In her book, Al-Khalili argues that the Syrian revolution, despite being seemingly defeated for it did not directly lead to the topple down of the Assad regime, was in fact an unended process. Al-Khalili's interlocutors were indeed still hoping to see their revolution succeed at the scale of the state in the political domain.

They conceived their revolution has a long-term process rather than a single event and understood that their revolution would take time to be fully completed. The ethnographic concept of al-thawra thus proposes to 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.

This book explores Syrians' imaginations, ideas and experiences of their revolution as well as the revolution's everyday, social and religious impacts in displacement.

SPEAKERS

Charlotte Al-Khalili

Charlotte 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).

Omar al-Ghazzi

Omar has been an Associate Professor in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economic and Political Science (LES) since 2017. His work has focused in particular on media coverage of the Syrian conflict in the Middle East and in Anglo-Saxon countries. His articles on citizen journalists (2014), the figure of the child as an ‘archetypal witness’ (2019) and ‘flesh witnesses’ (2021) have been particularly noted.