Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 98, October 2022, 102485
Political Geography

Who you gonna call? Theorising everyday security practices in urban spaces with multiple security actors – The case of Beirut's Southern Suburbs⋆

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Abstract

Who do urban residents turn to in everyday security incidents? Why do some go to the police in certain locations, others to armed nonstate actors or kinship networks? We explore the ways in which residents and security actors – state and nonstate – negotiate everyday (in)security in contested urban spaces with multiple security actors. We consider how hybrid security assemblages are shaped by physical and social space and how everyday security practices shape space. We use Beirut's Southern Suburbs (Dahiyeh) as a site of theorisation, bringing local vernacular experiences into dialogue with Bourdieu's concepts of capital, habitus, doxa and field to develop a spatially dynamic analytical framework. Using this framework, we map security actors' different types and sizes of capital and how this capital is affected by residents' habitus and doxa within the everyday security field. We introduce the notion of ‘translocal habitus’ to capture the impact of families' origins outside Dahiyeh on everyday security dynamics. The framework we develop contributes to the spatialisation, vernacularisation and pluralisation of everyday security studies, furthers the spatialisation of Bourdieu and adds to the literature on hybrid forms of governance. Our analysis is based on extensive fieldwork, including over 150 interviews and ‘street chats’ with residents and security actors in and around Dahiyeh.

Section snippets

Dahiyeh and doing research

Dahiyeh is nestled between the southern boundary of Beirut and Beirut International Airport. Although interpretations of Dahiyeh's boundaries vary, we use it to describe the municipalities of Ghobeiry, Chiyah, Haret Hreik, Burj al-Barajneh and Mreijeh/Tahwitat al-Ghadir/Laylaki (Fig. 1), covering an estimated population of 800,000 to a million (ISF Officer-I and II, 06/2019; Mayor and son, 05/2018; Nazzal, 2012).

The area became known as part of Beirut's ‘misery belt’ (Harb, 2010, pp. 60–67)

Unpacking everyday security with Bourdieu

Bourdieu's concepts of capital, field and habitus enable us to capture the complexity of everyday security practices by mapping the relative capital and habitus of any actor in the everyday security field. Capital describes the ‘chips’ security actors bring to the field: economic (money, investments), social (networks, social standing) or cultural (tastes, rank, knowledge). Other relevant types of capital Bourdieu later added include informational and coercive capital (Bourdieu, 1986b, 2014;

Spatialised capital

Although outsiders cast Dahiyeh as dangerous, most of our interlocutors – bar those from/near informal areas – reported feeling safe in Dahiyeh, crediting this to its strong sense of community, Hizbullah's (or Amal's) presence and increased coordination between political parties and state agencies. Two-thirds of respondents to a 2013 Dahiyeh poll similarly indicated feeling secure, even while being dissatisfied with crime (Hayya Bina, 2013). A young woman summarised this position, saying that

Habitus, homology and heterodoxy

Habitus affects how capital is valued and which security actor an individual goes to ‘instinctively’. The social and political structures of Dahiyeh have privileged the formation of a habitus that sees the parties' capital as ‘natural’, thus turning it into symbolic capital. This is partly because the parties are products of the same social structures as Dahiyeh's population, having emerged from and evolved in the South, the Biqa and Dahiyeh. Such homology is helped by Amal and Hizbullah

Spatialised field

It is in fields that capital and habitus play out, but fields are not homogeneous across space. They form a ‘more complex spatiality’ than Bourdieu acknowledged, with ‘multiple and overlapping spaces’ characterised by ‘discontinuity, fragmentation and contradiction’ (Painter, 2000, p. 257).

The relative value of capital and which rules and habitus dominate varies across the field's space; for instance, the capital of parties and state actors had less value in Dahiyeh's clan-dominated areas,

Conclusion

To explore dynamics of everyday (in)security in contested urban spaces with multiple security actors, we grounded our research in Dahiyeh and developed a conceptual framework that makes possible a spatially complex analysis of the capital and habitus that residents and security actors possess in a fluctuating security field.

Built through dialogue between vernacular experiences and our operationalisation of Bourdieu in Dahiyeh, this framework allowed us to conceptualise everyday (in)security as

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to our interviewees for making time to talk with us. A special thanks goes to our research assistant for helping with many of the interviews and the walking tours and for their insights into everyday security practices in Dahiyeh. We thank Hizbullah's Media Office and the Lebanese Ministry of Interior and Municipalities for granting permission to conduct ‘street chats’ during elections. We are grateful to Alex Mahoudeau for introducing us to the method of

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    ⋆

    Although the 1984 film Ghostbusters made this saying (in)famous, we use it to capture the everydayness of responses to our field-work questions on who people turn to in everyday (in)security matters.

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