The sight of war ruins is a common feature in Beirut’s landscape. The civil war (1975-1990) left behind an expansive geography of war-scarred ruins in Beirut and its peripheries. Amid a massive construction boom, skyrocketing land and housing prices, and high demand for building sites in Beirut’s immediate southern peripheries, the continued presence of ruins 25 years after the end of the war is puzzling. Based on an ethnographic study in the Hayy Madi- Mar Mikhail neighborhood, a peripheral area within the southern suburbs of Beirut, over two time periods (2003-2004 and 2010-2011), this essay examines the transformation of the geography of civil war’s ruins over time and its re-inscription within the unfolding sectarian conflict. Hayy Madi- Mar Mikhail neighborhood has become one of the major contested frontiers on which the Christians (through the Maronite Church) and the Shiites (through real-estate developers) are struggling over land. The study focuses on the doubleness of the ruins — as products of a past civil war and a present territorial war that is not-so-different from the civil war but using different tools — in the transformation of the area into a deadly sectarian frontier in “times of peace.” To do so, the paper examines locally the ways in which these two religious political organizations use urban planning, zoning, and buildings laws in their territorial battles. It also investigates the transnational networks of finance, fundraising, and religious allegiances that have shaped this Beirut periphery into sectarian frontiers mired with violence. The study elucidates how such transactions are defined by discourses of religious and sectarian differences with significant implications to ongoing conflicts locally and regionally. The paper argues that this transformation of Beirut’s peripheries to sectarian frontiers is shaped by what I call the spatial and temporal logics of the war yet to come through which religious-political organizations simultaneously calculate, govern, and manage the city’s urban growth and the their possible role in future local and regional wars. By analyzing complex hybrid urban actors -like Hezbollah or the Maronite Church- not simply as local, bounded actors, but also as embedded in global circulations of finance, real-estate, aid, ideologies, and conflict, this study rethinks methodologically the ways in which cities in the Global South are often conceptualized as a binary between the city’s center and its marginalized peripheries. Using Beirut as a case study, this study also illustrates how sectarianism is geographically produced, lived, and contested.

This paper examines women’s behind-the-scenes employment (writers, producers, directors,) and variety of representations (number of female roles in a given program, the types of roles, whether women continue to be stereotyped in certain categories) in Lebanese television programming, an area of research that remains particularly understudied in the Arab world. The aim was to highlight whether Lebanese drama and comedy programs continue to under-employ and/or under-represent women or represent them in stereotypical and subordinate roles, whether in the home or the workplace. Indeed, these (under- or mis) representations are not exclusive to Lebanese or Arab media; recent findings from a number of US studies continue to demonstrate the negative and diminished role of women across a number of genres, and their under-representation in the higher echelons of behind-the-scenes work. A multi-method approach was employed, beginning with a content analysis of the seven major networks over a select number of evenings during a month to collect an objective, quantitative, and systematic description of media content as it pertains to gender roles on Lebanese television and behind the scenes. This was followed by a textual analysis of select programming on each channel in order to examine and explore the potential meanings associated with the messages in these media texts. Although there has been a discernible growth in online media audiences over the years, television remains a primary source of entertainment for audiences across the region (and beyond). Moreover, because of its established socializing role, how women are portrayed on television has an impact on audiences. The obvious consequences – self-esteem, beauty ideals, subordination, victimization – have been well documented (c.f. Conway 2013; Wykes and Gunter 2005; Wolf 1991). One of the few studies to address similar issues in Arab media involved a quantitative content analysis of women’s roles in 15 Arabic and 3 Turkish drama serials on transnational Arab television channels. The authors argued that, in addition to women being underrepresented and “portrayed in sex-typed occupations, activities and settings” (Kharroub and Weaver, 2014), there were differences stemming from which Arab countries produced the programs: more conservative countries presented more “sex-typed portrayals than the more liberal Arab countries.” These conclusions are inconsistent with the present study’s findings. Although Lebanon is considered one of the more liberal Arab countries, an analysis of the content on Lebanese television suggests that when it comes to depictions of women the portrayals (and stereotypes) are not always very different.