This paper examines “The Egg,” an abandoned relic of the Lebanese Civil War that activists took over during the October 2019 mobilizations, as a site of contestation. The Egg or what became popularly known as the Eggupation (“Egg occupation”) or Eggthawra (“Egg revolution”) became a platform for intellectuals, activists and academics to gather for lectures and discussions. The topics covered economic theories, theories of resistance, and democratic procedures. While the Egg was a popular gathering site in the beginning weeks of the mobilizations, activity fizzled out. By turning to this site, we uncover multiple forms of contestation. We find that the events related to the Egg reproduced the classed divisions that prompted the mass mobilizations in the first place. In particular, our analysis complicates teleological theories which privilege an enlightened subjectivity as the path to political awakening. We argue that these political assemblies, whether strategically devised or organic, relied upon false consciousness as a state where ideology is a veil to be lifted. At the same time, we recognize the possibilities that such assemblies open up like the reinstitution of public debate and dialogue. Bringing the conversation back to/with/among the people. Our interest here lies in the performance and aesthetics of the events that took place at the Egg, including claims of occupying the space ‘first,’ historical parallels that were drawn to the May 68 events in France, and the imagery surrounding the (re)territorialization of the space. More broadly, there has been an anxiety around just what constitutes a “public” debate, leading to stunted political representation of the movement. Indeed, no group leader has come through to represent the “people.” In fact, the very “philosopher kings” who led discussions in the Egg simultaneously disavowed leadership of the movement. We examine this very disavowal or unwillingness to “speak for” and “represent” the “people” and its constitutive anxieties to better understand the politics of representation and the role they play in the national mobilizations. We are interested in the implications for the fetishistic disavowal of the self as a representative of “the people.” We turn here to the surge of contestation in the mobilizations, not only as a surge against the ‘ruling elites’ but also against any and all assemblages that overshadow or take over spaces of mobilization.

From 1958 to 1970, Lebanese presidents Fuad Shehab and his protégé Charles Helou, presided over a period of significant state expansion. Successive Lebanese governments enacted largescale central-planned state infrastructure projects and public welfare schemes. This included building major roads, hospitals, schools, as well as the establishment of the Lebanese central bank and ports. Shehab and his advisors held that grievances over socioeconomic inequality largely led to the communal sectarian fighting at the end of Camille Chamoun’s presidency (1952-1958). In order to quell both sectarian and class tensions, Shehab set out to expand the reach of the state towards Lebanon’s peripheries. Shehab established a social welfare network and launched economic development projects that would stretch further north, south, and east. I argue, however, that the Shehab era’s central-planned initiatives generated the exact opposite desired outcome. Rather than dismissing sectarian leaders, Shehab readily allied with sectarian power-brokers, welcomed them in his governments and relied on their legitimacy to enact large-scale economic development projects. Shehabist state modernization transpired well within the parameters of the sectarian status quo. This approach further engendered and reified sectarian both segregation and tensions; not only within all branches of government but subsequently reinforced sectarian social structure at the local levels where projects were enacted. Instead of eliminating, or at least quelling sectarianism, the Shehabist era bureaucratized it. During the Shehabi period, patronage economic networks by which the Lebanese masses latched onto to protect their socioeconomic self-interests coalesced into robust sectarian social structures. The Shehabist reforms promised visions of a unifying national economy yet the result was a stratified sectarian one. Shehab’s endeavors transformed the various spheres of the Lebanese governmental structure, into sites of sectarian jostling and conflict. Through investigating Lebanese state archives, including ministerial, independent agencies, and parliamentary documents, as well as a critical review of ethnographic and developmental studies undertaken during the Shehabi era, I aim to demonstrate the material application of sectarianism at diametrically opposed yet interlinked levels of power. The first, a top down – institutional – perspective, sectarianism as statecraft that goes beyond confessional quotas and parliamentary seats. The second, a bottom up – popular – point of view, sectarianism as a form of economic and societal reconfiguration and organization.

This paper will explore the media event as a site of contestation in the context of the mass mobilizations which took place in Lebanon in October of 2019. We examine specifically the controversial panel which took place at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on January 23, 2020 called, “The Return of Arab Unrest.” In it, CNBC anchor Hadley Gamble, spoke with leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, Former Minister of Energy and Water, and Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants in Lebanon, Gebran Bassil, Dutch Foreign Trade Minister Sigrid Kaag, and Damac Properties Chairman Hussain Sajwani. During the panel-turned-trial, the focus shifted to Bassil’s role in the recent economic decline in Lebanon, turning the tables from his usual control of the narrative in traditional Lebanese media. The panel was dominated by Gamble, who reprimanded Bassil, and Kaag, who engaged in pedagogical discourses. Both converged in their moralizing stances. We are particularly interested in the ambivalent responses by Lebanese nationals and diaspora who reported conflicting feelings, sometimes simultaneously, about the interview. To explore this ambivalence, we analyze a petition launched to prevent Bassil from attending the forum, the interview itself, traditional media discourse, and the surrounding discourse on social media following the interview. In these spaces, we turn to the dynamics of shame and pleasure within the interview, as well as the articulation of embarrassment and fun in the memes and posts following the interview. We explore these political affects, whereby viewers indicated a desire to see Bassil finally taken to task and shamed for his role in the demise of the economy and his lack of credibility and effectiveness as minister. At the same time, reactions also pointed to the stakes of this representation in the “international” arena, indicating an uneasiness with the directionality, power dynamics, and performance involved in the shaming of a Western humanitarian gaze. In this way, we situate this discussion within the broader political economy of local and international media coverage of the protests and the vicious cycle and unholy trinity of debt, adjustments, and financial aid which have served the further entrench Lebanon’s ruling order and license moralizing discourses like the ones which took place in Davos. This spectacle ultimately highlights the kinds of nationalisms that are mobilized in times of heightened public discourse, revealing the stakes of representation which are inextricably tied to political contestation.

This paper explores the way in which Instagram, a digital photo-sharing platform, affectively constitutes and re-shapes imaginaries of city-spaces in Lebanon. It works from an understanding of Instagram as both a social and public space (Boy & Uitermark, 2016; Hochman & Manovich, 2013), where users can produce, share, edit, and construct experiences that in turn constitute and shape online communities. The use of Instagram as both media infrastructure and practice reshapes the ways people interact with their urban and geographical surroundings, becoming a contested space where sociopolitical, cultural, and identitarian claims to the city are visually reinscribed. The research takes the Instagram page “Live Love Tyre” as the site of study, which curates a cosmopolitan gallery representing the southern Lebanese city, Tyre. The account’s images of blue seas and colorful urbanscapes stand in stark contrast to the city’s offline visual culture, which is overwhelmingly comprised of political-sectarian photos, billboards, and flags of Shi’ite political leaders and parties, as well as images of martyrs. The paper explores Tyre and Instagram as contested spaces, placing them in conversation with one another. It unpacks these visual tensions and their modes of production, exploring how these photographs speak to and/or challenge existing narratives and imaginaries of Tyre—specifically how they deconstruct and reconfigure understandings of the city as a peripheral and abject space. The paper uses a trifold theoretical framework to argue that “Live Love Tyre’s” images engage users on different affective registers, which re-imagine the social, cultural, spatial, and physical boundaries of the abject city-space. It critically unpacks the historical present as an affective experience, employing Lauren Berlant’s (2011) notions of “cruel optimism” and the “good life”; Judith Naeff’s (2018) theory of suspended temporality in postwar Lebanon; and a nuanced understanding of precarity that framed Tyre’s spatial, political, and lived realities. “Live Love Tyre” produces an overall surreal “affectsphere”, shaping visual representations of a “good life” that are simultaneously symptomatic of and in contradiction to experienced precarity in the city and in Lebanon more generally. The paper places the dynamics and implications of this “affectsphere” in relation to the ongoing uprisings in Lebanon, deconstructing the socio-spatial boundaries that exist in digital and offline realms, and unpacking these boundaries’ contested relationship to popular mobilizations in a sectarian nation.