Charlotte Al-Khalili | University of Sussex (original) (raw)

Books by Charlotte Al-Khalili

UCL press, 2023

Waiting for the Revolution to End explores the Syrian revolution through the experiences of citiz... more 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.

While the Assad regime remains in place, the Syrian revolution (al-thawra) still holds a transformational power that can be located on intimate and world-making scales. Charlotte Al-Khalili traces the unintended consequences of revolution and its unexpected consequences to reveal the reshaping of Syrian life-worlds and exiles’ evolving theorizations, experiences and imaginations of al-thawra. She describes the in-between spatio-temporal realm inhabited by Syrians displaced to Turkey as they await the revolution’s outcomes, and maps the revolution’s multidimensional and multi-scalar effects on their everyday life. By following the chronology of events inside Syria and Syrians’ geography of displacement, the book makes the relation between revolution and displacement its centerpiece, both as an ethnographic object and an analytical device.

UCL Press, 2023

Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerg... more Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Approaching revolution through its relationship to time, the book is a critical intervention into attempts to define revolutions as bounded events that act as sequential transitions from one political system to another. It pursues an ethnographically driven rethinking of the temporal horizons that are at stake in revolutionary processes, arguing that linear views of revolution are inextricably tied to notions of progress and modernity. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the ‘modern’ idea of revolution, and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts.

Peer-reviewed Articles by Charlotte Al-Khalili

History and Anthropology, 2024

This article explores time and temporality in the wake of the defeat of the Syrian 2011 revolutio... more This article explores time and temporality in the wake of the defeat of the Syrian 2011 revolution. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Syrian revolutionaries in Gaziantep, Turkey; it argues that waiting for detainees to be freed, for return to the homeland or for the revolutionary cycle's repetition and closure, deeply modifies displaced Syrians' relation to present, past and future. Syrians' waiting thus appears reversed-directed to the past and awaiting a different repetition of the past-for, in this context, the temporality of displacement is simultaneously a temporality of the aftermath of defeat.

Conflict and Society , 2023

How is conflict reshaped by and through the displacement of millions of people into neighboring c... more How is conflict reshaped by and through the displacement of millions of people into neighboring countries? Does conflict follow displaced people and how does this spatial rupture reconfigure conflict itself? Based on ethnographies of Syrians in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Syria, this introduction to a special section on displaced conflict argues that displacement, generating a spatial rupture between people and the state, layers conflict by embedding state level competitions over power in intimate relationships. Moreover, displacement inscribes the altered stakes of everyday social life into state level politics. In displacement, the Syrian conflict re-emerges as a layer of decision about, for instance, where and how to bury the deceased, just as shifting forms of solidarity between Syrians and Lebanese becomes one layer of what the conflict is all about. As such, comprehending the conflict and the transformations it instigates in people's lifeworlds requires attention to the layering induced by spatial rupture.

American Ethnologist, 2023

As demonstrated in an ethnographic description of displaced Syrians living in Gaziantep, Turkey, ... more As demonstrated in an ethnographic description of displaced Syrians living in Gaziantep, Turkey, hospitality fails when it is captured by a state that transforms ethical-religious duties into legal obligations. Indeed, Syrian “guests” cannot reciprocate state hospitality because they do not belong to the same scale; moreover, they refuse their guest status, claiming to be refugees and thus subjects of law rather than favor. This scalar confusion also puts Turkish locals in a delicate position, since hospitality's very purpose is defeated by the rescaling of duty-based hospitality and the state's injunction that locals play host to displaced Syrians. The rescaling of hospitality and the confusion of its moral, religious, and legal registers thus alienate local hosts and guests, creating hostility, as hosts and guests characterize each other as “bad.” Eventually, hospitality's dead ends lead Syrians to aspire to become refugees, to imagine new migratory horizons, and to follow novel routes to living with dignity.

Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale, 2022

Through the ethnographic exploration of the Syrian uprising, this article shows how revolutionary... more Through the ethnographic exploration of the Syrian uprising, this article shows how revolutionary actions and times are shaped by competing ideas of martyrdom. Aiming at tracing Syrian revolutionary engagement through the fragments left by martyrs and witnesses; this article argues that the urge to act now during the 2011 revolution was linked to the imminence of personal and collective endings. Th rough revolutionary actions, Syrian revolutionaries seemed to actualise in the present their desired destiny, oft en understood as martyrdom among my interlocutors. Destiny thus appears not so much as a cosmological but as a moral frame of revolutionary actions, as well as an ex post facto theory of the revolution's defeat and the course of history.

Al-Khalili, 2022

How does one study a revolution and its defeat in the aftermath of large-scale political violence... more How does one study a revolution and its defeat in the aftermath of large-scale political violence? What traces does a revolution, its repression and defeat leave on people’s bodies, self, social and gendered norms, as well as lifeworlds? Based on long-term ethnographic work with Syrian revolutionaries displaced to the city of Gaziantep, located in the Syrian-Turkish borderland, between 2013 and 2019, this article interrogates what an anthropology of a defeated revolution looks like. Drawing on the anthropology of trace and erasure in the context of mass political violence (Napolitano, 2009; Navaro, 2020; Trouillot, 1995; Scott, 2014), this article maps out the effects and consequences of the revolution, its repression and its defeat on the Syrian lifeworlds.
This article asks: How does the anthropologist study a defeated revolution, a revolution whose very existence is contested, a revolution that seems to have disappeared? In other words, how can anthropology study a defeated revolution, a revolution that has been erased? The Syrian context of revolution and war leads us along further lines of enquiry: What kind of tools does the anthropologist have to retrace unwitnessed events, the very occurrence of which is denied, and whose traces are being deleted? What remains of the 2011 revolution and its defeat, and where might it be located?
Such an ethnographic endeavour thus turns out to be an attempt at locating 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 article thus argues that an anthropology of the Syrian revolution and its defeat can only be fragmentary.
This approach presupposes a shift from the seen and the present to the unseen, the hidden, the absent, and therefore from an ocular-centrist epistemology to other modes of knowing, through an anthropology of the invisible, for instance (Bubandt et al., 2019; Mittermaier, 2019). Indeed, one has to start with what is missing, what is absent and what is unknown to make sense of the revolution’s defeat and its aftermaths. This simultaneously suggests the rethinking of anthropologists’ methodological tools of enquiry as well as anthropological concepts, and proposes to walk away from a Eurocentric ontology and epistemology inherited from the Enlightenment (Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2016; Trouillot, 1995).
By doing so, this article aims to locate the Syrian revolution, its repression and defeat in unexpected places: in scale (the intimate) and domains (religious and social) that sometimes seem apolitical, in the social fabric, in new marital alliances, in people’s bodies, in pictures of the deceased and in conceptions of the witnesses.

Focaal , 2021

Through an ethnographic account of Syrian halaqas (Sunni religious circles) from the 1980s until ... more Through an ethnographic account of Syrian halaqas (Sunni religious circles) from the 1980s until the 2011 Syrian revolution, this article argues that halaqas have a revolutionary potential. Th e analysis demonstrates that Syrian religious circles are spaces of self-transformation that have heterotopic qualities. Th e Darayya halaqa studied here is a space where present and future are collapsed: a space in which future revolutionary selves and societies are already enacted. Th is temporal collapse is thus simultaneously a scalar one, for through the emergence of a rela tional or unbounded subject, a revolutionary project is being performed. Th is project is, moreover, without a preexisting program that its members seek to implement in a distant future; it is rather a revolutionary project that is perpetually in the making through discussions and actions happening within it.

Book chapters by Charlotte Al-Khalili

Papers by Charlotte Al-Khalili

History and anthropology, May 14, 2024

This article explores time and temporality in the wake of the defeat of the Syrian 2011 revolutio... more This article explores time and temporality in the wake of the defeat of the Syrian 2011 revolution. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Syrian revolutionaries in Gaziantep, Turkey; it argues that waiting for detainees to be freed, for return to the homeland or for the revolutionary cycle's repetition and closure, deeply modifies displaced Syrians' relation to present, past and future. Syrians' waiting thus appears reversed-directed to the past and awaiting a different repetition of the past-for, in this context, the temporality of displacement is simultaneously a temporality of the aftermath of defeat.

Lexique vivant de la révolution et de la guerre en Syrie

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale

Through the ethnographic exploration of the Syrian uprising, this article shows how revolutionary... more Through the ethnographic exploration of the Syrian uprising, this article shows how revolutionary actions and times are shaped by competing ideas of martyrdom. Aiming at tracing Syrian revolutionary engagement through the fragments left by martyrs and witnesses; this article argues that the urge to act now during the 2011 revolution was linked to the imminence of personal and collective endings. Through revolutionary actions, Syrian revolutionaries seemed to actualise in the present their desired destiny, often understood as martyrdom among my interlocutors. Destiny thus appears not so much as a cosmological but as a moral frame of revolutionary actions, as well as an ex post facto theory of the revolution's defeat and the course of history. À travers l'exploration ethnographique du soulèvement syrien, cet article montre comment la révolution est façonnée et subsumée dans un discours islamique du destin. Qu'advient-il du sens de la temporalité et de l'action révoluti...

This is an ethnography of Syrian revolutionaries who were forced to flee their country and have b... more This is an ethnography of Syrian revolutionaries who were forced to flee their country and have been displaced in the city of Antep (Turkey) after the regime’s brutal crackdown on their nonviolent movement. It explores Syrians’ life in the aftermath of a thwarted revolution and in the midst of war and displacement. The aim of the thesis is twofold: to understand Syrians’ evolving conceptions, theorisations, experiences and imaginations of what they see as thawra, ‘revolution’, and to analyse the intended and unintended consequences of a defeated revolution in all aspects of Syrians’ 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’ life, 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...

Charlotte Al-Khalili, Honorary Research Fellow, University College London -Anthropology Une anthr... more Charlotte Al-Khalili, Honorary Research Fellow, University College London -Anthropology Une anthropologie de la révolution syrienne Peut-on encore parler de « révolution syrienne » dix ans après les premières manifestations qui ont marqué le pays et alors même que les termes de « conflit syrien » paraissent s’imposer pour décrire la réalité du terrain depuis au moins la moitié des années 2010 ? Cela peut sembler utopique alors que l’on compte des centaines de milliers de mortEs et de di..

Focaal, 2021

Through an ethnographic account of Syrian halaqas (Sunni religious circles) from the 1980s until ... more Through an ethnographic account of Syrian halaqas (Sunni religious circles) from the 1980s until the 2011 Syrian revolution, this article argues that halaqas have a revolutionary potential. Th e analysis demonstrates that Syrian religious circles are spaces of self-transformation that have heterotopic qualities. Th e Darayya halaqa studied here is a space where present and future are collapsed: a space in which future revolutionary selves and societies are already enacted. Th is temporal collapse is thus simultaneously a scalar one, for through the emergence of a rela tional or unbounded subject, a revolutionary project is being performed. Th is project is, moreover, without a preexisting program that its members seek to implement in a distant future; it is rather a revolutionary project that is perpetually in the making through discussions and actions happening within it.

Vacarme, 2017

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Association Vacarme. © Association Vacarme. Tous droits... more Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Association Vacarme. © Association Vacarme. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

UCL press, 2023

Waiting for the Revolution to End explores the Syrian revolution through the experiences of citiz... more 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.

While the Assad regime remains in place, the Syrian revolution (al-thawra) still holds a transformational power that can be located on intimate and world-making scales. Charlotte Al-Khalili traces the unintended consequences of revolution and its unexpected consequences to reveal the reshaping of Syrian life-worlds and exiles’ evolving theorizations, experiences and imaginations of al-thawra. She describes the in-between spatio-temporal realm inhabited by Syrians displaced to Turkey as they await the revolution’s outcomes, and maps the revolution’s multidimensional and multi-scalar effects on their everyday life. By following the chronology of events inside Syria and Syrians’ geography of displacement, the book makes the relation between revolution and displacement its centerpiece, both as an ethnographic object and an analytical device.

UCL Press, 2023

Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerg... more Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Approaching revolution through its relationship to time, the book is a critical intervention into attempts to define revolutions as bounded events that act as sequential transitions from one political system to another. It pursues an ethnographically driven rethinking of the temporal horizons that are at stake in revolutionary processes, arguing that linear views of revolution are inextricably tied to notions of progress and modernity. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the ‘modern’ idea of revolution, and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts.

History and Anthropology, 2024

This article explores time and temporality in the wake of the defeat of the Syrian 2011 revolutio... more This article explores time and temporality in the wake of the defeat of the Syrian 2011 revolution. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Syrian revolutionaries in Gaziantep, Turkey; it argues that waiting for detainees to be freed, for return to the homeland or for the revolutionary cycle's repetition and closure, deeply modifies displaced Syrians' relation to present, past and future. Syrians' waiting thus appears reversed-directed to the past and awaiting a different repetition of the past-for, in this context, the temporality of displacement is simultaneously a temporality of the aftermath of defeat.

Conflict and Society , 2023

How is conflict reshaped by and through the displacement of millions of people into neighboring c... more How is conflict reshaped by and through the displacement of millions of people into neighboring countries? Does conflict follow displaced people and how does this spatial rupture reconfigure conflict itself? Based on ethnographies of Syrians in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Syria, this introduction to a special section on displaced conflict argues that displacement, generating a spatial rupture between people and the state, layers conflict by embedding state level competitions over power in intimate relationships. Moreover, displacement inscribes the altered stakes of everyday social life into state level politics. In displacement, the Syrian conflict re-emerges as a layer of decision about, for instance, where and how to bury the deceased, just as shifting forms of solidarity between Syrians and Lebanese becomes one layer of what the conflict is all about. As such, comprehending the conflict and the transformations it instigates in people's lifeworlds requires attention to the layering induced by spatial rupture.

American Ethnologist, 2023

As demonstrated in an ethnographic description of displaced Syrians living in Gaziantep, Turkey, ... more As demonstrated in an ethnographic description of displaced Syrians living in Gaziantep, Turkey, hospitality fails when it is captured by a state that transforms ethical-religious duties into legal obligations. Indeed, Syrian “guests” cannot reciprocate state hospitality because they do not belong to the same scale; moreover, they refuse their guest status, claiming to be refugees and thus subjects of law rather than favor. This scalar confusion also puts Turkish locals in a delicate position, since hospitality's very purpose is defeated by the rescaling of duty-based hospitality and the state's injunction that locals play host to displaced Syrians. The rescaling of hospitality and the confusion of its moral, religious, and legal registers thus alienate local hosts and guests, creating hostility, as hosts and guests characterize each other as “bad.” Eventually, hospitality's dead ends lead Syrians to aspire to become refugees, to imagine new migratory horizons, and to follow novel routes to living with dignity.

Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale, 2022

Through the ethnographic exploration of the Syrian uprising, this article shows how revolutionary... more Through the ethnographic exploration of the Syrian uprising, this article shows how revolutionary actions and times are shaped by competing ideas of martyrdom. Aiming at tracing Syrian revolutionary engagement through the fragments left by martyrs and witnesses; this article argues that the urge to act now during the 2011 revolution was linked to the imminence of personal and collective endings. Th rough revolutionary actions, Syrian revolutionaries seemed to actualise in the present their desired destiny, oft en understood as martyrdom among my interlocutors. Destiny thus appears not so much as a cosmological but as a moral frame of revolutionary actions, as well as an ex post facto theory of the revolution's defeat and the course of history.

Al-Khalili, 2022

How does one study a revolution and its defeat in the aftermath of large-scale political violence... more How does one study a revolution and its defeat in the aftermath of large-scale political violence? What traces does a revolution, its repression and defeat leave on people’s bodies, self, social and gendered norms, as well as lifeworlds? Based on long-term ethnographic work with Syrian revolutionaries displaced to the city of Gaziantep, located in the Syrian-Turkish borderland, between 2013 and 2019, this article interrogates what an anthropology of a defeated revolution looks like. Drawing on the anthropology of trace and erasure in the context of mass political violence (Napolitano, 2009; Navaro, 2020; Trouillot, 1995; Scott, 2014), this article maps out the effects and consequences of the revolution, its repression and its defeat on the Syrian lifeworlds.
This article asks: How does the anthropologist study a defeated revolution, a revolution whose very existence is contested, a revolution that seems to have disappeared? In other words, how can anthropology study a defeated revolution, a revolution that has been erased? The Syrian context of revolution and war leads us along further lines of enquiry: What kind of tools does the anthropologist have to retrace unwitnessed events, the very occurrence of which is denied, and whose traces are being deleted? What remains of the 2011 revolution and its defeat, and where might it be located?
Such an ethnographic endeavour thus turns out to be an attempt at locating 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 article thus argues that an anthropology of the Syrian revolution and its defeat can only be fragmentary.
This approach presupposes a shift from the seen and the present to the unseen, the hidden, the absent, and therefore from an ocular-centrist epistemology to other modes of knowing, through an anthropology of the invisible, for instance (Bubandt et al., 2019; Mittermaier, 2019). Indeed, one has to start with what is missing, what is absent and what is unknown to make sense of the revolution’s defeat and its aftermaths. This simultaneously suggests the rethinking of anthropologists’ methodological tools of enquiry as well as anthropological concepts, and proposes to walk away from a Eurocentric ontology and epistemology inherited from the Enlightenment (Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2016; Trouillot, 1995).
By doing so, this article aims to locate the Syrian revolution, its repression and defeat in unexpected places: in scale (the intimate) and domains (religious and social) that sometimes seem apolitical, in the social fabric, in new marital alliances, in people’s bodies, in pictures of the deceased and in conceptions of the witnesses.

Focaal , 2021

Through an ethnographic account of Syrian halaqas (Sunni religious circles) from the 1980s until ... more Through an ethnographic account of Syrian halaqas (Sunni religious circles) from the 1980s until the 2011 Syrian revolution, this article argues that halaqas have a revolutionary potential. Th e analysis demonstrates that Syrian religious circles are spaces of self-transformation that have heterotopic qualities. Th e Darayya halaqa studied here is a space where present and future are collapsed: a space in which future revolutionary selves and societies are already enacted. Th is temporal collapse is thus simultaneously a scalar one, for through the emergence of a rela tional or unbounded subject, a revolutionary project is being performed. Th is project is, moreover, without a preexisting program that its members seek to implement in a distant future; it is rather a revolutionary project that is perpetually in the making through discussions and actions happening within it.

History and anthropology, May 14, 2024

This article explores time and temporality in the wake of the defeat of the Syrian 2011 revolutio... more This article explores time and temporality in the wake of the defeat of the Syrian 2011 revolution. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Syrian revolutionaries in Gaziantep, Turkey; it argues that waiting for detainees to be freed, for return to the homeland or for the revolutionary cycle's repetition and closure, deeply modifies displaced Syrians' relation to present, past and future. Syrians' waiting thus appears reversed-directed to the past and awaiting a different repetition of the past-for, in this context, the temporality of displacement is simultaneously a temporality of the aftermath of defeat.

Lexique vivant de la révolution et de la guerre en Syrie

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale

Through the ethnographic exploration of the Syrian uprising, this article shows how revolutionary... more Through the ethnographic exploration of the Syrian uprising, this article shows how revolutionary actions and times are shaped by competing ideas of martyrdom. Aiming at tracing Syrian revolutionary engagement through the fragments left by martyrs and witnesses; this article argues that the urge to act now during the 2011 revolution was linked to the imminence of personal and collective endings. Through revolutionary actions, Syrian revolutionaries seemed to actualise in the present their desired destiny, often understood as martyrdom among my interlocutors. Destiny thus appears not so much as a cosmological but as a moral frame of revolutionary actions, as well as an ex post facto theory of the revolution's defeat and the course of history. À travers l'exploration ethnographique du soulèvement syrien, cet article montre comment la révolution est façonnée et subsumée dans un discours islamique du destin. Qu'advient-il du sens de la temporalité et de l'action révoluti...

This is an ethnography of Syrian revolutionaries who were forced to flee their country and have b... more This is an ethnography of Syrian revolutionaries who were forced to flee their country and have been displaced in the city of Antep (Turkey) after the regime’s brutal crackdown on their nonviolent movement. It explores Syrians’ life in the aftermath of a thwarted revolution and in the midst of war and displacement. The aim of the thesis is twofold: to understand Syrians’ evolving conceptions, theorisations, experiences and imaginations of what they see as thawra, ‘revolution’, and to analyse the intended and unintended consequences of a defeated revolution in all aspects of Syrians’ 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’ life, 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...

Charlotte Al-Khalili, Honorary Research Fellow, University College London -Anthropology Une anthr... more Charlotte Al-Khalili, Honorary Research Fellow, University College London -Anthropology Une anthropologie de la révolution syrienne Peut-on encore parler de « révolution syrienne » dix ans après les premières manifestations qui ont marqué le pays et alors même que les termes de « conflit syrien » paraissent s’imposer pour décrire la réalité du terrain depuis au moins la moitié des années 2010 ? Cela peut sembler utopique alors que l’on compte des centaines de milliers de mortEs et de di..

Focaal, 2021

Through an ethnographic account of Syrian halaqas (Sunni religious circles) from the 1980s until ... more Through an ethnographic account of Syrian halaqas (Sunni religious circles) from the 1980s until the 2011 Syrian revolution, this article argues that halaqas have a revolutionary potential. Th e analysis demonstrates that Syrian religious circles are spaces of self-transformation that have heterotopic qualities. Th e Darayya halaqa studied here is a space where present and future are collapsed: a space in which future revolutionary selves and societies are already enacted. Th is temporal collapse is thus simultaneously a scalar one, for through the emergence of a rela tional or unbounded subject, a revolutionary project is being performed. Th is project is, moreover, without a preexisting program that its members seek to implement in a distant future; it is rather a revolutionary project that is perpetually in the making through discussions and actions happening within it.

Vacarme, 2017

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Association Vacarme. © Association Vacarme. Tous droits... more Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Association Vacarme. © Association Vacarme. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.