“The War is Going to Ignite”: On the Anticipation of Violence in Lebanon

Abstract

In this article, I elaborate on the constant anticipation of violence that runs deep within society in Lebanon. My objective is to think of the mundane locations of violence, and how we come to live the violence in and through ordinary times; my motivation here is to inquire into the different ways people experience war and its aftermath. I also explore the ways that violence is present and implicated in the ordinary rather than the two being mutually exclusive. The anticipation of violence becomes a way to think through regular mundane encounters of everyday life in states with protracted conflict. I analyze this anticipation of violence by looking at select ethnographic encounters from my fieldwork, and specifically during a time of sporadic bombings over several months in 2007. [Anticipation of violence, protracted conflict, war, Lebanon, Middle East, everyday life] "Sami, awlak rah . yisīr fī h . arb?" (Sami, do you think there will be a war?). 1 Ahmed, 2 a married man in his thirties, with two kids at the time of this writing, would sometimes ask me this question as I walked into a café where he worked as a waiter, in the Beirut neighborhood of Hamra. I would spend several hours a day in cafés such as this one, especially during the early days of fieldwork when I had no Internet at home or during Beirut's regular power outages because my apartment building did not have a backup electric generator. This particular café was small and often quiet, which allowed me to chat with Ahmed and to develop friendly relations with him, as there were usually no more than two or three other customers.On days when Ahmed asked me the above question, he would do this rhetorically after hearing the day's news. The question came almost immediately after our greetings and after he'd handed me a menu; when he was this blunt, it was usually followed with a smile or giggle, as though he were being playful rather than fearful. Sometimes I would try to answer; other times I would dismiss the question for what it was: a signal to start a conversation and a way to bond between two people who did not know each other very well. The question opened the door to allow me to ask him about his day or to engage with him in a political analysis of the present. With Ahmed, the conversation would sometimes move from current events to discussions of his future, including whether he should find work in Dubai before a war breaks out. 3 I could do little to comfort him, as we both entertained the idea of the inevitable beginning of a war, its contours variably defined, and that it was a matter of when, not if, it would

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“…The point here is that there is a normalisation process of a shared sense of insecurity, instability and precariousness within everyday life: a notion of an "imagined community" of socially constructed understanding of belonging to larger group of individuals that are all not known to each other (e.g. Anderson, 2006;Bayat, 2012;Floris, 2011;Hermez, 2012;Knudsen & Kerr, 2012). This notion of "imagined community" in its most general sense of the term does not necessarily equate to an idea of social unity or uniformity in that structures of inequality and exploitation are taken into account.…”

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“…As they near, they have become predominantly – and unsurprisingly – the topic of conversations aound town, in places I visit, and around people I meet. But there is always a twist, and inevitably the same question keeps resurfacing: ‘Do you think there will be a war?’ Lebanese social life seems to be constantly inflected with this question (Hermez ).…”