Description
Book SynopsisBeirut is a city divided. Following the Green Line of the civil war, dividing the Christian east and the Muslim west, today hundreds of such lines dissect the city. For the residents of Beirut, urban planning could hold promise: a new spatial order could bring a peaceful future. But with unclear state structures and outsourced public processes, urban planning has instead become a contest between religious-political organizations and profit-seeking developers. Neighborhoods reproduce poverty, displacement, and urban violence.
For the War Yet to Come examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut's southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Hiba Bou Akar argues these neighborhoods are arranged, not in the expectation of a bright future, but according to the logic of "the war yet to come": urban planning plays on fears and differences, rumors of war, and paramilitary strategies to organize everyday life. As she shows, war in times of peace is not fought with tanks, artillery, and rifles, but involves a more mundane territorial contest for land and apartment sales, zoning and planning regulations, and infrastructure projects.
Trade Review"Once in a while, a book comes along that makes a field of inquiry reconsider its assumptions, categories, and vocabularies. Through elegant ethnography and nuanced theorization, Hiba Bou Akar's
For the War Yet to Come gives us a new way of thinking about violence, development, modernity, and ultimately, the city. This city is not just Beirut but rather urban life everywhere." -- Ananya Roy * University of California, Los Angeles *
"
For the War Yet to Come upends our conventional notions of center and periphery, of local and transnational, even of war and peace. It takes courage and smarts to navigate these spaces, let alone to write about them. With daring and precision, Hiba Bou Akar proves herself to be a complete master." -- AbdouMaliq Simone * Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity *
"How do you plan cities when the specter of war is always present? Hiba Bou Akar places 'planning' on its head to show how Beirut has developed to serve a sectarian order. Fascinating, theoretically astute, and empirically rich,
For the War Yet to Come enriches our understanding of fragile cities in the Middle East and beyond." -- Asef Bayat, University of Illinois * Urbana-Champaign *
"
For the War Yet to Come is a feminist and postcolonial critique of a masculinized geography of urban militarism that favors the spectacular and the sublime. This vision of the city at war is blindingly technological and curiously devoid of people, as if seen from above (perhaps from a fighter jet). Bou Akar's Beirut is peopled, swirling with rumor. It is the site not of anonymized destruction but of calculated and complex construction." -- Emma Shaw Crane *
Public Books *
"Bou Akar is able to assess how years of sectarian warfare and conflict have turned Beirut into an arena for competing religious/political parties and groups to seize footholds and influence in the city. [Her] in-depth analysis reveals a painful reality: Beirut's urban planning reflects Lebanon's political factions' acceptance of the inevitable continuation of sectarian violence and human displacement." -- Refael Kubersky *
Middle East Journal *
"Hiba Bou Akar's
For the War Yet to Come is an important contribution, shedding light on urban planning in unstable contexts....I highly recommend this book to readers interested in further understanding how urban planning could be viewed as a sword with two edges, for consensus or conflict building." -- Christine Mady *
International Journal of Middle East Studies *
"Hiba Bou Akar convincingly reveals the considerable weight of the anticipation of war and violence in the production of urban geographies in one emblematic contested city, Beirut. She names this phenomenon 'the war yet to come.' The mechanisms she skillfully describes are profoundly anchored in the urban dynamics of this city but could also be easily found in other cities....an enormous effort that succeeds in describing how fear of 'the war yet to come' is profoundly affecting urban and territorial dynamics in the contested suburbs of Beirut." -- Oula Aoun *
H-Nationalism *
"
For the War Yet to Come is an incredibly brave book. It would have required enormous courage, fortitude, inventiveness and discipline in order to engage the sites and actors of this book—municipal officials, street-level bureaucrats, bankers, housing developers, landowners, draughtsmen in public and private planning agencies, police officers, militiamen, religious charity workers and even asphalt company employees. Instead of being overwhelmed with rumours, impressions and partial understandings, the book resounds with confidence and clarity." -- AbdouMaliq Simon *
Urbanisation *
"In the literature on urban development, Beirut takes on symbolic significance as a prefigurement for cities where political difference is assumed to be primordial and inherent. In contrast to this assumption, Bou Akar's focus on 'everyday sectarianism,' located in 'zones of awkward engagement' between people, and between people and place, has shown sectarianism to be spatially and temporally produced and contingent." -- Hannah Sender *
Environment & Urbanization *
"[With] the theoretically astute concept of 'the war yet to come'....Bou Akar masterfully weaves a spatial and temporal logic together to demonstrate how these territorial contestations are both a reconfiguration of past violence and a patchwork of destruction, construction, lavishness and poverty, otherness and marginality." -- Mona Atia *
Society and Space *
"[A] beautifully written book....In an almost forensically meticulous manner, Bou Akar shows us the tangible connections between territoriality, geopolitics and everyday urban life." -- Sara Fregonese *
Society and Space *
"Bou Akar deftly moves across transnational, national, city-wide, and neighborhood spaces, while remaining sharply attuned to the complex temporalities of 'urban warscapes'....in Beirut, as Bou Akar vividly shows, urban strategy is far from unitary and coherent." -- Federico Pérez *
Society and Space *
"Bou Akar's work is a fascinating study of how planning is discussed and practiced in contexts of conflict. Furthermore, her analysis provides a compelling example of the way that contestations over identity have important spatial dimensions.This book is vital reading not only for anyone who wants to better understand sectarian politics in Lebanon but also for anyone interested in the interplay of conflict and planning in urban spaces across the region and the globe." -- Matthew DeMaio *
Anthropological Quarterly *
"
For the War Yet to Come makes an important contribution to urban studies, to be sure. Moreover, while the book is in strong dialogue with the already rich scholarship of planning and politics in Lebanon, its insights apply more broadly to contexts of urban political conflict well beyond Beirut and the Arab world" -- Alice Stefanelli *
PoLAR *
"Bou Akar makes an essential contribution to the urban studies and planning fields....Her analysis of Beirut's planning political economy is fascinating and insightful." -- Gerardo Francisco Sandoval *
Journal of Architectural Education *
Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue: War in Times of Peace chapter abstract
The Prologue offers a theorization of the spatial and temporal logics of the war yet to come through which Beirut's south and southeastern peripheries are governed and regulated. It locates these peripheries spatially in the city, and provides an overview of how these peripheries, in times of peace, have been transformed into frontiers of urban growth and sectarian violence largely through the spatial practices of religious-political organizations, mostly former civil war militias and the major political players in post–civil war Lebanon. These organizations include the Shiite Hezbollah, the Sunni Future Movement, the Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), and the Christian Maronite Church.
Chapter 1: Constructing Sectarian Geographies chapter abstract
This chapter introduces the discourses through which sectarian geographies are constructed in Beirut's peripheries. It discusses how commonly used terms like environment (bīa in Arabic) and demography can be used to depoliticize spatial policies and practices of segregation, discrimination, and fear by relegating them from realm of the political to the realm of the natural and scientific. Through an overview of the study's approach, which included patching stories and maps together with real-time data collection, this chapter engages with the methodological question of conducting research in contested spaces and violent geographies. This chapter also situates the book within the interdisciplinary fields of urban and planning studies, Middle Eastern studies, and studies on conflict urbanism and militarization. It also explains the three research sites, and theorizes the ways in which they, together, contribute to an understanding of the geographies and temporalities of the war yet to come in contested spaces.
Chapter 2: The Doubleness of Ruins chapter abstract
This chapter examines the still visible, expansive geography of war-scarred ruins left by the civil war in Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail, by examining the transformation of these geographies of ruins within the unfolding sectarian-political spatial conflict. The doubleness of ruins arises from their being products of both a past civil war and a present territorial war that is not so different from the civil war but that uses different tools. Through this exploration, the chapter shows how the Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail neighborhoods have become one of the major contested frontiers, one where the Christians (through the Maronite Church) and the Shiites (through Hezbollah-affiliated real estate developers) are struggling over land locally and through global networks of finance, fundraising, and religious allegiances, and where this struggle is transforming Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail into a sectarian frontier in times of peace.
Chapter 3: The Lacework of Zoning chapter abstract
This chapter traces how urban planning and zoning technologies have become technologies of warfare in times of peace, transforming Sahra Choueifat, a southeastern periphery of Beirut, into a deadly frontier of contestation and violence. The territorial battle of Hezbollah and the PSP over the area through zoning policies and real estate and housing markets is resulting in what this chapter calls the lacework of zoning. This low-income periphery is now a patchwork of apartment buildings that are in the vicinity of industries that are next to one of the most active urban agricultural areas around Beirut, with severe repercussions on the everyday life of area residents. The chapter describes how areas known to be Hezbollah's spaces in Beirut are in fact produced by the continuities and discontinuities of neoliberal practices with practices of religious affiliation, sectarian constructions, service provision, resistance ideologies, and militarization.
Chapter 4: A Ballooning Frontier chapter abstract
This chapter shows how access to development sites and individual project characteristics are resulting in the simultaneous (and competitive) ballooning of Shiite al-Dahiya and the city core (primarily Sunni west Beirut) toward Doha Aramoun, a periphery that emerged as a violent frontier in the May 2008 sectarian violence. Ballooning takes place on a variety of scales, from constructing more floors than initially permitted in a building to working behind the scenes with government agencies or religious-political organizations to bypass market mechanisms to using international aid to build infrastructure that enables the extension of sectarian patterns of urbanization. Thus, in Doha Aramoun, large-scale, nationally sanctioned building and planning projects have combined with the building-by-building efforts of Hezbollah-affiliated developers to transform a formerly marginal periphery into a prime new site for sectarian violence. In these territorial battles, minority religious groups become brokers between dominant religious groups.
Chapter 5: Planning without Development chapter abstract
This chapter describes the genealogy of the sectarian order in Lebanon and how it came to be understood and practiced spatially. This genealogy is constructed by tracing the debates and discourses that circulated among experts in the fields of development and urban planning since the 1950s, soon after the establishment of the Lebanese post-colonial nation state. The chapter shows how, over time, urban planning was voided of its development discourses, and transformed through militias' and religious-political organizations' interventions into a collection of "innovative" exercises aimed at balancing the spatiality of a sectarian order. It illustrates how these shifts in logic coincided with global moments of anxiety around Communism, and later, political Islam, ultimately ushering in the spatial and temporal logics of the wars yet to come. It closes with a discussion on how planning experts have become the technicians of this logic.
Epilogue: Contested Futures chapter abstract
This closing discussion of contested futures shows how the geographies and temporalities of the war yet to come are often dystopic, foreclosing the possibilities of urban politics and social change outside the sociopolitical order of political difference. At the same time, it shows that hope for change lies in the continuously shifting and contested spatialities of the sectarian order. It also explains this study's relevance beyond Beirut, discussing the implications of the findings for urban studies research in cities across the Global South and Global North. By contending that the urban futures of all cities are being contested, this chapter argues that while the logic of anticipated wars is particular to cities like Beirut, many other cities are governed, regulated, and contested by the logics of conflicts that are yet to come, driven by terror, gun violence, and climate change.
