Abstract
Like many countries in the Middle East, Lebanon has been witness to a neo-liberal project involving the restructuring of the state. Briefly put, this state-restructuring involved the creation of new, “neoliberal” institutions that are built on “informal decision-making” (decisions that take place behind closed doors or through mutual agreement between certain actors and interest groups). Importantly, this restructuring has led to a clash of interests, as many ordinary Lebanese citizens believe that these new institutions privilege an exclusive group of people over and above everyone else.
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Notes
See J. E. Innes, S. Connick, and D. Booher, “Informality as a Planning Strategy,” Journal of the American Planning Association 73, no. 2 (2007): 195–210;
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In order to understand this correlation we can look at collective mobilizations through literature on “contentious politics”. According to Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, contentious politics can be defined as: “episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants. Roughly translated, the definition refers to collective political struggle.” [As quoted in: D. McAdam, S. Tarrow, and C. Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5]. This chapter broadly concurs with this definition and will investigate the mobilization of Lebanese society against the new institutions as a “collective political struggle.”
See M.I. Lichbach, “Contending Theories of Contentious Politics and the Structure-Action Problem of Social Order”, Annual Reviews of Political Science 1 (1998): 402.
See: Sidney Tarrow, “Social Movements and Contentious Politics: A Review Article,” American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 874–83.
See N. Brenner and N. Theodore, “Cities and the Geographies of Actually Existing Neoliberalism,” Antipode 34 (2002): 349–79;
D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
J. Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology and Development in American Urbanism, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007);
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For example, see Y. Elsheshtawy (ed.), The Evolving Arab City: Tradition, Modernity & Urban Development (London: Routledge, 2008);
Rami Daher, “Neoliberal Urban Transformations in the Arab City,” Urban Environment 7 (2013): 99–115.
For example, see H. Schmid, “Privatised Urbanity or a Politicised Society? Reconstruction in Beirut after the Civil War,” European Planning Studies 14, no. 3 (2006): 365–81;
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See J. Pierre, ed., Partnerships in Urban Governance: European and American Experience, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 5;
G. Stoker ed., The New Politics of British Urban Governance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 3.
R. A. Beauregard, “Epilogue: Globalization and the City,” in Change and Stability in Urban Europe, ed. H. Andersson, G. Jorgensen, D. Joye and W. Ostendorf (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001);
A. Bongenaar, Corporate Governance and Public Private Partnership: The Case of Japan (Utrecht: Knag/Faculteitt Ruimtelijke Wetenschappen Universiteit Utrecht, 2001).
This external environment is characterized by monetary chaos, speculative movements of financial capital, global location strategies by major transnational corporations, and rapidly intensifying interlocality competition. For details, see R. Imrie and M. Raco, “How New Is the New Local Governance? Lessons from the United Kingdom,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 24 (1999): 45–63.
See C. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta 1946–1988 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989);
S. R. Fosler and R. A. Berger, Public-Private Partnerships in American Cities: Seven Case Studies (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1982), 174–98.
See, for example, S. BrowniH, Developing London’s Docklands: Another Great Planning Disaster? (London: Sage Publicatons, 1990).
See Rami F. Daher, “Amman: Disguised Genealogy and Recent Urban Restructuring and Neoliberal Threats,” in The Evolving Arab City: Tradition, Modernity and Urban Development, ed. Yasser Elsheshtawy (London: Routledge, 2008), 37–68.
For general details on other large-scale development and reconstruction projects, see M. Harb, “Urban Governance in Post-War Beirut: Resources, Negotiations, and Contestations in the Elyssar Project,” in Capital Cities: Ethnographies of Urban Governance in the Middle East, ed. Seteney Khalid Shami (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001), 111–33;
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Howayda al-Harithy (ed.), Lessons in Postwar Reconstruction: Case Studies from Lebanon in the Aftermath of the 2006 War (London: Routledge, 2010), 21–45.
See Jon Pierre, “Introduction: Understanding Governance,” in Debating Governance. Authority, Steering, and Democracy, ed. Jon Pierre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–10.
See F. Moulaert, E. Swyngedouw, and A. Rodriguez, “Large Scale Urban Development Projects and Local Governance: From Democratic Urban Planning to Besieged Local Governance,” Geographische Zeitschrift 2–3 (2001): 71–84.
Gerry Stoker, “Introduction: Normative Theory of Local Government and Democracy,” in Rethinking Local Democracy, ed. Desmond King and Gerry Stoker (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 1–27.
For examples, see M. Raco, “Researching the New Urban Governance: An Examination of Closure, Access and Complexities of Institutional Research,” Area 3 (1999): 271–79;
See I. Elander and M. Blanc, “Partnerships and Democracy: A Happy Couple in Urban Governance?” inGoverning European Cities: Social Fragmentation and Governance, ed. Ronald van Kempen and Hans Thor Andersen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 93–124.
In Downtown Beirut, then, decision making was only semi-transparent and numerous protagonists were excluded from it. As Healey et al. expressed: “New forums for decision-making are often not as open and transparent in the way that traditional government decision-making is now expected to be. Real decision-making often takes place behind closed doors.” As quoted in: Patsy Healey, Goran Cars, Ali Madanipour, and Claudio de Magalhaes, “Transforming Governance, Institutional-ist Analysis and Institutional Capacity,” in Urban Governance, Institutional Capacity and Social Milieux, ed. Goran Cars, Patsy Healey, Ali Madanipour, and Claudio de Magalhaes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 13.
See O. Kabbani, Prospects for Lebanon: The Reconstruction of Beirut (Oxford: Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1992);
Henri Eddeh, Al-mal-in Hakam (Beirut: Sharikat Al-Matbou’at Li Al-Tawzee’, 1998).
Daouk described the prospects of expropriation by a single company as, “the biggest land grab in history.” Cited in: Tim Llewellyn, “The Big Build-Up,” Sunday Times, January 29, 1995.
See R. Becherer, “A Matter of Life and Debt: The Untold Costs of Rafiq Hariri’s New Beirut,” The Journal of Architecture 10 (2005): 17.
For example, see Zayan Khalil, “Angry Property Owners Accuse Solidere of Bribing Judges,” The Daily Star, October 15, 1999;
Reem Haddad, “Property Owners Claim That Solidere Is Corrupt,” The Daily Star, May 01, 1998.
See Reinoud Leenders, The Politics of Corruption in Post-War Lebanon (London: PhD thesis, SOAS, 2004), 86–87.
See M. Raschka, “Changing Lifestyles: Some Squatters in Rags Get Riches from Effort to Rebuild Beirut Area: But Others Are Overlooked by a Program That Pays Thousands to Families Displaced by Construction.” The LA Times, April 18 1995.
See H. Schmid, “The Reconstruction of Downtown Beirut in the Context of Political Geography,” The Arab World Geographer 5, no.4 (2002): 239–40.
These figures are obtained from a report that was written in The Daily Star: Lysandra Ohrstrom, “Solidere: ‘Vigilantism under Color of Law’,” The Daily Star, August 6, 2007.
See U. Makdisi, “The Modernity of Sectarianism in Lebanon: Reconstructing the Nation-State,” Middle East Report 200 (1996): 23.
See S. Makdisi, “Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere,” Critical Inquiry 23,no. 3 (1997): 672.
This is according to information obtained from Samir Kassir, Beirut (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 531.
Quoted in G. Trendle, “A ‘Civil War’ over Rebuilding Beirut,” Middle East Journal 22 (1991): 22. Giles Trendle was a freelance journalist based in Beirut and reporting on Lebanon’s economy after the civil war. He spent over ten years in Beirut reporting for, among others, The Economist, The Sunday Times, CNN and CBS radio. Today, he works for Al Jazeera English.
See J. Tabet, “Towards a Master Plan for Post-War Lebanon,” in Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-War Reconstruction, ed. Samir Khalaf and Philip S. Khoury (New York: Brill, 1998), 95.
See also N. Beyhum, “Beyrouth au coeur des debats,” Les Cahiers de l’Orient 32–33 (1994): 103.
See E. Khoury, “The Memory of the City,” Grand Street: Special Issue on Space 54 (1995): 142–73.
See S. Hakimian, “Beyrouth: L’histoire d’une destruction ou les destructions de l’historie,” in Beyrouth: Construire l’avenir, reconstruire le passe? ed. Nabil Beyhum, Assem Salaam, and Jad Tabet (Beirut: Urban Research Institute, 1996), 17–29.
See N. Beyhum, Construction and the Public Benefit in Society and Culture: Citizens and the City (Beirut: Dar El-Jadeed, 1995), 50.
See G. B descu, “Beyond the Green Line: Sustainability and Beirut’s Post-War Reconstruction,” Development 54, no. 3 (2011): 363.
This is according to the biographical note in H. Sarkis and P. G. Rowe (eds.), Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and the Reconstruction of the City (London: Prestei Verlag, 1998), 299.
See Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).
See J. Markoff, Waves of Democracy: Social Movements and Political Change (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1996);
See Joel S. Migdal, “The State in Society: An Approach to Struggle for Domination,” in State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World, ed. J. S. Migdal, A. Kohli and V. Shue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
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Makarem, H. (2015). The Bottom-Up Mobilization of Lebanese Society Against Neoliberal Institutions: the Case of Opposition Against Solidere’S Reconstruction of Downtown Beirut. In: Gerges, F.A. (eds) Contentious Politics in the Middle East. Middle East Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137530868_21
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