Deliberate Institutional and Legislative Failures: On the Governmentality of Inefficient Infrastructure in Post-War Lebanon
Waste Management Facility in Aitat, 2018. Photo by Author.
In the fall of 2017, the municipality of Aitat—a village of approximately two thousand residents located in the Mount Lebanon governorate—inducted a local waste facility to manage the collecting, sorting, and treatment of waste. The collapse of the waste infrastructure was sparked by the expiration of the privatized Sukleen contract alongside the closure of Lebanon’s main landfill that saw mountains of trash piled on the streets of Lebanon for months on end. Popular mobilizations referred to as the “You Stink” movement erupted throughout the country protesting the government’s failure of yet another service infrastructure.[1] As is often the case in Lebanon, the government offered unsustainable measures that temporarily allowed for the removal of waste from the streets to quell the uprising materializing on the ground. The blueprint for Aitat’s new waste management facility came to life in the aftermath of the garbage crisis of 2015 and was encouraged and subsidized by the Ministry of Interior and Municipalities (MoIM) and the Ministry of Environment (MoE).
Following the relocating of the trash to peripheral regions[2], Lebanon’s MoE released a decree offering logistical and financial support for municipalities willing to take over the management of waste.[3] Decentralizing waste management appealed to many local councils, particularly because of the potential for financial transparency if managed on a local scale. Salah Timani, the municipal president of Aitat from 2016 to 2019, discussed the exceptionally high costs of operations provided by Sukleen that saw much of the municipal budget usurped for waste management for years. Thus, the municipal council of Aitat voted in favor of managing waste locally, resulting in the construction of the facility in 2017.[4] The circulation of guidelines on the role of residents in the sorting of waste, the distribution of garbage bins, and the allocated pick-up trucks from the MoIM made for a rather seamless transition to decentralized waste management.[5]
Despite the immediate success of the local waste management project in Aitat, the almost million-dollar facility was forced to shut down within a year. The municipality’s securing of materials and funds from the MoIM and the exploitation of migrant and refugee labor proved insufficient in securing the necessary support to maintain the operations of the facility. Delays in delivering the annual municipal budget by the Independent Municipal Fund (IMF) and the news of debt accrued by municipalities caused by back pay to Sukleen bankrupted the facility shortly after its inauguration.[6] Even though the MoIM and the MoE decreed the decentralization of waste management to local municipalities, the IMF continued to withhold funds from municipal budgets to cover the remaining fees for the inoperable contract with Sukleen.[7] Municipalities were forced to foot the bill for the management of waste locally while still paying for the defunct Sukleen contract.
The municipal council in Aitat attempted to remedy the financial setbacks through mechanisms all too familiar throughout Lebanon: Syrian refugee and migrant laborers were fired and replaced by “cheaper Bangladeshi migrant workers.”[8] This institutional response depicts how the most precarious of workers—refugee and migrant workers—are the first to be impacted by Lebanon’s inefficient budgetary management.[9] The collapse of the waste management infrastructure, the failure to sustain decentralization projects, and the disposability of migrant and refugee workers crystalizes a cyclical pattern involved in the hegemonic governmentality of infrastructure in Lebanon: the myopic solutions enacted to alleviate infrastructural crises consistently generate worse political, social, and economic conditions.
By assessing the opening and closing of Aitat’s waste management facility within one year, this article contends that the inefficiency of the Lebanese government’s solutions is not the result of poor planning but is intentionally orchestrated to be ineffective to deflect accountability, increase the need for privatization, and to reproduce the clientelist relationship between residents and political leaders. The ‘instrumental-effect’ of failing and mismanaged infrastructure thus produces the “anti-politics machine”[10] that individualizes responsibility, sees increased privatization and decentralization, and generates the intensification of xenophobic, anti-migrant, anti-refugee, and sectarian rhetoric by deflecting blame on ‘outsiders’ or ‘others’ who deplete the resources of the country.[11]
I present the opening and closing of Aitat’s waste management facility as a point of departure for examining how inefficiency emerges as central to the hegemonic sectarian modality of governance. I argue that since the onset of the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990, ineffective services, infrastructure, and provisioning of resources have come to operate as the generative mechanism allowing sect-based militias maintain their authority, garner support, deflect responsibility, and strengthen their clientelist networks. To understand the current blackout and collapse of all infrastructure services in Lebanon, this article highlights the fundamental entanglements between the following: first, the collapse of the Lebanese state’s territoriality and sovereignty with the onset of the civil war and the usurpation of the provisioning of services and governance by sect-based militias; second, the enactment of various decentralized legislations, the formation of new ministries, and the institutionalization of militia governance and administrations; third, the reliance on clientelist networks to combat ineffective infrastructures and increased privatization; and fourth, the intensification of xenophobic discourse attributing burdened infrastructure to refugee and migrant residents and their exploitation, marginalization, and disposability.
Lebanon’s contemporary political landscape is haunted by the legacies of the Civil War. The story of the persistent blackout in Lebanon begins with the containment of space, infrastructure, resources, planning, bodies, and of memories that necessitate inefficiency to entrench the hegemony of sect-based militias. I trace the sociopolitical and legislative legacies of the Civil War, the generative effects of ineffective infrastructure and services, and the centrality of the specter of the ‘other’ or the ‘outsider’ to historicize and contextualize the current blackout in Lebanon.
Legislative Legacies of the Civil War
The precarity of circumstances emergent with the Lebanese Civil War permeated all corners of the country as vicious cycles of violence created a power vacuum that saw the collapse of state services and the central security apparatus.[12] Everyday practices involved in navigating geographies of war—from ensuring access to food, electricity, water, and safety—came to inform the sociospatial configurations implemented by locals, militias and the central government alike. From the onset of the civil war, space was consistently renegotiated and reconstituted through encounters with rivaling militias who demarcated their territoriality through the establishment of checkpoints, roadblocks, and popular committees that managed the distribution of goods and services.[13] Checkpoints and public administrations delineated the borders within which residents were to be served and created the militia-economy where funds were collected through the imposed taxes and tolls of controlled areas.
The territorial authority of militias expanded exponentially and coincided with the enactment of various legislative decrees aiming to ameliorate the loss of sovereignty of the central government. On January 31, 1977, the parliament founded the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR), a governmental organization that would function under the tutelage of the office of the Prime Minister.[14] Despite receiving millions of dollars in donations and grants, however, the CDR remained inoperable from its establishment into the post-war period. With the inefficiency of the CDR already plaguing attempts of reconstruction, the same parliamentary body met and legislated a decentralizing decree called the Municipal Act of 1977 (the Act). I argue that the Act functions as one of the most consequential legislations responsible for the restructuring of the governmentality of sectarianism enacted by the Lebanese state.[15] The Act gave municipalities jurisdiction over all matters of public service and governance, including the management of the “municipal budget; public programs for works, aesthetics, cleaning, health affairs, water projects and lighting; establishing streets, gardens, and public places…; hospitals, shelters, sewers, waste drainage; transportation; controlling educational activities and work progress in public and private schools; supervising public utilities.”[16]
By June of 1977, the central government passed two legislations tasking two distinct bodies with the responsibility and jurisdiction over reconstruction plans throughout the country: one under the supervision of the Prime Minister and the other through the MoIM. Both bodies were given jurisdiction over infrastructural construction with the CDR receiving all funds related to reconstruction. However, as the CDR did not disburse funds to local municipalities as initially legislated,[17] a central account allocated to financing municipalities was created, known as the Independent Municipal Fund (Decree No. 1917). The implementation of the Act and the CDR remained limited throughout the Civil War both because of internal disagreements and because of the intensification of the war.
The legislative initiatives aimed at ameliorating the precarity of circumstances on the ground did little to thwart militia groups from increasing their grip on claimed territories through the formation of civil administrations and checkpoints. On the contrary, in Aitat and the rest of Mount Lebanon, the recently religiously homogenized Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP)[18] formed the Civil Administration of the Mountain (CAOM), that became the central modality of provisioning services and infrastructure. [19] In practice, this meant constituents of the PSP in Aitat, and other Mount Lebanon municipalities depended on the CAOM over the inoperable and ineffective government agencies to deal with matters of electricity and other services. Instead, residents of PSP controlled areas claimed, “the CAOM’s Alay officials were accessible and red tape could be eliminated… they could receive help one week after their requests had been made.”[20] This stood in stark contrast to the paralyzed bureaucratic operations of the state. The effectiveness of the CAOM was amplified with the introduction of the Public and Municipal Affairs Committee within the CAOM, that came to “handle services at a local level.”[21]
These developments brought local state agencies under the control of the CAOM and the PSP militia, who derived its budget through “war tax.”[22] War tax encompassed the political economy of war. It included fees collected through imposed tolls along Druze roads and within Druze neighborhoods; through the taxation on all households within PSP held areas, and through foreign funding from both international ministries and non-governmental organizations.[23] The funds collected were used solely to support PSP loyalists and initiated the cyclical reliance on party services for access to goods.[24] The strategies of CAOM were not unique to the PSP or to the village of Aitat. Across Lebanon, militia groups developed a clientelist relationship with their constituents.
The entrenchment of militia territoriality was furthered with the formation of civil administrations to manage resources, infrastructures, and space. The geographies of war appeared as the blueprint for militia hegemony and was codified in the landscape of the post-war period through the enactment of the CDR, the Act, and the IMF. The multifaceted dynamics operating in conjunction came to play a central role in how an agreement on the war’s end was reached. For approximately three years—from 1989 to 1992—various political actors coalesced to arrive at the official culmination of the war. With the signing of the Ta’if Agreement on October 22, 1989,[25] and its adoption into the Lebanese constitution in 1990, the General Amnesty Law of 1991 was passed and granted amnesty to virtually all militia leaders, members, and politicians. Maya Mikdashi explains the Ta’if Agreement as that which “actively reproduces the future tense of the nation-state precisely because it keeps citizens suspended within the temporality of the temporary, backed by a fear of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ if political sectarianism is ended before national citizens have been successfully made out of sectarian citizens.”[26]
The parliamentary elections of 1992—the first in twenty years—saw those responsible for the violence, massacres, destruction, and mass-displacement enter the political arena as elected officials. In this sense, the transactional relationship between militias and their constituents facilitated the entrenchment of the geographies of war that see the divvying of resources, services, space, and infrastructures. Alongside the enactment of the CDR, the Act, and the IMF, I argue that it is within the temporality of the post-war era where we witness the hegemony of inefficiency appear to enable the durability of the militia-based power-sharing and sectarian governmentality. Fundamental to the entrenchment of sectarian governmentality was the implementation of the CDR, the Act, and the IMF, which came to be entangled in the private business transactions of politicians. The prioritization of particular regions within Lebanon created broader inequalities in infrastructural construction and maintenance, particularly in areas outside of the city-center of Beirut. Until today, the CDR collects large sums of donations from international donors, but the disbursement of the funds continues to exasperate inequities in development and infrastructure. Despite the legislative obligation to fund municipal projects, the CDR scarcely contributes to municipal budgets. On the contrary, the council consistently receives funds from the IMF; the financial body initially established solely for the funding of municipalities.[27]
In addition to the absorption of national institutions and politics, the shift to decentralized governance through the implementation of the Act further enabled the permeation of corruptive practices into the most local of scales, the municipality. The penetration of local municipal politics became possible for several reasons: first, the post-war compartmentalization of space relied on the borders drawn within the context of the civil war leading to the increase of official municipalities rise from around 400 in the late 1950s to over 1,000 in the post-war era.[28] Second, both inter and intra-sectarian (within a singular sect) opposition groups raised the stakes of local politics, particularly because opposing intra-sectarian factions battled for power. Third, within the IMF are a number of contradictory criteria that inherently fail to meet the needs of local municipalities and their populations as the distribution of funds is based on the 1932 census, an outdated and falsified colonial mapping of population demography.[29] By relying on the only census conducted in Lebanon under the French Mandate, municipal budgets are tied to the registered population of municipal locales instead of the resident population, and that does not account for internal migration and displacement. Lastly, discrepancies in the allocation of funds based on registered versus resident populations see the over-funding and under-funding of the vast majority of minimalities in Lebanon.[30]
These shortcomings are compounded by other administrative issues that bring forth corruptive practices, such as the delayed delivery of budgets to municipal locals by the IMF. The IMF regularly fails to deliver annual funds, which leaves local municipalities—specifically smaller, spatially isolated localities—without the fiscal or administrative capacity to provide or manage services.[31]
I contend that these ineffective modalities of governance are intentional. As the hegemony of inefficiency comes to be further entrenched, so does the durability of the militia-led sectarian governmentality. The orchestrated blackout allows for the reproduction of the central mechanisms that uphold the legitimacy, governmentality, and hegemony of sect-based militias. This becomes most apparent when assessing the case-study of the waste management facility of Aitat.
On the Failure of Aitat’s Waste Management Facility
Upon his entry into the municipality as president in 2016, Salah Timani decided to focus his term on the construction and operation of the waste management facility, particularly as Aitat was still reeling from the garbage crisis of 2015. The MoE and MoIM offered municipalities a choice: Aitat could launch and operate its garbage facility or enroll in the state-operated contract with the new waste management company, City Blue.[32] Because of the collapse of the privatized waste contract with Sukleen years prior, the municipal council collectively decided to opt-out of the City Blue contract to establish a waste management site in Aitat. The municipal council hoped that shifting the site of waste management to the local level would ease the budgetary constraints caused by the defunct Sukleen contract and that there could finally be financial transparency around the annual municipal budget.
While the construction and production of a waste management facility were to cost the municipality close to a million dollars, Timani emphasized that having a locally managed facility would ultimately be cheaper for them. Timani discussed how the Sukleen contract had already negatively impacted the municipality and said, “The municipality of Aitat owes Sukleen…almost US$ 40,000 for a few years of pick up. We are in debt to Sukleen, how does this even make sense? To remind you, this is debt we’ve incurred despite the deduction of funds to pay Sukleen from our budget every year, already.”[33] According to Timani, the MoIM and the IMF failed to provide any receipts to display the funds removed or withheld from the municipal fund for Aitat, nor did the MoIM provide any documentation to demonstrate how funds were spent.[34] Instead, upon receiving their annual budget, the municipality would learn that their funds were short tens of thousands of dollars.[35] Understandably then, the municipal council voted to launch the waste management facility in Aitat. After all, municipalities were encouraged to handle waste management at the municipal level.
In 2016, the municipal council agreed on a piece of municipal land to use as the site of the facility and began construction with the annual budget distributed by the IMF and the funds leftover from the previous administration and private donations from local families. Once approved, green, red, and blue garbage bins were distributed throughout the village: green for organic waste, blue for paper, and red for other recyclable materials. Residents were informed and educated on ways to separate their waste into each bin accordingly and the municipality even established a fine system for residents that did not comply. Aitat received three pickup trucks dedicated to collecting trash, each used to gather one of the three bins twice a week. Upon retrieval of the trash, the underpaid—and later unpaid—migrant workers would stand along a conveyor belt and sort through the materials coming in. Composted materials would be burned while recycled material would be collected and sometimes sold.
From the end of 2017 until the end of 2018, the garbage facility in Aitat operated rather seamlessly despite frustrations amongst the municipal officials over the delayed delivery of the municipal budget.[36] By November of 2018, the IMF had yet to deliver the funds for the year 2017 or 2018, despite Article 7 of the IMF obligating the distribution of funds by September of every year.[37] The municipality was already operating at a deficit for 2018 as all the resources available were utilized to fund the construction and maintenance of the waste management facility. It was then that Timani mentioned his plan to replace Syrian refugee workers to hire Bangladeshi migrant workers who he mentioned would be paid significantly less.[38]
The municipal president’s strategy to combat the budgetary delays by replacing refugees with migrant laborers is a trend all too common in Lebanon and globally.[39] In Lebanon, the state’s response to the influx of refugees was “understood as one of state absence: referred to broadly as 'a policy of no policy’, which encouraged decentralized responses through municipalities.[40] Roula Seghaier of the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) reminds us of the discursive and material effects of the racialized informal economy materializing globally and says, “It calls it ‘unskilled’ and ‘blue-collar,’ and treats workers as if they are disposable. This very same economy produces new workers to feed chains of hidden production: being informal workers with no access to social protection, informal work becomes generational.”[41] In this sense, in scheming to cut operational costs, the most marginalized and precarious of laborers succumb to the exploitative and ineffective procedures functioning from the larger to most local of governing scales.
The preference for migrant laborers over Syrian or Palestinian refugees appears as a result of “the fact that [migrant workers] are in a more vulnerable position, compromising their bargaining power and their ability to defy exploitation.”[42] Migrant workers in Lebanon arrive as part of the Kafala system; a sponsorship program that brings migrant workers into Lebanon through a sponsor who has legal responsibility over the worker for the duration of their contract. In Lebanon, the kafala system prevents migrant workers from being covered by employment laws, and in turn, leads to horrific abuses and exploitation of migrants, especially because their passports are confiscated leaving them trapped. Thus, migrant workers are often underpaid or unpaid, held hostage, abused, and enslaved. The kafala system has been described by Banchi Yimer, founder of Egna Legna as a system that “legally [binds] a migrant worker’s immigration status to a contractual relationship with the employer” which enshrines the “position of the employer as tyrant…in kafala. They can withhold wages and inflict horrific abuses without consequence, turning the lives of domestic workers into a living hell.”[43]
By replacing Syrian refugee workers with Bangladeshi migrant laborers, the municipal council of Aitat took advantage of the entrenched infrastructure that systemically exploits migrant workers as a means of remedying the financial struggles faced by the municipality. Despite the council’s attempts to cut costs; however, the indefinite postponement of the distribution of the budget by the IMF forced the waste management facility to shut down, leaving the migrant workers without pay for approximately three months of work[44] and Aitat without waste infrastructure. The delays in the distribution of IMF funds were attributed to the withholding of approximately ten billion dollars earmarked for Lebanon through the Cedre Conference in Paris.[45] Resources were withheld due to the Lebanese government’s failure to comply with the Cedre Conference’s conditional agreement for specific reforms and transparency in budgeting.
To add insult to injury, in October of 2018 the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS) revealed that the IMF had accrued a two-billion-dollar deficit as a direct result of the MoIM’s policy to redistribute waste management at the local level.[46] Scott Preston reported, “That the current deficit is a consequence of the fact that the Cabinet raided the Independent Municipal Fund to foot the bill for local waste management contracts signed by municipalities and central government entities with no other means to pay.”[47] Beyond the deficit causing further delays in the distribution of allocated funds to municipalities, the central government arbitrarily decided to consider the funding given to local municipalities as loans, registering the funds as incurred debt. In this sense, the municipality of Aitat not only lost a million dollars of their budget on an unsustainable project recommended by the MoIM and MoE, but Aitat had now also accumulated twice the debt because of the inefficient and weak proposal of the MoIM.[48]
The lack of financial security and certainty around the delivery of the IMF’s budget was not a surprise to Timani. In the past fifteen years, Timani stated that only three times has the IMF distributed Aitat’s budget in full and on time which makes it nearly impossible to implement, let alone sustain new projects.[49] The government and the IMF add, change, or drop the criteria for receiving funds without warning and as they see fit. The inability of the central government and the IMF to provide consistent access to the funds necessary to sustain these daily operations continuously perpetuates the various crises that emerge in the country, whether they be water shortages, electrical cuts, lack of garbage disposal, lack of sustainable economic opportunities, or the exploitation of marginalized workers. This results in an increased reliance on sect-based services and networks to access necessities, and in turn, sees the formation of welfare regimes that are created through sectarian political groups. The institutionalization of militias into local politics thus allows for sect-based groups to step in to provide basic services when access to allocated budgets, infrastructures, and services are delayed or denied. It is within this context that the Municipal Law’s regulation on registered constituents versus unregistered residents creates a perpetual paradox and cycle of inefficiency.
The instrumental effects of the inefficient planning are profound. The municipality of Aitat lost a million dollars on the construction of the waste management facility, accrued debt of over two million dollars, and exploited the labor of refugee and migrant workers, the latter remaining unpaid. Yet, the failure of the decentralization project managed to regenerate key discursive arguments that reproduce and uphold divisive rhetoric that attributes blame to everything and everyone but its own political leadership. On the local level, Timani blamed the previous municipal administration for misspending funds while the previous administration accused Timani of being too ambitious and idealistic. Both the current and previous administration agreed on the condemning of Syrian refugees for issues both related and unrelated to the closure of the facility which continues to produce xenophobic rhetoric and plague the lived experiences of Syrian refugees across Lebanon. This also sees the cyclical exploitation and disposability of refugee and migrant laborers by abusing their precarity for cheaper labor. Nationally, the indebted and defunct IMF and central government mobilized discourse utilized by oppositional camps. For instance, political camps blamed each other for the withholding of the Cedre fund and accused each side of stalling reforms.[50] This cycle works to deflect responsibility over the failure of projects administered by the state, a particular institutional body, political parties, or local municipalities which ultimately regenerates weak and inefficient institutions and infrastructures.
Concluding Remarks
The impact of weak institutions and projects—or the instrumental effects—lies in the expansion of the state’s bureaucratic power.[51] It is precisely these instrumental effects of the Act and the CDR that enable the production of the anti-politics machine.[52] The limitations of municipalities in governing effectively and efficiently are understood to be the result of the weakness of the state which then necessitates clientelist networks and privatization. What gets lost within this equation is how the durability and longevity of the Lebanese state, and the hegemonic governmentality of sectarianism, intentionally orchestrate these circumstances precisely because of how responsibility and accountability become deflected between central and local governance. As James Ferguson reminds us, this reduces the lack of funds and resources to a technical problem that can be resolved through privatization or foreign funding and ignores the systemic corruption responsible for the scarcity in the first place.[53] Ultimately, what this means is that events like the opening and closing of the waste management facility in Aitat are not only frequent occurrences, but they have also been normalized and are to be expected.
In historicizing the enactment of the various legislations, ministries, and political bodies, it becomes apparent that inadequate governance, budgets, and legislations seen in places; such as Aitat, are intended. While attempting to maintain the central government’s structure and sectarian configuration,[54] the shift of government services from the site of the state to that of the local bureaucratic municipality enabled the permeation of state power into the most local of sites. The legislations written during the civil war operate as tools of governance mobilized by militia-parties to codify their institutionalization in the aftermath of the civil war, thus necessitating the sectarianization of space, infrastructure, resources, and citizens for their success. As James Ferguson states of a different case-study, “‘Government services’ are never simply ‘services’; it may be at least as appropriate to think of ‘services’ which serve to govern.”[55] The services said to be provided by municipalities with the decentralization decrees shifting the site of governance to the local level must therefore be understood as that which “serves to govern”, and not as that which governs to serve.[56]
The case-study of the waste management facility in Aitat highlights how the IMF and the MoIM actively damage and devastate municipal locales through the enacting of hurried resolutions to deeply ingrained structural problems. The unpredictability of the IMF’s distribution of funds, establishing the criteria for the distribution of funds on registered versus resident populations, the hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, as well as the two-billion-dollar deficit for the IMF illustrate the inherent inefficiency in managing infrastructure in Lebanon. It is within this framework that the Lebanese government is deemed weak and ineffective. I argue that this produces the conditions that entrench the durability of the sectarian governmentality.
When we examine the instrumental effects of the legislations written during the Civil War, it becomes apparent that their implementation succeeded in furthering the permeation of militia power through municipal politics. The coalescing of state and local governance to further the territorial sovereignty of militias required the continued entrenchment of economic, spatial, infrastructural, and service compartmentalization. Even though municipalities remain unsuccessful in provisioning resources and maintaining infrastructure, the processes involved in remedying the ineffectiveness of services—such as increased privatization—enable the continued hegemony of militia groups who step in to alleviate the inefficiency at its worst. Paradoxically, thus, the futility of decentralization reproduces the effectiveness of sectarianism as a mode of governance which occurs precisely because of the continued inequity in the distribution of funds and resources that reinforces reliance on sect-based networks.[57]
As is evident, the very structure of governance—sectarianism—remains unimpacted and unchallenged despite the blackout Lebanon faces. Instead, the current circumstances seem to have reified the proposals for increased privatization, decentralization, and sect-based provisioning of services and resources. In this sense, Lebanon’s blackout appears as an intentionally organized one; one that relies on the shortcoming of the central government and municipalities to produce the need for sect-based militias to alleviate the precarity. The disintegration of state territoriality and sovereignty throughout the Lebanese Civil War ushered in this configuration: the hegemonic governmentality of the sectarian state relies heavily on inefficient infrastructures for the survival of the post-war militia state. And while inefficient services and resources serve as the hegemonic modality of generating the governmentality of sectarianism benefiting sect-based politicians, the most precarious and vulnerable of Lebanon’s residents—migrant workers—continue to be scapegoated, exploited, and victim to the post-war political landscape of inefficiency.
Notes
[1] Ziad Abu-Rish, “Garbage Politics,” Middle East Report, Vol. 277, Winter 2015, 35–40.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Tarek El Khatib, rep., Circular No. 7/1: Guidelines Concerning the Integrated Management of Domestic Solid Waste, Republic of Lebanon, Ministry of Environment, Beirut, November 16, 2017
[4] Salah Timani, (Municipal President) in discussion with the author, Fall 2017.
[5] Esperance Ghanem, “Will Short-Term Solution Help Lebanon Solve Trash Crisis?,” Al-Monitor, March 18, 2016, https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2016/03/lebanon-trash-crisis-government-plan-landfills.html. Accessed on March 2, 2021.
[6] Cynthia Kreidy, “Unpacking Solid Waste Management Policies in Lebanon: Public Policies Based on Power-Sharing Politics Rather than Evidence-Based Decision-Making,” Arabic Reform Initiative, August 2022, UNPACKING SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT POLICIES IN LEBANON | Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung | Lebanon - Beirut (boell.org).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Timani, Fall 2017.
[9] Kreidy, “Unpacking Solid Waste Management Policies in Lebanon.
[10] James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
[11] Cathrine Brun and Ali Fakih, “Debunking the Dangerous Myth That Refugees Are an Economic Burden in Lebanon,” The New Humanitarian, November 14, 2022, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2022/09/26/Syrian-refugees-Lebanon-economics.
[12] Kristin V. Monroe, The Insecure City: Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut, (Rutgers University Press), 2016, pp. 35–55.
[13] Fuad I. Khuri, “The Social Dynamics of the 1975-1977 War in Lebanon.” Armed Forces & Society, vol. 7, no. 3, 1981, pp. 383–408, https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X8100700304.
[14] Salim Al-Hoss, Michel Doumit, Farid Michel, “Decree No. 5. Council for Development and Reconstruction” signed January 31, 1977.
[15] Ministry of Interior and Municipalities, “Decree-law no. 118; Municipal Act of 1977,” June 30, 1977, 12.
[16] Ibid.
[17] United Nations, “National Urban Policies in Lebanon”, UN Human Settlement Programme. 2018.
[18] Judith P. Harik, “Change and Continuity among the Lebanese Druze Community: The Civil Administration of the Mountains, 1983–90,” Middle Eastern Studies 29, no. 3 (1993): 377–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/00263209308700957.
[19] Nazih Richani, Dilemmas of Democracy and Political Parties in Sectarian Societies: The Case of the Progressive Socialist Party of Lebanon 1949–1996. 1st ed., (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998).
[20] Harik, “Change and Continuity among the Lebanese Druze Community: The Civil Administration of the Mountains”, 387.
[21] Harik, Change and Continuity among the Lebanese Druze Community: The Civil Administration of the Mountains, 384.
[22] Richani, “Dilemmas of Democracy and Political Parties in Sectarian Societies”.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Judith Harik, The Public and Social Services of the Lebanese Militias (Oxford: Centre for Lebanese studies, 1994), 18.
[25] Muadth Malley, “The Lebanese Civil War and the Taif Accord: Conflict and Compromise Engendered by Institutionalized Sectarianism,” The History Teacher, vol. 52, no. 1, 2018, pp. 121–59, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26646477.
[26] Maya Mikdashi, “The Magic of Mutual Coexistence in Lebanon: The Taif Accord at Thirty,” Jadaliyya, October 23, 2019, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/40134.
[27] “CDR - Reporting Portal.” CDR Funding and Financing, 2020.
[28] Ziad Abu-Rish, “Municipal Politics in Lebanon,” Middle East Report, Vol. 280, Fall 2016, 4–11.
[29] Rania Maktabi, “The Lebanese Census of 1932 Revisited. Who Are the Lebanese?,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 26, no. 2, 1999, 219–41.
[30] Abu Rish, “Municipal Politics in Lebanon”.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Khatib, “Circular No. 7/1. Guidelines Concerning the Integrated Management of Domestic Solid Waste”.
[33] Salah Timani, (Municipal President) in discussion with the author, October 2018.
[34] “LCPS - Municipal Finance Must Be Reformed to Address Lebanon’s Socio-Economic Crisis,” LCPS.
[35] Timani, October 2018.
[36] Salah Timani, personal interview with the author, November 2018.
[37] Ministry of Interior and Municipalities, “Decree-law no. 118; Municipal Act of 1977” June 30, 1977, 12.
[38] Timani, November 2018.
[39] For more information on the racialization and exploitation of laborers, see Roula Seghaier’s “Why Feminist Recovery Must Rethink Labor?,” Oxfam International, October 7, 2021, and “Time to Re-Open Unfinished Conversations” Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, June 7, 2021.
[40] Lama Mourad, Brothers, Workers or Syrians? The Politics of Naming in Lebanese Municipalities, Journal of Refugee Studies, Volume 34, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 1387–1399, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feab012.
[41] Roula Seghaier, “Why Feminist Recovery Must Rethink Labor?,” Oxfam International, October 7, 2021, https://oxfam.medium.com/why-feminist-recovery-must-rethink-labor-c4058475ad7a.
[42] Imane El Hayek and Zeina Ammar, Domestic Work in Lebanon Post-2019: Reflections on Emerging Trends, (Beirut: Anti-Racism Movement and Asfari Institute, 2020,) 20.
[43] Banchi Yimer, “The Lebanese Revolution: A New Chapter of Kafala Misery,” The Public Source, February 18, 2020, https://thepublicsource.org/lebanese-revolution-kafala-misery.
[44] Timani, personal interview with the author, 2021.
[45] Nohad Topalian, “Funds Earmarked for Lebanon May Face Delays,” Al-Mashareq, 25 Sept. 2018, https://almashareq.com/en_GB/articles/cnmi_am/features/2018/09/25/feature-01.
[46] Scott Preston, “Lebanon’s Municipal Fund Runs over $2 Billion Deficit as Waste Expenses Multiply,” The National, Oct 9, 2018, https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/lebanon-s-municipal-fund-runs-over-2-billion-deficit-as-waste-expenses-multiply-1.778968.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Timani, November 2018.
[50] Nohad Topalian, “Funds Earmarked for Lebanon May Face Delays,” Al-Mashareq, September, 25 2018, https://almashareq.com/en_GB/articles/cnmi_am/features/2018/09/25/feature-01.
[51] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction. (New York: Random House, 1978).
[52] Ferguson “The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho.”
[53] Ibid.
[54] Thomas Haase and Randa Antoun “Decentralization in Lebanon,” In Public Administration and Policy in the Middle East, ed. Alexander Dawoody (New York, NY: Spring, 2015), 202.
[55] Haase and Antoun. “Decentralization in Lebanon,”, 203.
[56] Haase and Antoun. “Decentralization in Lebanon,” 272.
[57] Joanne Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2016), 22.
Author
Dima Abi Saab is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. Dima completed her Ph.D. at New York University, where her dissertation, Geographies of War: Scalar Containment, Municipal Politics, and the Creation of Post-War Lebanon focuses on how affective geographies informed the production and management of sectarianized space, infrastructure, and citizenry in the aftermath of the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990.
