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On Specters of Violence and the Afterlives of War: The Production of Space in Post-War Lebanon
Abstract
Reckoning with legacies of historical violence necessitates an assessment into the how the past comes to be entrenched in the banalities of everyday life. Looking to how historical violences live in the physicality of our built environment allows for the conceptualization of how space existentially regenerates the past in the present: specters of violence and the afterlives of war live in the built environment and in the fabric that threads post-war society together. Looking to the multi-scalar territorial configurations and containment of space materializing throughout the Lebanese Civil War of 1975 to 1990, this paper examines the role of violence in the creation of the sociopolitical landscape of post-war Lebanon. As everyday practices inform the production of space, the ideologies within which it is entrenched, and its ontology, I trace the palpable viscerality involved in living in and maneuvering through sites whose futurity is always already informed by perpetuated violences of the past. I argue that an assessment into the entrenchment of the legacies, specters, and afterlives of the violence of the civil war informs the post-war sectarianization of space, identity, and political life more broadly. Thinking through the affective implications of checkpoints allows me to unpack how threats of violence, desires for safety, and navigating of geographies of war directly shape the formation of borders and boundaries in the post-war era. The everyday practices involved in traversing disintegrated spaces tainted with physical violence and precarity, I argue, foreshadowed the emergent sociospatial configurations of sectarian governmentality that appeared in the post-war period and contend with the physicality of checkpoints as that which reinforced the post-war borders through their haunting. In examining how the legacies of violence informed the production of space during and in the aftermath of the civil war, I ask: where can the ruins and legacies of violence be located within space in Lebanon? How can we look beyond bullet-riddled buildings and monuments to unpack the existence of historical violences in the physicality of our built environment? How are historical violences entrenched in the banalities of everyday life? How does the civil war seep into the temporality and geography of the post-war? How does the binaristic identification of the civil war as a cross-sectarian hinder our understanding of the production of space in Lebanon?
Discipline
Architecture & Urban Planning
Geography
History
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
None