Garbage Infrastructure, Sanitation, and New Meanings of Citizenship in Lebanon

Joanne Randa Nucho (bio)

Abstract

In 2015, protestors south of Beirut, Lebanon, blocked the road to the landfill in Naimeh, an improperly prepared and overflowing dumpsite that serves as a collection point for Beirut’s garbage. As piles of garbage grew on Beirut’s streets, so did a massive protest that was not defined or organized by either of the major political factions or any of the sectarian political parties in Lebanon. Why were the 2015 protests not organized along the dominant sectarian political lines? This article analyzes the protests and their aftermath to understand how a relation to shared infrastructures plays a role in the emergent forms of citizenship brought about in the protest movement.

Naimeh, Lebanon had long borne the burden of the capital city’s trash. The local landfill, an improperly prepared dumpsite in use since 1997, was supposed to have been temporary (Abu Rish, “Garbage Politics”). Complaints about the overflowing and poorly managed site went unheeded for years. In the summer of 2015, residents of the town blocked the road leading to the landfill. This was not the first time that protestors had blocked the road, but years of broken promises by government officials made this protest more serious (ibid). Garbage throughout Beirut remained uncollected. During those weeks, mountains of garbage piled up on Beirut’s streets. Sukleen, the private company hired to carry out sanitation services, was unable to haul the garbage off to Naimeh. Out of desperation, people started burning it on the streets, releasing noxious fumes and odors into the humid summer air.

The protests that accompanied the accumulation of garbage in the city streets were aimed at the state’s inability and unwillingness to manage public goods and services, and at the illegal extension of parliament, the subsequent deferral of the 2014 elections, and the absence of an acting president. By August, an estimated 20,000 protestors had gathered in downtown Beirut, a site that was rebuilt during post-civil war reconstruction in the 1990s as a luxury shopping destination inaccessible to most Lebanese (El Deeb and Karam). This was the largest protest in years that was not organized or backed by one of the prevailing political factions (the Sunni dominated March 14 coalition and the Shi’a dominated March 8 coalition) or by any of the sectarian political parties. The broad spectrum of protestors in attendance, presumably from different political factions, was rare in recent years. Since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005, the polarization of political factions had deepened. However, this protest defied the narrow framework that positions Lebanese politics as a binary of Sunni and Shi’a dominated politics (often reductively mapped onto regional disputes between Saudi Arabia and Iran). The protestors did not direct their critique against any particular political faction. Instead, the protestors’ critique took as its central defining feature the failure of infrastructure and thus the failure of the government itself, rather than the failure of a particular political faction. Because sect is a salient and important political category in Lebanon, it was all the more remarkable that the protests were not attached to sectarian political formations. In Lebanon, each political party is affiliated with a religious sect, and representation in parliament is based on a sectarian quota system. Aside from formal political representation, Lebanese religious courts have jurisdiction over personal status laws regulating marriage and divorce. Furthermore, many Lebanese people rely on sect-affiliated institutions for access to basic services and infrastructures.¹

What is it about coming together around the buildup of failure that compels thinking about collectivity outside of the usual ways of conceptualizing sociality through belonging or exclusion? We can approach this question using Lauren Berlant’s framework of breakdown as a “transitional” moment, a moment when new forms of being together might come into view without an insistence on sameness as the starting point for politics (Berlant, “The Commons”). The garbage crisis represents a moment in which, as Berlant writes, “just because we are in the room together does not mean that we belong to the room or each other” (“The Commons” 395). The protests that ensued when garbage collection broke down created an opening in the highly fragmented, privatized identitarian political framework. This political framework is constituted by infrastructure channels that form what Paul Kockelman might call “sieves” that produce belonging and exclusion not in terms of religious belief, but in terms of sectarian identity and identification. The protests provide an opening to a way of thinking about the terms of citizenship that does not rely on likeness, but is articulated in relation to the demand for functioning infrastructures.

While no single coherent movement emerged from Beirut’s garbage protests, they did present the possibility for a form of collective action that neither required nor denounced a sectarian discourse of belonging, which is important, given that many of those involved presumably had attachments to sectarian identification and even to sectarian institutions. The result was that an ambiguous space opened, one of being together in opposition to the privatization and state neglect of vital infrastructures. In and through their focus on infrastructure, the Beirut garbage protests of 2015 staged new forms of relation and even demands for citizenship outside of likeness as belonging. These forms of citizenship are important to think about not only within the context of Lebanese politics, but more conceptually as well. The protestors performed something akin to what Kyle Shelton calls “infrastructural citizenship” in his work on the collaborative activism against highway construction by residents of a mainly affluent white suburb and a lower class black suburb of Houston. For Shelton, this citizenship is not defined by national belonging or by belonging to a certain community, but “by the quotidian acts residents used to construct themselves as political actors” (422). In Beirut, a new imaginary of citizenship was forged through acts of protest and civil disobedience and in the face of violent state suppression of the protestors. This connection between Houston, an American city built on histories of violent racist exclusion, and Beirut, a city that is still recovering from civil conflict and ethnic cleansing, illuminates the importance of shared infrastructures to the determination of citizenship beyond the framework of the nation-state.²

While the 2015 protests ended without resolving the sanitation crisis in Lebanon, I take up Julia Elyachar’s provocation in “Upending Infrastructure” not to read an uprising in terms of success or failure. In what follows, I argue that the 2015 protests present the possibility of non-teleological citizenship, citizenship that is still unfolding and that does not necessarily lead to the emergence of a secular national identity, which Lebanon has allegedly “failed” to develop owing to its underlying sectarianism.³ Instead, the protestors articulated an emerging notion of citizenship attached to shared, equitably distributed and well-functioning infrastructures and services. In some ways, the idea that public goods and infrastructures can play a role in bringing people together and in creating a sense of belonging is very old.⁴ The difference in the Beirut protests is that this demand for functioning universally accessible infrastructure was not made in a top-down nation-building moment, but in and through a moment of protest against infrastructural failures and the failure of the state to provide adequate infrastructure. While the implication of these protests remains unknown, they hold potential and promise for everyone living in an era when privatized and fragmented infrastructures differentiate access and perpetuate vast inequalities.

How Did We Get Here?

Access to infrastructures in Lebanon is often facilitated through private or sectarian channels. In fact, there is little distinction between the “state” and sectarian and private channels in Lebanon. Actors occupy multiple positions or navigate through their connections to others who may also occupy multiple positions. In many contexts, accessing services depends upon the ability to make a claim to belonging to a sectarian community, determinable through birth or marriage and further dependent upon class, neighborhood belonging, and the capacity to demonstrate social and gendered notions of propriety. For example, in the Beirut suburb of Bourj Hammoud, low-income housing, managed and maintained by an Armenian political party, is available to men who marry out of sect, but not to women who marry men from another sect.⁵ Getting access or connection usually involves the mobilization of classifications and their “attendant […] moral dimensions,” as is apparent for example in the different gendered dimensions of what would be considered a correct marriage (Bowker and Star 5). The process of connecting is not always seamless for those who navigate these channels, which is why they recalibrate and negotiate sectarian belonging through infrastructure.

The broad coalition of protestors in 2015 is a remarkable achievement in the Lebanese political context where every major political party is affiliated with a religious sect. Lebanon’s political sectarianism does not stem from an ancient system; it is the result of modernizing reforms that started in the late Ottoman empire and extended into the French Mandate period, essentially from the mid-19th century to Lebanon’s independence in 1943 (U. Makdisi). In Lebanon, there are eighteen officially recognized religious sects (including Shi’a Muslim, Sunni Muslim, Maronite Christian, Druze and others), and even among non-observant people, sectarian identity cannot just be “opted” out of, as sectarian identity does not always equate with religious belief. While religious belief and piety certainly animate some political movements in Lebanon, as Lara Deeb argues, sectarian politics and conflicts are not reducible to religion as theology and have continued to evolve and change in the years since independence in 1943.⁶ As Maya Mikdashi reminds us, the state itself is secular, and that state secularism is produced in and through its regulating and managing “both sexual and sectarian difference” (281).

During the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990, sect-affiliated militias carried out ethnic cleansing in the city and divided it into zones that were dangerous or inaccessible to members of certain groups. But conflict is not entirely a thing of the past. Particularly since the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005, Beirut has seen the resurgence of street battles and car bombs. These conflicts are not the same as those of the Civil War era: they are fought along different lines and between different factions. Still, the continuity of violence keeps the memory of the war alive and present for many people who face ongoing insecurity and unpredictability.⁷ Many of my Lebanese interlocutors born after the end of the Civil War avoid visiting neighborhoods dominated by certain sectarian political parties where they feel the people would be hostile towards them because of their own sectarian affiliation.

Sectarian parties and affiliated organizations play a critical role not only in formal political life but in the provisioning of infrastructures, urban planning, and services, as I have argued elsewhere. In most areas, the Lebanese state does not provide sufficient services like water, electricity, or medical care, though infrastructure failure in Lebanon today is not a direct result of the Civil War of 1975-1990. Electricity infrastructures were never fully functional and available to all Lebanese, even before the war years (Abu Rish, “On Power Cuts”). Electricite Du Liban, a public electricity utility, is subject to frequent electricity cuts, especially outside of the Beirut municipal district. Private generator subscription systems have cropped up all over the city and are especially needed in the city’s peripheral suburbs where electricity cuts can go on for several hours each day, while in Beirut cuts average three hours. These generator subscription systems are often owned by wealthy patrons, some of them connected to important political figures or officials, or at least to officials presumed to be important by residents in the neighborhood. Many of my interlocutors believe there is no real distinction between the “state” and the patrons and important families that monopolize the provision of some of these goods, and they do not express distinctions in these terms. Rather, these relationships are described by invoking the term wasta or “connections”—the idea that knowing people in power allows certain individuals access to ownership, political power, or exceptional treatment. As Kristin Monroe writes, this notion of the power of wasta extends even in dealings with traffic police, who must think twice about issuing a ticket to someone who might be well-connected.

In 1994, the private company Sukleen was contracted to handle Beirut’s sanitation services, an arrangement that only ended in 2018, owing partially to the controversy over the garbage pileup of 2015.⁸ Even before the 2015 protests began, the growing problem of improperly prepared landfills prompted the state to come up with a comprehensive system for sanitation. The plan was to allow the private sanitation company Sukleen to negotiate the disposal of garbage regionally with “local power brokers” (Abu Rish, “Garbage Politics”). The sectarian political actors and patrons that run most of the patchwork shadow infrastructure services, like electricity, are precisely the people with whom Sukleen would have needed to negotiate. Municipalities that are dominated by members of one sectarian political party can make planning decisions that have profound impacts on urban development for all residents in their jurisdiction.⁹ While the pileup of garbage on Beirut’s streets might be called a “crisis” in media shorthand, those solutions that propose to pick up garbage alone will not address the larger framework that has produced the broken sanitation system and the numerous failed infrastructures.

Failure in itself does not prompt transformation. In fact, infrastructural failure can serve to reinscribe existing relations of power as sectarian patronage networks use instances of breakdown to enrich themselves or consolidate their political positions. Sectarianism is more than just a divisive discourse manipulated by elites, it must also be understood as a material process rooted in service provisions, urban planning, and development. In the lead-up to 2015, there was a growing sense of frustration with the ways neoliberal ideologies “as translated through Lebanon’s sectarian‐clientelist regime on the ground” put further pressures on low income people and their “right to the city,” especially in relation to housing (Fawaz 828). In other words, over the years people have realized that the channels available to them through which to secure resources, through affiliation and sectarian political parties, were far from stable or guaranteed.

The garbage pileup represented a breaking point partially because of the uniqueness of sanitary infrastructure. It does not have an analog in water or electricity infrastructures, both in terms of its material qualities and attendant modes of management, and these differences matter. As Brian Larkin argues, the aesthetics of infrastructures are just as vital as their technical function, because they “produce the ambient conditions of everyday life” (“The Politics” 336). The pileup of garbage presents a unique disruption to the everyday conditions of a city, in contrast to shortages of water or electricity, which do not play as significant a role in a city’s ambient conditions – things like everyday smells or sounds and how people think about them. Electricity in Lebanon, which suffers frequent timed cuts, does not work in the same way. People with the money to do so can keep their supply of electricity going during the frequent public cuts by subscribing to privately owned electricity generators. Some people may share expenses in order to buy a generator for their building, and wealthy individuals may buy a generator for their building. The pileup of garbage does not really have an individual solution, payout, or workaround, and it must be collectively managed. Even if wealthy individuals could hire private trash collectors to remove their own garbage, the smells and physical obstacles produced by the trash bags piling up on sidewalks and streets and the clouds of smoke from burning trash would be inescapable. Trash in the streets, unlike electricity cuts or water shortages, produces a different urgency for collective action. While by no means inevitable (or sustainable without a considerable long term strategy), the pileup of trash in Beirut quickly brought protestors to a breaking point.

The circulation of trash, including its disposal, transport, and removal, crystallizes and makes visible certain relationships and relations (Moore). The removal of trash from Beirut and its relocation in the Naimeh landfill are of course not accidental, even when they are poorly planned and executed. That is why the accumulation of trash on the streets of Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon and the privileged beneficiary of services, resources, transportation, electricity, and water, is political: it “makes visible that which had no reason to be seen, it lodges one world into another” (Rancière). Naimeh had always lived with Beirut’s trash, and suddenly Beirut had to do it.

It is not only the visibility of trash that matters here, however. Christina Schwenkel reminds us of the need “to move beyond the primacy of vision and visuality” and to be attentive to the other senses and the experiences they produce in relation to infrastructures (“Sense”). In some of the worst months of summer heat and humidity, Beirut was smothered with terrible odors and with smoke rising from burning trash. Air travels unfettered between Beirut’s neighborhoods and its suburbs, and with it the stench of rotting trash. The meaning of garbage is produced in relation to its physical qualities, its nauseating smell and the health risks it brings. Trash is dirty, and as Rosalind Fredericks writes, “its associations of filth govern its management and its sociopolitical power” (“Vital Infrastructures” 532). Garbage carries social and even moral meanings and interpretations, hence the emergence of the “You Stink” hashtag lobbed at the politicians involved in what protesters deemed “dirty” political games.

Anatomy of the 2015 Protest

As garbage piled up on the streets of Beirut, anger and disgust grew. As Ziad Abu Rish writes in “Garbage Politics,” the protests were started by a movement calling itself “You Stink,” which also created an online presence documenting the garbage pileup with photos and videos. These initial protests were small, but eventually they became more popular, drawing in people from outside the initial circle of activists. However, the You Stink organizers were not at the helm of the more popular protests; in fact, You Stink at one point tried to withdraw from the ongoing protests, claiming provocateurs had infiltrated them after a particularly violent clash in August (Abu Rish, “Garbage Politics”). While they later reversed their position and continued to participate in the protests, this account demonstrates that most of the protestors were not represented by this initial group of activists. The protests had the force of a truly popular demonstration, which was also ignited by the violent state reaction to the protestors. Soon “You Stink” appeared all over social media, referring to the politicians and government actors the protestors found responsible for inefficiencies in all utilities and services (and, of course, for the garbage).

It is no accident that downtown Beirut ended up as the site and setting for protests demanding better public infrastructure and services. The downtown has always been the spatially privileged recipient of infrastructures and resources, not only in relation to its larger urban metro area but also compared to other parts of Lebanon. As Rosalind Fredericks argues in Vital Infrastructures of Trash in Dakar, in Senegal the capital city plays a major role in the imaginary of Senegalese citizenship, and the same can be said for Beirut, where the pileup of garbage in the capital of this small country represents the “trashing of the nation” (6). For many Lebanese, the downtown is a symbol of the many unpopular postwar investments that privatized public space and resources. In 1997, Saree Makdisi presciently wrote that the battles over the narrative of Lebanese national identity would be fought over the image of downtown Beirut. The battles over the rebuilding and redevelopment of the downtown had already been fought in the 1990s, and for the vast majority of people who hoped the downtown would regain its prewar glory, they were also lost. After the end of the civil war, Lebanon faced the challenge of recovering from the destruction of most of its institutions and many of its urban spaces. The controversial overhaul of downtown Beirut by former Prime Minister Hariri’s company, Solidere, turned the downtown into a space for luxury consumers. The overhauled area has little connection to the downtown of the prewar years, with its popular markets and major transit hub. In fact, today’s downtown is designed to exclude most Lebanese people who are not wealthy enough to consume within its spaces. Its shopping mall boasts international luxury chains that cater to wealthy tourists and to Lebanese elites and expats. The downtown is not easily approachable on foot and feels cut off from the neighborhoods around it. For many, the overhaul of the downtown was one of the postwar era’s most searing betrayals of an implicit promise to restore or to rebuild public spaces in the country’s capital.

Of course, infrastructure and urban planning are often used to create and entrench forms of exclusion. As Antina von Schnitzler writes in Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid, infrastructures were not primarily used to “produce or to maintain a public” (15). She recounts that townships in South Africa lacked services and basic infrastructures like electrification. White wealthy neighborhood residents retreated to private gardens or country clubs and did not demand public parks. Von Schnitzler makes the keen observation that “apartheid infrastructures were deployed to prevent a public from coming into being” (15), inverting the presumed relationship between infrastructure and its powers to constitute a sense of being part of a public. Infrastructures can also alienate.

The 2015 Beirut trash protest was both about reclaiming the downtown and performing a different kind of sociality and collective action in the wake of a hitherto unseen form of infrastructural failure: garbage piling up in the streets of the capital city. However, to imagine that the crisis only begins when garbage is left on the streets of Beirut is to maintain the hierarchy of geographies in terms of infrastructure provisioning in Beirut and its peripheries. As Janet Roitman argues in Anti-Crisis, the crisis framework prevents certain questions from emerging, particularly in instances where breakdown is not exceptional, but part of an ongoing continuum. Describing the events in Beirut as a garbage “crisis” implies a framework of mutually exclusive problem and solution, where solutions involving the removal of garbage in Beirut may leave unexamined the impact of this removal on Beirut’s peripheries or rural areas. This notion of crisis implies the normalcy of the preceding period, which is understood as having been interrupted by a deviation that led to the current situation. The protestors demanded much more than better sanitation infrastructure, demonstrating their understanding of the garbage pileup of 2015 beyond the terms of crisis. We can understand the pileup of garbage as the materialization of the trash politics of the state, an emblem of the layers of theft and political patronage systems that keep systems patchworked together and broken, partially privatized for the benefit of a small elite.

The 2015 protests expressed frustration with the failure of the Lebanese government to provide and maintain state infrastructures, including electricity, water, and management of public services. Failing infrastructures, however, can still create the conditions of possibility for imagined futures, for the promise of modernity. As Brian Larkin writes, “It is precisely because infrastructures are invested with promise and because that promise is reflexively foregrounded that—when they work or when they fail—they bring into visibility the operation of governmental rationality and offer that rationality up for political debate” (“Promising Forms” 183). The infrastructure of sanitation contains within itself a kind of promise, at the very least, to move trash out of the city streets and into landfills, out of sight and out of senses, at least for the residents of the city.

The protesters’ appeal was not for the fall of the state, but rather a demand for the state to provide. Perhaps this demand for reform should not come as a surprise since the state can be understood, according to Lauren Berlant, as “a resource as well as a site of domination” (Berlant “On Citizenship”). When the police and military attacked protestors, social media users began to post photos of the violence. Artist Jana Traboulsi created iconic graphics juxtaposing these photos with phrases like “Kif ma fi dawleh? Hon al dawleh wa hek shekleha!” (What do you mean there is no state? Here is the state and this is what it looks like!).¹⁰ The phrase “here is the state,” which appeared all over social media sites, was a reference to the often-repeated wayn al dawleh? (Where is the state?), a common Lebanese saying used to locate responsibility for failing infrastructure in Lebanon. As James Ferguson writes, “infrastructure does its violence in ways that make it peculiarly hard to ascribe responsibility” (559). Indeed the violence of infrastructures and the pervasive inequalities it produces are often naturalized and made to seem inevitable. The dawleh, or “state,” in wayn al dawleh? does not point to one faction or sectarian political organization; it points to a “state” that has failed to live up to its normative promises. The protestors’ demands are not nostalgic and do not necessarily have precedents. Still, everything from electricity cuts to water shortages and traffic jams could be an occasion for someone to ask wayn al dawleh? as a way of assigning accountability to a state that has left the provisioning of certain utilities to a patchwork of private entities that skim profits for themselves and deliver goods that are both expensive and low in quality. These private entities include wealthy patrons who sell a few amps of electricity via private generator systems and water from privately owned water trucks that fill tanks atop apartment buildings when water supply runs low.

In 2016, state officials responded to the infrastructural breakdown with a familiar makeshift solution: the garbage was dumped in other improperly prepared landfills. One of the places where the garbage ended up was the working class municipality of Bourj Hammoud (see fig. 1). If we are to pay attention to the aesthetics of infrastructure, it is meaningful that a disused and informal Civil War era landfill in Bourj Hammoud, a working-class suburb of Beirut, was one of the sites chosen in 2016 to take Beirut’s garbage. Most of the residents who live in Bourj Hammoud earn little or are precariously employed. It is a relatively affordable area near Beirut that is home to many migrant workers and to displaced people from Syria. In recent years, the number of displaced Syrians in Lebanon has grown, due to ongoing conflict in Syria. The UNHCR estimates that there are almost one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, but it is likely these figures are low, as they only include registered refugees (“Refugee Situations”). The Bourj Hammoud municipality was reportedly offered 25 million US dollars to reopen its landfill to Beirut’s trash for a five-year period (“Lebanon’s Trash Crisis”).

The reopening of the informal landfill in Bourj Hammoud was met by protests, but they did not draw the crowds that Beirut’s protests did, partly because their choice was cast within a sectarian framework. While Bourj Hammoud is a diverse working-class district in terms of its population, the municipality’s leadership is Armenian, and most of the city’s social welfare institutions, medical facilities, and schools are run by Armenian political and religious organizations, namely the Armenian Tashnag party. It was the Maronite Christian Kataib party that organized a protest opposing the municipality’s decision to accept the garbage deal (El Amine). While valid environmental concerns motivated the protest, it did not draw the broad coalition of protestors that Beirut’s trash pileup did. The Bourj Hammoud protest was reminiscent of other political mobilizations against failing infrastructure, which remain within sectarian frameworks. Éric Verdeil describes earlier protests against the dysfunctional electricity distribution system, which “never coalesced into a unified movement; instead, they have served sectarian and local political agendas, reinforcing the city’s current political fragmentation” (162). In Bourj Hammoud, protests against the informal landfill’s reopening ended up looking like a dispute between two political parties with sectarian overtones. It was far more difficult for Armenians in Bourj Hammoud to join in local protests than it was for them to protest in Beirut because in Bourj Hammoud it would have been regarded as a protest against the Armenian Tashnag party-dominated municipality rather than against the Lebanese “state” and its actors, which everyone could (and frequently does) justifiably critique. Given that they were not promoted by any particular sectarian political party, the protests in downtown Beirut had more legitimacy in their call for a new form of citizenship attached to a demand for functioning infrastructure.

Fig. 1. Bourj Hammoud’s landfill (on the left) as seen from the Mediterranean Sea. Photo by Laleh Khalili. Used by permission.

For many of my Armenian interlocutors living in Bourj Hammoud, affinities emerge from feeling part of a community. This community is often defined in sectarian ways and reproduced through everyday transactions and exchanges in medical clinics, microlending facilities, and social welfare centers (Nucho). In 2015, people were deeply frustrated with the patchwork systems that kept electricity erratic and expensive and the water supply unpredictable. The ambivalence that many felt between their affinities for sect-affiliated organizations and resentment towards a state that seemed to provide very little in the way of infrastructure left an opening. In the 2015 protests, people said, the object of their ire was not the failure of specific parties or factions but rather their totality in the state. It was wayn al dawleh? that activated the garbage protests in 2015 in the capital city. It was this stage that provided for the emergence of a broad-based coalition and an emergent citizenship imaginary.

The Protest and New Meanings of Citizenship

In the postwar era, the Lebanese state did not mobilize infrastructure as a mediator to state institutions. In fact, the intentions of the state are not always important for understanding, experiencing, and apprehending infrastructures. Nikhil Anand’s provocation to think about human relationships formed in and through urban water pipes and distribution systems that “exceed human intentionality, thought, and action” (7-8) is useful here. What he calls “hydraulic citizenship” is a process worked out incrementally through relations between residents, city officials, plumbers, and the pipes themselves; it is not a teleological project but can be reversed, pushed back against. In Lebanon in 2015, everyday relations to infrastructure were instructive: people were tired of having to pay two electricity bills (one to a private generator owner and another to the state grid) or of asking well-connected people for favors in order to secure a hospital bed. These accumulated experiences of breakdown and lack provided for an alternative vision of politics and political action, one that imagined a right to infrastructure that could be guaranteed to citizens, rather than being a privilege. In that sense, the protests were built on a citizenship imaginary unintentionally shaped through infrastructural failure rather than its even provision.

A citizenship imaginary based on the demand for equitable, functioning infrastructures is nothing less than a new kind of public imaginary. Abdoumaliq Simone’s notion of the formation of publics is instructive: “Instead of people coming together to consensually decide the markers of identity and common rules necessary to recognize common participation, the public is a matter of projecting a way of talking and regarding that goes beyond the specificity of one’s life situation” (119). Material infrastructures provide that possibility, as what is shared between protestors is the experience of brokenness, of patchwork systems, even as they are left vulnerable to these breakdowns quite differently, especially those with the least resources. In 2015, the citizenry insisted that the starting point for assembly would be the experience of infrastructural breakdown. Many contemporary infrastructures divide territories and populations both through uneven accessibility and privatization (Graham and Marvin). In Lebanon, infrastructure did the inverse of what it is often presumed to do; the shared sense of brokenness allowed people to unite around its failure. The failure of sanitation infrastructure created the conditions of possibility for a shared project, a shared hope, and a shared sense of belonging and citizenship. Of course, what happened in Lebanon is not the first or only case in which the brokenness of official or state infrastructures mobilized alternative forms of solidarity around both the critique of state failure and the development of ways to cope with infrastructural inadequacies.¹¹ Julia Elyachar’s concept of the social infrastructures of communicative channels is helpful here (“Phatic Labor”). We can think about these “social infrastructures” as resources that are not entirely subsumed by sectarian political organizations. As Diana Allan reminds us, moments of collaboration that come from experiences of “shared marginality” and that exceed both nationalist frameworks and sectarian divisions are often overlooked in the context of Lebanon. These moments emerge through mundane or even illicit activities that are rendered somehow outside of politics, even by the participants themselves (Allan 94-95). As Elyachar argues, moments of breakdown might make these pathways and channels more visible (“Upending Infrastructure”).

The fact that this starting point for a new citizenship imaginary had been a potential for a long time not only dispels the “crisis” framework, but also explains why many of those who joined the protest later were not only residents of Beirut fed up with a local garbage problem. The protest was instead an opportunity to express disgust with the rampant “theft” of state actors across sectors and sects. The fragmented infrastructures of Beirut and its urban periphery can tell us something about the contours of a particular political process, given that “they represent long-term accumulations of finance, technology, know-how, and organisational and geopolitical power” (Graham and Marvin 12). The incidents of 2015 represent the possibility of a still-emerging “infrastructural citizenship” (Shelton).

In contrast to the popular garbage protests of 2015, in which a large and diverse group of people took part, a smaller 2011 protest organized by a movement called “The people want the fall of the sectarian regime” was not as popular (Abu Rish, “Garbage Politics”). The latter protest did not foreground material politics, though it held up the sectarian system itself as the object of protest. What is notable here is that the garbage protests did not explicitly call for the “fall” of the sectarian system. According to Abu Rish, some of the original organizers considered broaching the topic of a larger critique of the political order, but they backed off, fearing they would lose public support. The popularity of the 2015 protests was due in part to the fact that they provided an opportunity to enact a citizenship imaginary that did not require the denouncement of or recourse to sectarian attachments. The protestors made a claim for better sanitation as citizens, not as members of a “community.” This change in the citizenship imaginary was precisely what made the protests so notable.

Despite the fraught nature of Lebanese narratives of national identity, protestors in 2015 waived the Lebanese flag. Still, the protestors’ demands do not explicitly attach themselves to an already articulated Lebanese nationalist project. The presence of the Lebanese flag can be read as insisting on a collectivity outside of sectarian affiliation or likeness. This idea of citizenship involves ideas of belonging as enacted in and through functioning infrastructures that link all parts of the city (and the wider metropolitan region and beyond) in relations that could produce a new kind of “imagined community” (Anderson). According to Abu Rish’s compelling account, the protest movement fell apart in the wake of violent police responses and of internal disagreements (“Garbage Politics”). However, the protests and their ability to stage a mass political movement around the question of infrastructure are still unfolding in Lebanon today.

Citizenship Imaginaries and Futures

While the 2015 protests were ultimately dispersed, the memory of that moment where wayn al dawleh? was no longer a hopeless curse mumbled under one’s breath, but a rallying cry to reimagine a new way of relating to infrastructure and to each other, is still animating protests in Lebanon today. In Lebanon and elsewhere, a plan to make these infrastructures a point of departure for new forms of citizenship and belonging that are not based on likeness will take the sustained commitment of new and emergent forms of organizing.¹² As I write these words, protests are again taking place, but this time all over Lebanon and quite beyond any specific infrastructural demand. The situation is evolving, and it is too soon to draw any conclusions about the protests. However, it is clear that the organizational efforts of political platforms like Beirut Madinati, or Beirut My City, while focused on the municipality of Beirut, have pushed forward the demand for equitable social processes through their focus on material infrastructures.

In Lebanon and elsewhere, demands for even provision of services and infrastructures are dominating political discussions. Protestors in Beirut in 2015 gathered in the hope of articulating a different citizenship imaginary out of the frustrations of dealing with infrastructural fragmentation and disrepair. Lebanon is not unique or exceptional in this regard. The American Society of Civil Engineers issued US infrastructure a D+ rating on its 2017 Report Card (“American Infrastructure Report Card”). Does this moment allow for imagining infrastructural solidarities and forms of reciprocity that reach beyond the current geographic and conceptual frameworks of nation states? Given the global and yet unevenly distributed risks in the era of rapid climate change, it is not an unimaginable idea.

Footnotes

1. For further details on access to services, see Cammett, Compassionate Communalism, and Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism.

2. On forms of citizenship beyond the nation-state, see Seitz, A House of Prayer.

3. Below I discuss this idea of sectarianism, which is a problematic and frankly inaccurate framework.

4. See Elyachar, “Next Practices,” and Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism.

5. For more on various aspects of belonging, see Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism.

6. For an excellent discussion of religion and sectarian identity, see Joseph, “Pensée 2.”

7. On the past and present of war, see Hermez, War is Coming.

8. See “Sukleen Ends Services in Beirut.” Another private company, Ramco, now collects Beirut’s trash; see “Ramco Wins Tender.”

9. See Bou Akar, “Contesting Beirut’s Frontiers,” and Bou Akar, For the War Yet to Come.

10. For more on these graphics, see Abu Rish, “What Do You Mean.”

11. See Schwenkel’s discussion of the Vietnamese example in “Spectacular Infrastructure.”

12. See for example Mona Harb, “New Forms of Youth Activism.” Harb identifies the growing importance of new forms of youth activism in Beirut who work outside of the frameworks of sect-affiliated identities or professional NGOs.

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