Presentation short abstract

Drawing on the experiences of displaced individuals from nine different villages across the Southern Lebanese border, this paper examines the possibilities and promises that tending to ecological remnants, in the shape of trees, gardens, and farmlands, holds amidst uninhabitable worlds.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how ecologies of living (Khayyat 2022) persist amidst uninhabitable worlds (Simone 2015) in Southern Lebanese border villages. Ongoing Israeli colonial violence in the region since October 2023 —despite a ceasefire agreement entering effect in November 2024 —has especially impacted life on the borders, leading to the internal displacement of an estimated 82,000 people, and the near-complete destruction of more than thirty villages, rendering them unlivable. Drawing on the experiences of displaced individuals from nine different villages across the borderland, I ask: what possibilities and promises does ecological life, in the shape of trees, gardens, and farmlands, hold amidst displacement and ruination?

This inquiry is based on semi-structured interviews which were conducted between April and June 2025. Capturing events taking place six months into the ‘ceasefire’, at the time when the interviews were held, the research documents how the displaced who retain a connection to their villages navigate fleeting returns under continuous bombardment, shelling, targeted assassinations, kidnappings, occupation, and the air striking and detonation of residential units. Dimming hopes of return and the ever-present impossibility of reconstruction compel the displaced to tend to ecological remnants under extreme conditions of insecurity and precarity. By bringing to the fore the meanings that the displaced attach to these acts of tending to ecologies, the paper seeks to stretch the conversation of struggle in South Lebanon beyond the narrative of resistance and to critically examine the boundary between rootedness and uprootedness, as well as between life and nonlife.