Most authors have, however, focused on affects and emotions as they unfold in collective action. Less has been written about the 'emotional legacies' of activism, understood here as 'the emotional residue that emerges from the remembered past, including regret, pride, resentment, nostalgia, and tiredness' (Nussio, 2012). We aim to contribute to this understudied topic by focusing on two case studies -Egypt and Syriawhere the politics of affect has been generally disregarded. More precisely, we seek to provide some responses to the following questions: How do participants in extraordinary events such as revolutions recall these moments and what affects and emotions do they mobilize when remembering them? And how do they experience the aftermath of these disruptive processes emotionally? Based on a Syrian-Egyptian comparative perspective and a microlevel approach, we study the 'emotional legacies' of revolutionary activism, which entailed a multitude of ambivalent emotions. We argue that this ambivalence has persisted across the years, and that conflicting memories and narratives about the revolutionary experience are entangled with affective ruptures, continuities, and transformations of activists' present. Our paper is based on biographical material collected in Lebanon and Turkey (for the Syrian case) between 2014 and 2022, and in Egypt and Lebanon (for the Egyptian case) from 2011 to 2023.