SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter draws on two years of fieldwork with an activist-initiated community group in the East Beirut neighborhood of Mar Mikhael, a locale suffering the consequences of an aggressive process of gentrification. I argue that gentrification has served as both a sign and a facilitator of feelings of social abandonment. A bodily knowledge has brought the residents of Mar Mikhael to the conclusion that the Lebanese state very much exists and is more than capable of getting things done when it wants to, countering the common refrain that Lebanon is a failed state. I discuss a group of activists’ attempts to “activate” the citizens of Mar Mikhael and help them lobby for their rights by asking them to appeal to the very state they believed had willfully abandoned them. I argue that these activists’ progressive vision for the political potentiality of community organizing was limited by their dependence on a response to this grassroots work from the state, framed as the sole legitimate provider for city and citizenry. I explore the resurrection of state effect from below and the ability of the “idea” of the state to survive its own deconstruction by turning to theorizations of the state as fantasy.