MESA Banner
Navigating Dahiyeh, Negotiating Everyday Peace: Mediation practices across Beirut’s Southern Suburbs
Abstract
Beirut’s southern suburbs, known as Dahiyeh, offer a compelling site for empirical exploration and theorisation around geographies of urban peace and conflict that go beyond the Westphalian-Weberian model. Dahiyeh is a product of war and socio-economic marginalisation, part of the broader contested urban space of Beirut. Predominantly Shia, it has multiple societal cleavages which can fuel insecurity – regional, clan/family-based, political, socio-economic, refugee/citizen, sectarian. It encompasses both informal impoverished and affluent neigbourhoods and lies on key translocal crime routes. Multiple armed actors (political parties, most notably Hizbullah, state actors, clan militias) operate in shifting and spatially varied security assemblages. This paper asks: how do residents of Dahiyeh navigate conflict in this contested urban space and how do they negotiate everyday peace? Residents and security actors have developed well-honed practices to manage everyday (in)security. We will focus on informal mediations as everyday peace practices, typically carried out by nonstate actors (family elders, local party officials) or state actors with family connections. Who is called in depends on the structural and normative characteristics of the location, what broader structures and networks it is embedded in, and the social characteristics of the conflict parties. Whether mediations are perceived positively or as imposing insecurity depends in part on whether residents consent to or oppose the status quo. Drawing on fieldwork spanning 2016-2020, we will analyse narratives and experiences of conflict resolution across Dahiyeh through a spatialised Bourdieusian framework, exploring what types of capital successful mediators have in different locations and what role habitus and doxa play in affecting capital valuation and establishing shared norms and practices. Of particular interest are the relative roles played by state and nonstate mediators, the interplay between coercive and symbolic capital, and the interplay between habitus and individual agency. By focusing on the experiences of ‘ordinary’ residents, and by developing a theoretical framework that allows us to analyse the routine, spatial and relational practices that residents employ to navigate conflict in Dahiyeh, our paper seeks to contribute to the vernacularisation and to the spatial and everyday turns in Peace and Conflict studies as well as to the ‘peace’ turn in urban geography.
Discipline
Other
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
None