In search of utopia in post-political Beirut: The pragmatic turn and the decline of radical imaginaries in activist Lebanon

Thesis

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut, Lebanon, this dissertation examines the turn towards a pragmatic and technocratic approach to politics in Lebanese civil society, in the aftermath of the ‘garbage protests’ that gripped the country in 2015. It situates this development within a global political conjuncture characterized by what other scholars have designated an anti-political, or post-political turn amongst activists in disparate contexts. Such activists are seen as focusing increasingly on uncontroversial questions of livability and wellbeing imagined to have the capacity to transcend binaries of Left and Right and, in so doing, instigate change.

This dissertation tells the story of a middle class urban social movement concentrated largely in Beirut, which drew on the technocratic expertise of its adherents to market an alternative vision for the city and wider country. The activists that made up this movement rejected the divisiveness of ‘ideology’ and the messiness of ‘politics’ proper in favor of what they put forward as a neutral discourse of the ‘right to the city’ – a non-contentious approach to socio- political agitation. In addition to making sense of the appeal of this approach to activism, I highlight its limitations.

My research unfolded in the aftermath of a political event that activists saw as charged with potential, yet quickly fizzled out, stranding them in a post-evental moment of ‘dead time’ heavy with the debilitating sense of having yet again failed to facilitate transformative change. I examined the ways in which activists in Lebanon attempted to work their way out of this impasse and towards new moments of rupture in an endeavor to create new processes of political subjectivation.

This dissertation charts ways in which activists in Lebanon attempted to challenge the hopelessness that was assumed to have enabled mass complicity with the status quo. It employs ethnographic methods to discern the ways in which activists in contemporary Lebanon made sense of and worked against what was designated as a prolonged period of ‘stuckedness’. It asks how the experience of routine failure within Lebanon’s post-civil war activist scene transformed contentious politics in the country, examining the decline of once popular radical political imaginaries, and the emergence, in their stead, of a pragmatic approach to politics. In exploring the limitations of this form of activism, I explore the effects that neoliberalism as a governing rationality has had on the political imagination, and on the ability of dissenters to think a more radical socio-political otherwise.

Authors: Chamas, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-aok4nbxk2
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Activism; Lebanon; Anthropology; Protest; Political imagination; Utopia; Neoliberalism; Resistance; Social Movements; Technocracy; Pragmatism
• Subjects: Middle East; Anthropology; Social movements