In Waiting for the Revolution to End, Charlotte Al-Khalili discusses the aftermath of what she calls the defeated Syrian revolution, which began in 2011. Pertaining to research carried out between 2014 and 2019, this designation of the revolution as “defeated” refers to the perception among Al-Khalili’s revolutionary interlocutors that they had lost the political battle for Syria for the time being. The book, however, suggests that the revolution continued to impact the lifeworlds of those engaged in it even after they were displaced, just as it lived on in new forms after it was defeated. To sustain this argument, Al-Khalili traces how several self-proclaimed revolutionaries displaced to Gaziantep, Turkey, made sense of the revolution from its inception over its development into first war and then defeat.

Through its engagement with Syrians predominantly from the poorer and lower-middle-class neighborhoods of Aleppo, the book provides a compelling ethnographic account of how...

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