Contesting Beirut's Frontiers

Abstract

On May 7, 2008, armed militias took to the streets of Beirut, Lebanon, in the worst sectarian fighting the city had seen since the end of the Lebanese civil war (1975‐1990). This paper argues that critical to the understanding of the contestations of post‐civil war Beirut are the ways in which the production of mundane geographies (such as housing, roads, and industrial zones) by religious‐political organizations have transformed Beirut's peripheral spaces into frontiers of conflict. These geographies are produced within planned and imagined geographies of local and regional wars that are “yet to come.” Based on ethnographic and archival research, this paper maps the transformation of what used to be a peripheral area into a religiously‐contested frontier zone, where spatial contestation has become less about war maneuvering and more about the production of a spatial order of political difference through land markets, building and infrastructure construction, and urban regulations and zoning. The study provides insights into how the geographies of the civil war, economic post‐war restructuring, resistance to Israel's incursions, the regional rise of Hezbollah's military power, the post‐war crisis of war militias such as the PSP, along with the skyrocketing prohibitive costs of land and housing in municipal Beirut have been articulated in new robust, shifting divide lines that configure the urban politics of Beirut's peripheries. I illustrate how the practice of urban planning in Beirut involve innovative techniques to continuously “balance” a spatiality of political difference in order to keep a war at bay while simultaneously allowing for urban growth and development profit.

Towards theorizing from the Arab non-periphery: Hyphenated identities and the boundless security field

“…One such battle unfolded between Hezbollah and the PSP over the zoning of the Beirut suburb of Sahra Choueifat, historically a swathe of Druze agricultural land and currently a predominantly Shiite neighborhood. The suburb’s zoning designation was altered eight times as Hezbollah pushed for high-density residential development while the PSP-dominated municipality defended industrial zoning as a bulwark against the encroachment of Shiite housing projects on previously Druze land (Bou Akar, 2012, 2018). Meanwhile, the Maronite Church, prompted by similar fears of Shiite encroachment into the historically Christian neighborhoods of Hayy Madi and Mar Mikhail, began purchasing vacant land and buildings in an effort to ‘keep the land “Christian”’ and help to ‘hold their ground against a larger scheme of “Islamization” and displacement’ (Bou Akar, 2018: 52).…”

“…However, few efforts have been made to synthesize this wealth of material into a generalizable understanding of the relationships between security, governance, and the state. While investigations of the role of Lebanese paramilitary organizations in spatial and urban planning are more widely available (see Bou Akar, 2012Akar, , 2018Fawaz, 2009;Fregonese, 2019;Harb, 2008;Haugbolle, 2006), these have largely been based in geography and planning studies, and thus do not engage with theories and concepts from the security literature. Nevertheless, their insights on the role of sectarian militias in shaping the built environment are instructive for security studies scholars seeking to understand the enduring bonds between security and governance.…”

Geopolitical boundaries and urban borderlands in an Ethiopian frontier city

“…If the nation-state is one among many relational groupings, it is nevertheless one whose territorialization has major impacts on many contemporary urban contexts. Conflicts over geopolitical borders and these borders' relationship to ethnic belonging, political power, and citizenship shape cities, some of which have been analyzed as "contested" or "polarized" cities -such as Beirut, Belfast, Jerusalem, or Johannesburg (one of the few widely-discussed African cases) (Bollens, 2012;Bou Akar, 2012;Murray, 2011). In "nationally-contested" cities, as Shtern (2016) summarizes a common thread of argument, urban encounters "are dictated by the sectarian logic of the macro level national conflict, thus deepening spatial segregation."…”

The postcolonial city in South Asia

“…Families were rendered destitute and homeless, and lost their breadwinners and livelihoods. The ‘mundane geographies’ (Akar, ) of the city were rapidly transformed into zones of conflict.…”

“…Much work from elsewhere has examined urban violence, for instance Weizmann () who refers explicitly to geopolitical struggles, Akar () who analyses Beirut's everyday geography of impending wars, and Abujidi () and Graham () who underscore the military's role in creating a permanent space of exception. Postcolonial Karachi also experiences violence as intrinsic in the making of a postcolonial urbanity in which the rise of aggressive political movements such as the MQM marks an expression of a vernacular modernity.…”