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Contesting Beirut's Frontiers
Author(s) -
BOU AKAR HIBA
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
city and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.308
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1548-744X
pISSN - 0893-0465
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-744x.2012.01073.x
Subject(s) - frontier , politics , spanish civil war , restructuring , political economy , political science , zoning , resistance (ecology) , power (physics) , ethnography , order (exchange) , economy , sociology , law , economics , ecology , physics , finance , quantum mechanics , anthropology , biology
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.