Paper Short Abstract:

Tripoli, Lebanon is considered the most impoverished city on the Mediterranean. To evoke images of past prosperities, inhabitants refer to orange orchards and the sea, two ecological features that are quickly diminishing. The paper discusses political futures in the wake of such ecological losses.

Paper Abstract:

Once a bustling economic hub, Tripoli, Lebanon is now considered the most impoverished city on the Mediterranean. Ravaged by civil conflict and systemic divestment, Tripoli now stands at the margins of political power, a city undergirded by atmospheres of desertedness, incompletion and the constant possibility of violence. To find respite from the daily reminders of living in this ever-present state of decline, inhabitants of Tripoli (Trabulsis) evoke memories of two ecological features – orange orchards and the sea – that offer possibilities of alternative future-making, uncorrupted by present constraints.

Today, Tripoli’s orange orchards are sites of aggressive real-estate developments led by kleptocrats who are transforming the seafront into exclusive restaurants and residences, inaccessible to the wider public. The sea on the other hand, has, since the economic crisis of 2019, turned into a container of drowned lives, journeys to better lands cut short by a combination of new human trafficking organizations and increased maritime securitization. In my contribution, I examine how Trabulsis navigate the ecological and material ruins of their pasts as protracted ‘’senses of ending’’ made possible by structural conditions and the loss of ecological spaces, the latter which have allowed them and their ancestors before them to articulate versions of fruitful and abundant futures. In response to this, I focus on two divergent trajectories that relieve Trabulsis from their senses of ending – participating in armed conflict and joining the 2019 secular Uprising that aimed at creating new ecological connections to their now heavily urbanized spaces.