Slow Revolution

A Slow Revolution immerses readers in Sicily's enduring fight against the mafia—a battle that has spanned more than 150 years—responding to a critical and urgent question: Why do some revolutions unfold so slowly, stretching across generations with a heavy toll of suffering? Drawing on extensive archival documents and over a decade of ethnographic research, Baris Cayli Messina brings new insights into the human and temporal dimensions of this ongoing revolution. He reveals how resistance is shaped through collective suffering, multi-generational trauma, and a sustainable movement that transforms Sicily's fight against the mafia into a painfully slow process. Rooted in Sicily's turbulent history, A Slow Revolution offers universal lessons on the pace of social change and transformation of social norms, provides an understanding of how collective resistance becomes sustainable, and explains why grim challenges arise in the face of an unreliable state and oppressive non-state authorities. Messina sheds new light on the catastrophic consequences of revolutionary attempts to oppose entrenched power systems and how these consequences are transformed into the weapons of slow revolutions.