Border Contestations · Contesting Colonial Borders: Spatial Ordering and Political Subjectivity in South Lebanese Borderlands

Existing literature on borders and border contestations in post-conflict societies is overwhelmingly written through the lens of the nation-state, state-failure, underdevelopment and security. This research analyses borders as complex social processes that are not only enacted through state policies and border policing, but also through perceptions, practices, identities and visions of border communities. It offers a historical ethnography about the multiple reorganisations of everyday life and forced migrations under the shifting borders and systems of rule in south Lebanese frontier villages. This research will provide a political context for the circumstances that created popular struggle against Western interventions around borders.Contesting Colonial Borders will be carried out with an outgoing phase in Geneva, with a secondment of fieldwork in Lebanon and a return phase in Italy. Primary and secondary material and resources in each of these countries will enable writing a social history from the perspective of people who resided in this volatile and constantly changing border area. The research will comprise archival research in Geneva and Beirut, as well as oral history interviews with former residents of the south Lebanese border zone. Working with leading experts on topics such as war, displacement, migration, and borders in each of these countries, this project will form a transnational and interdisciplinary network on these issues. The main output of the project will be a monograph tentatively titled Spatial Contestation in Post-Conflict Situations: A Historical Ethnography of Border Communities in South Lebanon, which will be submitted to Cambridge Middle East Studies Series. Furthermore, two journal papers will be submitted on interlinked dynamics of spatial contestations, colonial history, the state, and society to the Journal of Middle East Studies, the International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, or Social Anthropology.