In October 2019, Lebanon suffered one of the worst economic crises in contemporary history. Compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, and one of the worst non-nuclear explosions at Beirut’s Port in August 2020, the Lebanese economy has faced triple digit inflation, devaluation of the Lebanese Lira by 98% and shortages on everyday necessities such as energy and drinking water. Billboard advertising, however, has been a stalwart of the Lebanese landscape, despite the unviability of life for many in the country. Billboards advertise products only the most elite can afford, including purchasing passports from upwards of $100,000, apartments in Greece from $250,000 and luxury goods, while simultaneously promoting energy sources to avoid load-shedding. Using fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2023 in Beirut, this paper explores the increasing dollarization of Lebanon, the rise in a cash-based informal economy and how this is reflected in the visual and linguistic landscape of billboard advertising. It seeks to answer two questions: How do visual and linguistic landscapes change during times of crisis, and how does crisis seep its way into all corners of a cityscape? My research encompassed a mixture of methodologies, including interviews, visual ethnography and autoethnography to discover the affective nature of handling the devalued Lira and how increased dollarization contributes to a post-colonial imaginary of the Dollar as the symbol of financial stability in Global South countries. It further explores how post-crisis advertising is violent and predatory, by using the everyday fears of Lebanese citizens to sell products. As inequality and vulnerability grows in Lebanese society, and many Lebanese feel increasingly disconnected from their home country, several are choosing to emigrate as life becomes unviable in Beirut. The research adds to the literature on post-crisis advertising, dollarization of economies in the Global South and the increase in informal cash-based economies in an increasingly digitalized world.

The primary employment opportunities for working-class Syrian refugees in Istanbul are informal work or similarly informal yet socially autonomous self-employment. State officials, developmental and financial organizations—ranging from MPs to local NGOs and the World Bank—often endorse refugee entrepreneurship as the only viable option. Conversely, their activism and participation in civil society discussions are severely limited. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2016 and 2022 within makeshift entrepreneurial projects of Syrian refugees in Istanbul, this article highlights necessity-driven refugee entrepreneurship formed through improvisation and flexibility. This encompasses not only the self-employment facet of entrepreneurship in its narrower sense but also extends to political and community-oriented initiatives, such as the establishment of underground community centers and clinics within enterprises. The article traces the processes through which Syrian refugees, initially without entrepreneurial intentions, transform into entrepreneurs due to their needs for repair from socio-political containment in other aspects of life in Turkey, combined with the availability of resources towards refugee entrepreneurship. While acknowledging the reproduction of neoliberal free-market dynamics by integrating even refugees – conventionally considered as ultimate victims in need of others’ support – into self-reliant entrepreneurial narratives, the article also emphasizes Syrians’ creation of communal and political relations that extend beyond these imposed narratives, including unmediated cross-ethnic connections, collective autonomy, and improved economic and legal prospects. It questions the implications of such eclectic incorporation of refugees into neoliberal roles.

This paper investigates how notions of obligation factor into the begging encounter in one Beirut neighborhood known for its bustling café environment that caters to affluent residents and tourists. The number of people who ask for money, food, and other life necessities has increased dramatically in Beirut over the past decade. This is partly due to the influx of Syrian refugees to Beirut after the 2011 onset of the Syrian conflict as well as a steep increase in poverty rates among Lebanese following Lebanon’s 2019 financial crisis. Moreover, Lebanon’s context of chronic organized abandonment (Gilmore 2022) has led many to relinquish their expectation of the Lebanese state to fulfill its obligations to the people and has increased skepticism towards NGOs in light of the NGO-ization of social assistance in the country. I draw on 12 months of participant observation and qualitative interviews with those on the giving and receiving end of the café begging encounter—café managers, waiters, customers, and those who beg—to ask two major questions: 1) who do people choose to help and ask for help from, and why? 2) how/do notions of obligation and community boundaries become (re)configured as people respond to the ubiquitous begging encounter? This paper reveals how hegemonic notions of kinship obligations are drawn on to both justify and counter the idea that the obligation to assist beggars belongs to individuals and kin rather than the state and NGOs. Furthermore, this paper argues that ideas of dignified labor and “proper family values” associated with family obligations to care for relatives serve as criteria to blame beggars for their predicament and are used to re-inscribe existing class, citizenship, and sectarian differentiations. There is a rich body of work within Middle East anthropology that studies how people in the region make sense of and live with hegemonic categories of relatedness and difference, such as sectarianism, citizenship, and kinship, to forge solidarities and connections across various scales of society. My research attends to the processes through which people’s sense of obligation to others is conceptualized vis a vis the begging encounter and helps us think about how obligation, relationality, and community boundaries are brought into relief and called into question within a context of organized abandonment, in Lebanon and beyond.

Despite Lebanon's constitutional commitments for "balanced economic development," the country's second-largest city, Tripoli, bears the brunt of colonial and post-colonial legacies of marginalization that deepened in postwar Lebanon (1990-present). While some researchers described the city as the poorest on the Mediterranean (Nehmeh 2015), the limited academic literature on Tripoli focuses on Tripoli as a city of Jihadists (Lefèvre 2022), or as a "dethroned" secondary Sunni city (Gade 2022). Erased from such narratives are critical political economy perspectives that shine a light on the pronounced class antagonisms in this city and the violence of neoliberalism. Tripoli is the birthplace of the richest men in the Arab world (Bloomberg 2021). This class of businessmen-turned-politicians monopolizes vast economic sectors (banking, real estate, telecommunications, trade) by accumulating wealth abroad and through neoliberal dispossession. Juxtaposed against these wealthy businessmen are the working poor, who comprise 57% of Tripoli's population (Nehmeh 2015, 61). Among those working poor are seasonal fishermen whose livelihoods and communities are susceptible to violent dispossessions under neoliberalism. This paper proposes to look at the impact of the ongoing 2019 neoliberal crisis – the worst according to the World Bank - on fishermen in Northern Lebanon. While doing so, it situates the crisis and its impact on seasonal workers, as is the case for fishermen within the context of adopting neoliberal policies in postwar Lebanon. The paper's objectives are the following: - To assess class disparities from the fishermen's lens and the levels of poverty and precarity and the impact of the neoliberal crisis on the fishermen's community. - To account for how fishermen organize outside the official union structure and reassert their dignity and right to access the sea and earn a livelihood. The paper will be based on ethnographic fieldwork, combining surveys, interviews, focus groups, and participant observations.

In 2020, in the opening of the Moroccan parliamentary session, King Mohammed VI called for expanding access to ‘universal compulsory health coverage,' through the integration of self-employed workers, including small farmers and cooperative members, into a health insurance policy administered by the National Social Security Fund (صندوق ضمان الاجتماعي, CNSS). It was not until 2023, however, that many rural producers and cooperative members were informed that they had been enrolled in the program – and would now be expected to pay monthly health insurance premiums. This reform was just the latest in the restructuring of the CNSS and other state entitlements and services in Morocco since the 1980s. These reforms have resulted not only in the withdrawal of state programs and increasing privatization, but in a kind of 'predatory inclusion' (Taylor 2019) of the poorest citizens, including through formalizing rural property and employment and increasing taxation and payments. This paper examines the roll-out of the CNSS in three women's weaving cooperatives in the Middle Atlas Mountains, with differing outcomes for members' income. It considers structural factors which shaped these outcomes, as well as debates within these cooperatives as to how payments should be distributed within the cooperatives, as well as what they 'purchased.' Examining vernacular understandings of entitlements and insurance, this paper then considers tensions over distributive politics and who is - or ought to be - paying their share in a context of neoliberal reform.