For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers by Hiba Bou Akar (review)

Following Lebanon’s May 2018 parliamentary elections, a strong showing from Hezbollah and its allied parties in Beirut was interpreted, both in Lebanon and abroad, as a sign of the party’s growing power. Indeed, as election results were made public, Hezbollah supporters took to Beirut’s streets in celebration. In one particularly provocative act, some of these supporters draped Hezbollah flags over the memorial statue of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri (who is believed to have been assassinated by Hezbollah operatives) and chanted “Beirut has become Shia” (Khatib 2018). In her excellent study For the War Yet to Come, Hiba Bou Akar gives compelling insight into how this sort of sectarian identity has been spatialized and contested in a city where “land has a religion and everyday spaces are evaluated as strategic assets” (29).

Bou Akar disputes the oft-voiced lament that Beirut lacks urban planning. Challenging the modernist notion of planning-as-progress that underpins this complaint, she shows that urban spaces are instead planned according to the logic of “the war yet to come.” In this logic, war is not a temporary aberration but “a state of affairs expected to recur” (7), and preparation for it takes the form of planning and construction of the built environment as an always potentially militarized space. This includes ensuring residence of certain areas by members of the appropriate sect and seeking “to control strategic hilltops, secure access to supplies of weapons, and control urban routes of movement” (29). At the center of these processes are what Bou Akar terms Lebanon’s “religious-political organizations” (3). Bou Akar shows how these organizations, which grew out of militias active in Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, work through a constellation of government ministries, municipal bodies, private developers, and religious institutions to construct Beirut’s peripheries as frontiers in future sectarian and regional wars.

In order to demonstrate this, Bou Akar undertakes ethnographic research in three of Beirut’s southern neighborhoods: Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail, Sahra Choueifat, and Doha Aramoun. She speaks with a wide variety of stakeholders involved in the planning and building process over two periods (2004–2005 and 2009–2010), showing how sectarianism and its manifestation in the built environment have changed over time. Bou Akar characterizes these three neighborhoods as both peripheries and frontiers. She argues that they are peripheries in two senses: both to Beirut’s traditional urban center and to the neighboring Hezbollah-dominated area of al-Dahiya, which has transformed from a former periphery to a new urban center. At the same time, these neighborhoods have become frontiers in struggles against perceived “Shiite encroachment” (17) stemming from al-Dahiya. Seeking to stymie arrival of further Shiite residents, the neighborhoods’ Christian, Druze, and Sunni Muslim religious-political organizations have engaged in planning practices designed to maintain the neighborhoods’ previous sectarian identity. These include changing zoning laws to limit the number of apartments and floors in a given building or seeking to prevent or even reverse sales of land and buildings to Hezbollah-affiliated developers.

The book is split into five chapters, with a brief prologue and epilogue. Chapter 1 functions as an introduction to the book’s methods, theory, and sites of inquiry and provides context for Lebanon’s sectarian politics and discourses. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 take each of the three neighborhoods in turn, analyzing how a particular planning practice is manifested in the built environment and how it contributes to the production of Beirut’s frontiers. Chapter 5 traces the trajectory of planning discourse and practice in Lebanon spanning from the 1950s to the present.

Chapter 2 focuses on the neighborhood of Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail and analyzes what Bou Akar terms the “doubleness” (32) of ruins from Lebanon’s civil war in the neighborhood. Before the civil war, most of the neighborhood’s residents were Christians and the Maronite Church owned large swaths of land in the area. However, at the...