Maintaining, Repairing, and Living with Ruins of Violence: Infrastructural Politics in Lebanon

Abstract

This study analyzes everyday practices of infrastructural maintenance and repair to understand their sociopolitical impacts. More specifically, this dissertation responds to the following research questions: 1) how is everyday violence and inequality perpetuated and contested through technologies and practices of infrastructural maintenance and repair, and 2) how does the accumulation of infrastructural violence over time impact the formation of subjectivities, environments, bodies, and economies? Rather than analyzing infrastructural development as a matter of success or failure, this dissertation explores the kind of environments, subjectivities, and socialities brought forth by neoliberal infrastructural reforms and their attendant practices of governance in Lebanon, a country undergoing widely documented infrastructural and economic collapse. This study is based on more than 24 months of multi-sited, ethnographic field research in Lebanon. The data was gathered while immersed within everyday decision-making practices on the part of impacted individuals, NGOs, political coalitions, infrastructure experts and maintenance workers, and government officials in the interconnected sectors of energy, water, transportation, housing, and waste management. The analyses presented make sense of Lebanon’s recent “collapse” through the lens of infrastructure, looking at the ways that people, things, and institutions go about keeping the lights on, the A/Cs running, and the water tanks full—and what happens when they can’t. As this study reveals, the “crisis” state of Lebanon today is an accumulation of specific decisions, practices, and norms maintained by and through basic infrastructures and utilities. Guiding infrastructural arrangements in Lebanon empower and enrich competing transnational and local political players who are responsible for provisioning basic services, illustrated by case studies of waste management, housing, and electricity. By unpacking the discourses, relationships, and practices that sustain infrastructural crisis as an enduring experience, we see how infrastructures play key roles as technologies of power and violence. Additionally, by studying infrastructural governance “from below”, this study shows how various groups in Lebanon contest infrastructural norms through creating micro “circular economies” as vehicles for meeting people’s basic needs and enhancing their well-being. There are thus possibilities for infrastructural alternatives as mechanisms to redress resource inequalities and legacies of violence. Through a focus on everyday encounters with infrastructural systems and how they shape subjectivities, bodies, economies, and environments, this study follows characters living through Lebanon’s infrastructural collapse, charting intimate entanglements with infrastructure that make up essential experiences of being human: loss, love, and laughter. By investigating the various ways that infrastructures are governed, repaired, created, maintained, and lived with, this dissertation shows how violence has been maintained over decades, and why the collapse of social services and the impoverishment of most of the population was possible—and even predictable.