Waiting For The Revolution To End: Syrian displacement, time & subjectivity

Waiting for the Revolution to End explores the Syrian revolution through the experiences of citizens in exile. Based on more than three years of embedded fieldwork with Syrians displaced in the border city of Gaziantep (southern Turkey), the book places the Syrian revolution and its tragic aftermath under ethnographic scrutiny. It charts the evolution from peaceful uprising (2011) to armed confrontation (2012), descent into fully fledged conflict (2013) and finally to proxy war (2015), to propose an understanding of revolution beyond success and failure.

The author and social anthropologist, Charlotte Al-Khalili, sits down with the Takhayyul Project to discuss her new book and the way in which the Syrian revolution (al-thawra), and revolutionary imaginaries more broadly, shape and transform the lived experiences and world views of those they touch. All members of the public are cordially invited.

About the speaker

Charlotte Al-Khalili is a Leverhulme Early Career fellow in anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her work focuses on revolutionary politics and subjectivities and religious temporalities and practices in Syria and Turkey. Her research explores the effects of the 2011 revolution and its aftermaths on displaced Syrians’ lifeworlds and examines Syrians’ evolving understandings, imagination and conceptualizations of revolution and displacement. She is the co-editor of the Revolution Beyond the Event (UCL, 2023).

Accessibility

Access information for the IAS Forum can be found on the IAS website.

About TAKHAYYUL

TAKHAYYUL is a collaborative research project that will ethnographically excavate the imaginative forces in the formation of populist religious aspirations in the interconnected geographies recently coined as the Balkan-to-Bengal complex - namely the Balkans, the Middle East, and South Asia.