Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I explore some of the problematic ways in which Beirut has been conceptualised in relation to (past) violence. Drawing on my doctoral thesis, I suggest that ‘ethnography-inspired’ research can help overcome such reifications: through conversations and a focus on complex temporalities.

Paper long abstract:

The city of Beirut and Lebanon in general, their physicality and history have been written about as cases of a city/country at war or post-war, grappling with their history in a linear or cyclical way. Scholarship focusing on Lebanon is dominated by the protracted conflicts of 1975-1990 and violence, as well as their consequences and memorialisation, and labels Beirut as a ‘post-war’, ‘post-conflict’, ‘(violently) divided’ and ‘sectarian’ city and the Beirutis as ‘divided’ people.

In this context, memory, time, space and place have mostly been approached as flawed, missing, wrong, divided and divisive, without taking into account their fluidity and ever-changing nature, their respective temporal and spatial aspects. Furthermore, the use of prefixes such as ‘post-war’ or ‘post-conflict’ does not seem to mean ‘peace’. I argue that these prefixes give undue weight to past violence in the construction of the present and future of Beirut, and reifies the city’s relation to war in an uncritical manner, defining the present solely in relation to (past) violence.

In this paper, I explore some of the problematic ways in which Beirut has been conceptualised and thought about in relation to (past) violence, and some of the ways in which divisions and communities have been reified and essentialised. Drawing on my doctoral thesis in which I rejected the war-focused and sectarian-focused labels used to describe Beirut, I suggest ways in which ‘ethnography-inspired’ research can help overcome such reifications: through conversational methods, narrative analysis and a focus on complex temporalities.