From Local Revolutionary Actors to Exiled Humanitarian Workers. Contradictory Meanings of Social and Humanitarian Action in the Syrian Post-2011 Context

Based on empirical material collected in Lebanon and Turkey in 2014, this paper focuses on former Syrian revolutionary actors (secular, pious, Christian and Muslim alike) who have become aid workers operating from exile. Paying attention to what they do and say, as well as to their individual trajectories, namely during the 2011 period and the first months of popular protests, my objective is threefold. First, I seek to show how they convert their previous militant resources into means for social action, occasionally defined as charitable work. Second, I aim to shed light on how they understand and give meaning to their current activity. Third, I explore their relation to politics in the context of a war characterized by both the pluralization of the political arena and the need to negotiate space and resources with regional and international players. I argue that their strategies, discourses and practices are shaped and constrained by particularly contradictory dynamics. On the one hand: their previous contentious experiences within the Syrian uprising, their personal ambitions and needs, and the reasons for their involvement in such social and humanitarian activities. On the other: Syrian oppositional dynamics, funding opportunities, and local politics of the hosting countries (i.e. Lebanon and Turkey). Against this framework, exiled humanitarian actors resort to original repertoires of collective action in which contention, resistance, and religion go hand in hand with claims of apoliticism and neutrality, not without tensions.