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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a French-Lebanese competition over the Litani River between 1919–46 to argue that infrastructure and natural resource exploitation were pivotal means of asserting territorial sovereignty in the twentieth century.

Paper long abstract:

This paper historicizes infrastructural and natural resource development as pivotal practices of asserting sovereignty in the twentieth century. It argues that a shared commitment to efficient resource exploitation underwrote competitions among imperial and anti-imperial engineers over the right to assert sovereignty over landscapes in the interwar period. It focuses on the French-Lebanese competition to build hydroelectric infrastructure on Lebanon’s largest river, the Litani, a contested borderland. From the 1919 Paris Peace Conference through to Lebanese independence in 1943, French imperialists, Zionist developers, and Lebanese engineers sought to claim sovereignty over the Litani River basin by arguing that the river was flowing “wasted into the sea.” The League of Nations Mandate framework claimed that European imperial rule was a vehicle for technological modernization, epitomized by efficient resource management. But in practice, rather than pursuing efficient use, the French Mandate state in Lebanon distributed private monopolies over water resources, which prioritized profitability. Lebanese engineers pointed to the Mandate’s waste of the Litani as evidence that the Lebanese nation must rightfully claim it. Developing the river would simultaneously telegraph Lebanon’s sovereignty in international legal fora, build sovereignty as a fact on the ground, and secure that sovereignty by supporting economic self-determination. However, tensions over the nature of the national “self” defined such claims of self-determination. Most communities in the Litani Basin rejected both France and the Lebanese nation, including by means of armed insurgency. These contestations reveal how the built environment can establish uneven and disjointed patterns of imbricated state and popular sovereignty.