Paper Short Abstract:

What ends with the end of privatised healthcare? This paper explores how a privatised healthcare system unraveled in the wake of Lebanon’s 2019 liquidity crisis, during a period of time described by many as ‘al-inhiyar’—the collapse of Lebanon’s economy.

Paper Abstract:

What ends with the end of privatised healthcare? Lebanon’s 2019 liquidity crisis has been described among the worst economic crises of the past 150 years. In its wake, a healthcare system that had long-relied on privatised care as its main mode of public health governance unraveled. Drawing from fieldwork in 2021-2022, this paper will explore this period of time invariably described as that of “the collapse” (al-inhiyar), a period of time when prices, social relations, identities and structures become unmoored and in flux. Collapse, as approached here, is presented not as an end, but as a re-organisation. Among microbiologists, nurses, pharmacists, medication distributors, and physicians, the paper describes how collapse is not only something that happens to people, but also something that people themselves do. It also appears to take place not only at the level of a national economy, but also at the register of agentive changes in routinised everyday behaviour: in its enactments. Rather than imbue collapse with radical or revolutionary potential, this paper will frame its potential as one of ‘widening’ the spaces of struggle around privatised healthcare, where an ontological struggle — "a struggle over the making and unmaking of the social world” (Hage 2015) — takes place. Contra authoritative forms of medicine, this ‘widening’ takes place in recapturings of healthcare by non-physicians, opening up questions related to what Ivan Illich (1973) had called “conviviality”— collective responses that aim to “do ever more with ever less.”