injustice) of Islamist groups that had gained control over them. Nura described how people had refused to submit to these rules whereby women’s dress must be modified, men were forbidden to smoke in public, and revolutionary emblems were banned in her city. According to her and other interlocutors, such actions, as well as renewed protests inside Syria, exemplified the revolution’s legacy and the continued presence of the spirit of the revolution inside (juwwa). The areas where it happened had first been liberated by the FSA and had witnessed the involvement of communities in local bodies of administration and governance after the revolution. Nura, among other interlocutors, explained that after these localities were liberated by the FSA, women started to participate in public and political life, increased their mobility, and became breadwinners, getting new opportunities to work outside their homes in community centres and newly established institutions. They thus saw the revolution’s enduring spirit in the fact that after being taken over by Islamist groups, women organised protests against restrictions imposed by these groups. The possibility for the revolution’s future success was thus linked by my interlocutors to ‘irreversible’ (ghir rdud) changes in the social fabric and in people’s ‘mentality’ (‘aqliyyeh), that were already happening in the present. This was stressed by the fact that the revolution became increasingly called ‘al thawra al mustamera’ (the permanent revolution) stressing its long-lasting and constant effect. Despite political change at nation-state level becoming a more distant horizon, my interlocutors thus argued that permanent social transformations were taking place in the present at the local level. These in-depth transformations were believed to enable a political revolution in the long term. To my interlocutors, this widespread spirit of defiance was proof of the success of revolutionary transformation on the social level; such changes gave them hope that what Abu Zein called ‘cycle of anger’ would start again. This led my young interlocutors in particular to believe that even in the regions retaken by the Assad regime, people would eventually start a more radical revolution, even if it took a generation.
If the renewed protests happening inside Syria’s liberated areas were interpreted as a renewed struggle that replicated the 2011 uprising – they similarly opposed zulm (oppression/injustice) and illegitimate authority inside Syria – such struggle was also located outside, where it was similarly directed against traditional and usually taken-for-granted forms of authority. These acts of ‘everyday resistance’(maqawameh yawmiyyeh) index in particular Syrian women’s questioning of gender ideology and socio-religious conservatism, as pointed out by Nura for instance. Here, the term ‘resistance’ has to be understood as an ethnographic concept that signifies a struggle against all kinds of oppressive authority. Resistance literally translates as maqawameh but it was most often expressed by my interlocutors in terms of struggle against authority (sulta) and oppression (zulm). By taking seriously my interlocutors’ claims, and their understanding of continuities between their political struggles and the transformations of their social and intimate lives, I propose to make sense of their questioning of the dominant gender ideology in (pre-)revolutionary Syria. My aim is not to describe these processes in terms of ‘emancipation’ or ‘empowerment’, which would risk imposing a white Western feminist gaze that universalises a historically bounded situation. On the contrary – inspired by bell hooks’s feminist writings and building on Julie Peteet’s work on Palestinian women in the resistance – I aim to draw out processes of transformation of gender structures and meanings rather than analyse the situation in terms of liberation versus subordination.
Revolution as ethnographic object (from the Introduction)
Taking revolution as an ethnographic object – that is, examining it through Syrians’ experiences, narrations and understandings of the events – this book sheds a new light on its causes, developments and evolving definitions. This contributes to extending the concept of revolution, showing what a revolution can be when it is understood from the perspective of its very actors. Heard through Syrian voices, or its mnemonic and linguistic traces, al-thawra (the revolution) appears as an ongoing process that inscribes itself in a national and regional history of uprisings, rebellions and revolts, rather than merely a failed uprising. It is presented as having deep roots in Syria’s past, creating a radical rupture in Syrians’ present, and having long-lasting consequences in their lives. Moreover, al-thawra appears as a transformative entity that is itself subject to change: from a peaceful uprising to an armed rebellion against the regime’s and, later, the jihadists’ and islamists’ oppression (zulm), leading Syrian revolutionaries from hope to doubt and despair in their political project.
Here, looking at revolution ethnographically means putting the concept of revolution itself ‘under ethnographic scrutiny’, in other words, deconstructing revolution using my interlocutors’ conceptualisations and experiences as analytical tools. Such endeavour allows for a redefinition of what revolution is and can be by ethnographically showing how Syrian events have been experienced, conceptualised, and imagined by my interlocutors as thawra. This shows that a revolution engenders a series of transformations that transcend the paradigm of success and failure and can be found outside the (narrowly defined) political realm.
In taking revolution as an ethnographic object, this book’s central argument is that the Syrian revolution is understood as open-ended: despite having been defeated in the political domain at the scale of the state, the Syrian revolution still has a transformative power that can be identified at the level of the constitution of subjects, social relations, modes of dwelling, temporality, future horizons, and imaginative modes. Moreover, the Syrian revolution witnessed a displacement: rather than a political rupture at the scale of the state, it produced a series of transformations that dramatically reshaped Syrians’ lifeworlds. Here, al-thawra appears as a transformational entity that can reorganise an entire world even when a revolution has been defeated. My argument is therefore that a revolution defeated in the political domain can nonetheless produce ruptures and disruptions in the social realm, as well as on micro (intimate) and and macro (cosmological) scales. It thus suggests stepping away from the dichotomous definition of revolution as either a successful or a failed rupture and shifting the research focus to its marginal and often unexplored dimensions in order to grasp more fully what a revolution is. Rather than looking at the epicentre of revolutionary action – protests, occupations, and political organisations – it proposes to explore what is often seen as peripheral and apolitical: everyday life, kinship relations, religious imagination, and spatio-temporal practices.
Revolutions have been classically defined, according to a model of before-and-after, as a historical rupture that leads to a new political order and temporal cycle because of a change in political regime – the ancient regime is replaced by a new one. Such a definition therefore glosses over the transformative potential of apparently defeated and failed revolutions. Because of such definitions, failed or defeated revolutions end up in history’s dustbin. 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: 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.7 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’ theorisations, experiences, and imaginations of al-thawra (the revolution) are themselves being transformed. This book has thus 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.
By grounding my research within families, my ethnography was able to grasp the in-depth and long-term effects of the 2011 revolution on Syrians’ lifeworlds. In the course of my fieldwork, I often heard of great hardship.
The unbearable weight of waiting (from Chapter 4)
With the revolution’s defeat becoming clearer, it seems that the near future has been evacuated, yet this period is central to revolutionary action, for it is the time of ‘the reach of thought and imagination, of planning and hoping’. Moreover, the revolution’s defeat also leads to a shift in temporal horizons from the near future to a present consisting of waiting and a long-term horizon of the revolution’s successful return and its afterlife. In the aftermath of the defeated revolution, the near past and distant future appear as the main horizons of the revolutionary project and action, and are invested with hope, whereas the near future is a time of uncertainty that seems an extension of my interlocutors’ indefinite waiting in the present. After Umm Najem’s husband was arrested in Idlib by the regime forces, she did not hear of him for nine months despite her attempts to discover his whereabouts. When the security forces sent his belongings to her home – his watch, his ID card, and other things he had with him when he was arrested – they announced that he was dead [‘killed under torture’ as Nura translated it for me]. She had four small children, and she was living in her in-laws’ home. After her husband was martyred, and after the four-month mourning period, she married his brother so she could keep living with her children at her in-laws. It had then been over a year since her husband disappeared, and she had lost hope that he was still alive. A year after she married her brother-in-law, her husband was released from jail and he came home to find that his wife had married his brother and was pregnant by him … Can you imagine these people’s situation?! This is why people never give up hope and, unless they see their relatives’ bodies, never accept they are dead.
As Nura compared the incomparable – the martyrdom or detention of a relative – she used this story to contrast waiting for a detainee with her own situation. She had nothing to wait for anymore, no hope that her husband would ever come back, and no hope for a future together. On the other hand, if he had been detained there would still be a slight hope that he would come back, she explained. Yet waiting for a victim of enforced disappearance in a country known for its arbitrary arrests, and for torture on an industrial scale, is an indefinite and uncertain process.
About the author
Charlotte Al-Khalili is currently a Leverhulme Early Career fellow in anthropology at the University of Sussex
