Entrepreneurial activism

Abstract

Against what they considered the immoral politics of sectarianism, leading activists in Lebanon in the 2010s combined entrepreneurialism and activism to animate systemic change and build an effective nation‐state. In doing so, they created an ethicopolitical subjectivity that I call entrepreneurial activism. Entrepreneurial activists articulated an ethical politics that celebrated patriotic citizens who work autonomously on both individual moralities and political structures. Examining activist biographical accounts that tied entrepreneurialism to imaginations of change and revolution in Lebanon, this ethnography reveals both the possibilities and limitations of the middle‐class politics of entrepreneurial activism. Translocal encounters between the middle class, the aspirational middle class, and the returning diaspora entangled globalized projects of active citizenship and social entrepreneurship with lived experiences of war and leftist legacies in Lebanon. Fostering social mobilization and new ways of doing politics, entrepreneurial activism is a compelling case in which moral and political imaginations co‐constitute each other, and in which entrepreneurialism cannot be reduced to neoliberalism.

After Dobbs: Reflections on political and legal anthropology

“…Other ethnographers find themselves working in communities where their interlocutors are explicit in their counter‐hegemonic purposes and ethical imaginations of change—for example, in the domains of kinship among former revolutionaries in Oman (Wilson, 2020, 316–7), “active citizenship” in the context of audit mechanisms adopted by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (Webb, 2019, 700), the mediatization of Catholic saints in Lima (Norget, 2021, 775), and class‐based “entrepreneurial activism” in Lebanon (İpek, 2023).…”