Abstract
During the Israel war on Lebanon in July 2006, multiple humanitarian organizations began a series of trauma-related interventions for affected communities to diagnose and treat trauma in Lebanon. Yet, despite the widespread violence, these therapies faced numerous difficulties in finding traumatic subjects in Lebanon. By the end of the 2006 war, humanitarian psychology in Lebanon had expanded and multiplied to treat other forms of violence against women, Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, Lebanese prisoners and youth in urban ghettos. Also, interventions were designed to integrated mental health assessment within primary health care units for postwar communities in South Lebanon. The escalating political violence in Lebanon however, expressed in car bombs, suicide bombers, occasional street fighting and abrupt rockets hitting villages on borders, remain out of humanitarian therapeutic governance.
Therapeutics of violence in Lebanon, absent and emergent, re-located violence around new forms of injuries, bodies, sites of healing and subjects. It also produced a specific separation between violence occurring in war and peace in a place where violence is constantly anticipated. This paper follows the knowledge practices of violence as it becomes materially produced in the work of humanitarian therapeutics in Lebanon and embodied, contested and appropriated by different communities in Lebanon. What kinds of bodies, places, bombs, affects, speech etc. are considered violent and how are they transformed into non-violent ones? Which violence cannot be healed and intervened in by these therapies? How did communities in Lebanon themselves made sense of violence encountered and lived in?
In this paper, I will first address the materiality of humanitarian psychology as it unfolded in Lebanon in war and its aftermath (its market, political economy; new forms of commodities; its technologies (trainings of policemen, humanitarian workers on psychological therapies etc.) new kinds of political action; ethics and the psychologization of violence) then I will address the different humanitarian therapies, starting with war trauma therapies in 2006 then “postwar” therapies for Iraqi and Palestinian refugees and feminist therapies against domestic violence. I will then end the presentation by addressing the forms of political violence escalating in Lebanon since 2011 that does not fall within any kind of humanitarian therapeutic governance (bombs, assassinations, street fights, etc.)
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