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Purpose: Using critical disaster studies and state theory, we assess the disaster aid platform named Lebanon Reconstruction, Reform and Recovery Framework (3RF) that was put in place by international donors in the aftermath of the Beirut Port Blast in August 2020, in order to examine the effectiveness of its inclusive decision-making architecture, as well as its institutional building and legislative reform efforts. Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses the case study approaach and relies on two original data sets compiled by authors, using desk reviews of academic literature and secondary data, in addition to 24 semi-structured expert interviews and participant observation for two years. Findings: The aid platform appears innovative, participatory and effectively functioning toward recovery and reform. However, in practice, the government dismisses CSOs, undermines reforms and dodges state building, whereas the 3RF is structured in incoherent ways and operates according to conflicting logics, generating inertia and pitfalls that hinder effective participatory governance, prevent institutional building, and delay the making of projects. Research limitations/implications: The research contributes to critical scholarship as it addresses an important research gap concerning disaster aid platforms' institutional design and governance that are under-studied in critical disaster studies and political studies. It also highlights the need for critical disaster studies to engage with state theory and vice-versa. Practical implications: The research contributes to evaluations of disaster recovery processes and outcomes. It highlights the limits of disaster aid platforms' claims for participatory decision-making, institutional-building and reforms. Originality/value: The paper amplifies critical disaster studies, through the reflexive analysis of a case-study of an aid platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many states, including Lebanon, have used the Covid-19 pandemic as an occasion to reassert their power and to consolidate their policing and repressive apparatuses. We are far from a seamless scenario, however. Rather than a mere reproduction of the sectarian political system, we argue in this paper that the governance of the pandemic in Lebanon reveals tensions between powerful political parties, weakened public agencies, as well as multiple solidarity groups with diverging aspirations, colliding over the imagined future of the country. Using various sources of information (broadcast, print and online news media, social media), we build a database of the types of actors and the categories of actions across locations, and analyze the territorial and political variations of the governance of the pandemic. The paper demonstrates that the Covid-19 response in Lebanon operates through ongoing negotiations over the national territory in which timid yet visible aspirations for a non-sectarian country confront sectarian territorialities through back-and-forth cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to better study youth in ways that can capture their complex subjectivities? While qualitative methodologies succeed rather well at unpacking youth's holistic selfhoods, quantitative tools are often more rigid at apprehending their multifaceted lives. Some tools such as multiple correspondence analysis do allow for a more nuanced and thorough understanding, and are particularly opportune in contexts where the studied group is heterogeneous in terms of social class and sectarian origin – such as the Lebanese case. Building on these attempts at quantitatively measuring youth's multidimensional attributes, this paper analyzes a survey of Lebanese youth conducted in 2015 within the framework of the Power2Youth (P2Y) study to generate an intricate reading of young people, using the k-means clustering method. We use this technique to generate five youth groups: i) potential migrants, ii) secular youth, iii) school-to-job youth, iv) conservative students, and v) maturing youth. The paper discusses how each cluster relates to politics and religiosity, as well as to views on women's roles and rights, highlighting the high variability within and across clusters. We conclude with reflections on how the clustering method may be useful to furthering research agendas and quantitative methodologies examining youth's attitudes to political change in post-colonial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lebanon is hosting more than 1 million Syrian refugees. For a country of its size, and a population of around 4 million, this influx of Syrians into Lebanon has exposed many of its already established ailments. A prevailing perception is that Syrians are establishing businesses and competing with the Lebanese, leading to violent reactions on the part of host communities. In this article, we seek to debunk the reductionist framing of 'the Syrian refugee' as a burden, and showcase the economic contribution that some Syrian entrepreneurs have been making to urban neighbourhoods. While entrepreneurs certainly represent a minority of the refugees in Lebanon, we argue that, rather than being competition, Syrian entrepreneurs are complementary to Lebanese businesses in urban areas, and that Syrian businesses are enriching spatial practices in the city. As such, we claim their experiences are significant to document as they can inform useful policy interventions that can render Syrian self-employment an opportunity for local economic development in cities and towns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban scholarship on Beirut often focuses either on the reconstruction of its downtown area controlled by the private real estate company Solidere, or on its poor southern suburbs (Dahiya) dominated by the Shi‵i Islamic political party, Hizbullah. Downtown is strongly associated with an urban ‘modern’ model that generates pride for Lebanese, while Dahiya is defamed as a less modern urban space, unworthy of consideration as part of Beirut’s urban modernity. This article explores the contested urban modernity of Beirut through an investigation of the new moral leisure sector that has spread across the southern suburb. It challenges the simplistic distinction and valuation of urban spaces in Beirut, and argues for a more complex understanding of urban modernity that encompasses spaces of the city where the features that produce urban modernity are multiple and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging both polarized depictions of Muslim youth and scholarship that over-privileges piety as a focal point in Muslims’ lives, this article highlights the complexity of the moral worlds of Shi‘i youth in Lebanon. Through ethnography of youth choices when going out, we argue that youth practices and discourses of morality are multiple and flexible in their deployments, perhaps especially when it comes to ideas about leisure. This interpretive flexibility may work to redefine ideas about leisure within a framework of religiosity such that some of the rules of piety itself are perceived as flexible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the efforts of the Lebanese political party Hizballah to shape the culture of an Islamic milieu in Lebanon. Particular focus is given to the Khiam detention center and the Mleeta resistance memorial in south Lebanon. According to the authors, these two sites highlight the significance of history to Hizballah's understandings of thaqafa or culture. The different factors that contribute to the expansion of the Islamic milieu in the country are discussed which include the party's effort to respond to demand for Islamic entertainment, political polarizations and the growth of a Shi'i market base. The role played by the Lebanese Association for the Arts (LAA) in cultural production is also discussed.

The article presents information about several papers discussed at a conference organized by the American University of Beirut and the International Institute for the Study of the Muslim World that explored the theme Spaces of Faith and Fun. Topics discussed included socio-cultural aspects of the Muslim public sphere, leisure practices among the Muslim middle class and the impact of Muslim entrepreneurs on social norms and values in religious neighborhoods.

The article discusses the role of the Lebanese Muslim group and political party Hizbullah in producing a concept of culture in Lebanon deeply rooted in Islamic tradition and spaces. The author emphasizes the ways in which Hizbullah actively conflates notions of culture and religion in such acts of production. The author discusses a detention center in Khiam, Lebanon and an ecotourism project as indicative of Hizbullah's conception of culture.

The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims and in enduring the verbal and military onslaught against it. Although it is not the intention here to reduce explanations for Hizbullah's durability to discursive politics, this article suggests that both the labelling of Hizbullah as terrorist and, conversely, its identification as a 'lebanonised' political force that is about to make its conversion into an unarmed political party are misleading and incapable of grasping this organisation's complexities. In fact, both 'terrorist' and 'lebanonised' labels produce a quality of knowledge inferior to that produced by Hizbullah's own conceptualisation of its enemies. But most importantly, the debate on Hizbullah's alleged terrorist nature has obscured several of its traits that many should register before passing judgement on it. Our analysis shows that the variety of institutions Hizbullah has been carefully elaborating and readapting over the past two decades in Lebanon operate today as a holistic and integrated network which produce sets of values and meanings embedded in an interrelated religious and political framework--that of the wilayat al-faqih . These meanings are disseminated on a daily basis among Shi'a constituencies through the party's institutionalised networks and serve to mobilise them into 'the society of the Resistance' ( mujtamaa' al-muqawama ), which is the foundation of the hala al-islamiyya (Islamic sphere) in Lebanon. Accordingly, any prospect of Hizbullah's transformation away from armed 'resistance' should be firmly placed in an analysis of its hegemony among the Shi'a of Lebanon and of the tools it uses to acquire and sustain this status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature covering forced population displacement has neglected spatial implications, dealing with place as mere context. Building on a case study of the city of Halba (Lebanon) where it maps a process of contingent encounters through which disparate resources, individuals, and groups are stitched together to generate large-scale housing projects that shelter refugees, this paper demonstrates the importance of studying displacement through a grounded reading of the spatial transformations it implicates. The paper maps multiple private and public actors who exploit cracks and connect seemingly disparate material flows (e.g., humanitarian aid, public housing subsidies) and institutional systems (e.g., humanitarian, public, private, religious) in ways that catalyze and accelerate the production of housing in order to derive profit from the opportunities afforded by the refugee crisis. Thus, developers, buyers, residents, brokers, public agents, and other actors all support a flow of informal profitable exchanges that are far from seamless economic transactions, mixing instead capitalist profiteering with human solidarity, religious morality, or kinship obligations that all buttress the possibility of these encounters and their materialization into new configurations of urban quarters. The arrangements formed through these processes, the paper shows, are strongly reflective of existing social hierarchies and inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the dilemmas of the European Union's (EU) open access to data policy. The authors believe that EU's call for open research data is commendable in principle but presents problems in practice, as many researchers of southern countries are overworked and have little access to funds to buy time to analyse results and write before data is shared by others. It mentions the call of some researchers from Europe for public availability of data as soon as possible.