Paper short abstract:

This paper situates current UN peacekeeping intervention and boundary contestations in the Lebanon-Israel-Syria tri-border region in a long-term history and imperial legacy in south Lebanon.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses major sites of contestation and local resistance to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon's (UNIFIL) "Blue Line" in southern Lebanon, the unofficial borderline separating Lebanon and Israel. The Blue Line marks the Israeli military's line of withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. Its coordinates are based on adapted versions of the 1920 French and English boundary descriptions of modern Lebanon that often were never fully enforced—until now. There are ongoing contestations about the shape of the frontier in several locations of this geopolitically sensitive border region. This paper situates current boundary contestations in a long-term analysis of the dramatic history and politics of the region. Lebanon's current social turmoil has been shaped by decades of intense political struggles. My research emphasizes the imperial legacy underlying the Lebanon-Israel-Syria tri-border region and places current contestations into a history of foreign intervention and competing projects of internal and external rule. Recent literature emphasizes terrorism and the weak Lebanese state as reasons for current border contestations between Lebanon and Israel. This paper instead aims to foreground the experiences and perspectives of local peasant communities that were and still are directly affected by the enforcing of colonial borders. Based on oral histories collected in several south Lebanese border villages, it links current contestations to previous experiences of local peasants, their self-identities, and their relationship to the land they cultivated. It interrogates the reasons why many of these communities, support Hizbullah, what numerous (largely Western) governments consider an "extremist" or "terrorist" group.