Since the 2011 Syrian uprisings and the outbreak of the civil war, more than a million Syrians have fled their homes to the neighboring country, Lebanon. They arrived on foot and in family cars amidst bombings and through overwhelmingly securitized checkpoints. Mostly from cities active during the uprisings, such as Dera’a, Homs, Aleppo, Raqqa, and Hama, they all have stories of demonstrations, armed participation, surviving sieges, and experience with the death of loved ones. These are stories of a cause told in an uneasy amalgamation of pride, regret, hope, frustration, and doubt. Stories of everyday lives spent as refugees in a country where the majority have now lived in makeshift camps for years. “Collecting rain water that comes from the holes in your tent every winter makes you forget about isqat en-nizam (bringing down the state),” Rateb (pseudonym) told me once, when I asked him about where the revolution is headed. Like many of the young Syrians I’ve met, Rateb both refers to himself in the present tense as a revolutionary and decisively asserts that the Syrian revolution is over. In this paper, I explore Rateb’s life history, to ask: Where does revolution stand when the revolutionaries are displaced? And what aspects of political participation are lost during war and displacement and what forms of individual or collective forms of engagement replace what is lost? I look at multiple stages of what Rateb describes as his political formation: from being born to a Bedouin family, to serving in the Syrian military intelligence service, to joining the Free Syrian Army, to becoming an illegal refugee-activist in Lebanon. Rateb’s story weaves together the diverse and, at times, contradictory understandings held by my Syrian interlocutors about what political activism had meant to them before and during the uprisings and what it represents in their future. It sheds light on how Syrians are struggling to replace their active political engagement on the streets with social activism, a process marked by the experience of refugeehood in Lebanon. Through this story, I investigate the new understandings of homeland, belonging, and future, which make alternative forms of community-building and transnational political activism possible in the lives of displaced Syrians. As part of my dissertation project, this paper is based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork (July 2018-October 2019) in north and east of Lebanon. I conducted participant observation, life histories, and semi-structured interviews with Syrians in Lebanon.