War Is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon by Sami Hermez (review)

In War is Coming, Sami Hermez examines how people maintain normalcy and keep the everyday together in sites of protracted conflict, where violence is a condition of living fused into social and political reality. The book explores the experience of violence "in the meanwhile" as a liminal space of anticipation and remembrance. When "the war remains constantly present as a structural force in social life" (4), what kinds of emotions, ambiguities, politics, and experiences are possible? How do various discourses sustain a social order dependent on the very possibility of this violence emerging?

The book offers a rigorous and sophisticated exploration into these expressions and experiences of the everyday, where violence lurks as both eventful and ordinary. Hermez centers his ethnography on uncovering what the phenomenological approach can reveal about the nature of violence. He does so by tracing violence's anticipation and memory practices embedded in various ethnographic encounters: a mother's advice to her son, a family lunch conversation, a pub brawl, a meeting between neighbors, a walk in Downtown Beirut, etc. By highlighting the phenomenology of violence, Hermez presents us with a long-awaited ethnographic account of violence beyond and against ideas of Lebanese exceptionalism (the assumptions that the Lebanese are inherently indifferent to war and violence, and that the "Lebanon model" as political and social structure is unique).

If violence can be elusive, opaque, and ambiguous, then how can we study and understand it? Hermez's ethnography is layered with various intersubjective experiences of violence that render the latter less of an abstract concept or a predetermined phenomenon. The book shifts the focus to the experiential by exploring specific practices, behaviors, and emotions and what they can tell us about violence. The uncertainties and dissimilarities that emerge from these experiences point to violence as both rupture and transformation, elation and despair, terror and normal. They provide an interesting and not-so-explored insight into where violence—past and future—hides, how it emerges and disappears in social life, and when it is remembered and evoked. Violence then expands into the public discourse as something consumable, and memories are employed for various political and social interests. Through the experiential, one can simultaneously see how the ordinary collapses in moments of recollection and anticipation of violence, and how this violence is fused into the everyday. The ethnographer here becomes a detective, sometimes a psychologist, and many times an "ambulance chaser" (25) as he tries to detect the violence in people's experiences and utterances.

The book's chapters deconstruct different circulating narratives on living and violence in Lebanon and each gives a sense of how everyday life experiences are informed and affected by the practices of anticipating and recollecting violence. The multifaceted history of violence in Lebanon is also told as it is evoked in daily interactions like a family lunch conversation (Chapter 2).

The book is divided into two parts. The first part looks at the anticipation practices of violence in Lebanon, emergent in mundane acts, gestures, and expressions, and determined by identity (class, sect, and political affiliation), worldview (ideology), and interest (social, political, and economic), as well as the intensity of violence (Chapters 3 and 4). Anticipating future violence also relies on past experiences, "as if the past bombing was still sending shock waves into the present" (65). These intersubjective experiences are shaped and reconfigured by public discourses and objects that promote the consumption of certain narratives on violence. Chapter 5 collects these different objects and actors—including political speeches, TV shows, psychic readers, media advertisements, checkpoints, graffiti, and civil society campaigns—where an "anticipation economy" capitalizes on the meanwhile.

The second part looks at the relation between anticipating violence and remembering it, as "recollection and anticipation are simultaneous processes that meld into each other" (5). Here, the focus is on memory politics and how remembrance affects social relations and the relation of subjects to the state. The book offers an interesting contribution to the study...