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3 The bullet-scarred 'martyrs' memorial' statue with the Mohammad al-Amin mosque and Rafik Hariri's tomb in the backdrop Source: C. Larkin 2011 ©.
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The familiar Lebanese riposte am bihki bil Sokout (I’m speaking in the silence) carries multiple, and at times contradictory, meanings. In some instances it may be used to avoid politically sensitive conversations or convey an unspoken judgement, in other contexts it suggests a sense of dislocation or powerlessness. Among Beirut’s youth this phrase...
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... Furthermore, Larkin (2013) explored how the memory of the conflict is passed down to the post-war generation and restricts youth's ability to renegotiate Beirut as they have grown up living the divisions. While some show the desire to renegotiate familiar or unfamiliar locations, they bear the baggage of memory stemming from their co-ethnic predecessors (Larkin, 2013). The attempts of youth to reassess, subvert, or overcome the city's divisions for a more pluralistic environment often become, in and of themselves, a form of a re-enactment of an 'unresolved' past. ...
... The attempts of youth to reassess, subvert, or overcome the city's divisions for a more pluralistic environment often become, in and of themselves, a form of a re-enactment of an 'unresolved' past. Larkin (2013) argues that this development has created a new set of boundaries in the city negating and erasing many memories of that place while imposing new socio-economic and cultural restrictions. For Petti (2007), whose piece is more pessimistic in tone, the role of space is not necessarily benign but is at least as crucial. ...
... As Larkin (2013) notes, little attention had been given to how the next generation of Lebanese envisions and encounters their reconstructed city, with "its remnants of war, sites of loss and transformed urban" (p. 95). ...
The research study investigates the social and political dimension of contemporary street art production in the deeply divided cities of Beirut and Belfast. Specifically, it examines how historical experiences with the ethnonational and the neoliberal urbanisation of space constitute and maintain the perceptions and motivations of street artists to engage with everyday life. While more is understood on the neoliberal urban and ethnonational impact of social realities on the social perceptions within the milieu of divided cities, much less is understood about the impact of new social realities about the social perceptions of street art communities. The research design for the project compared the urban and social phenomenon of street art in the post-conflict cities of Beirut and Belfast, over a four-month, blended case study and focused ethnography. The researcher conducted twenty-two semi-structured interviews with eighteen street artists, three festival organisers and one city management official, and observed participants while volunteering at two street art festivals in Belfast. By shedding light on some of their artistic practices, the findings reveal that street art communities engage in small- ‘p’ political acts. They re-purpose taken-for-granted spaces within the city to demonstrate how street artists adjust their practices to reveal pragmatic and rule-based forms of placemaking to avoid jarring with sectarian identities while bringing attention to the democratic, transient and transformative nature of their practices. While they do not have an impact on the nature of space, their interactions could remark on the possibilities for the co-production of space. Moreover, they intend to awaken the slumber of urban dwellers with the visceral enjoyment and experiences of creating and producing street art for the inhabitants of the space. While small, their artistic interventions gift the inhabitants of Beirut and Belfast with ephemeral and gratuitous forms of interactions which present an opportunity, however temporary, for different social worlds to meet.
... In promoting an engagement which is simultaneously crosssectarian, religiously plural and also liberal, civil society organisations work against the grain of urban, middle and upper class cosmopolitanism-as-indifference as it has developed in post-war Lebanon. But questions remain: how do they harness not just religion-as-relationship but also religion-as-culture, everyday lived religion, to move beyond 'cosmopolitanism light' (Larkin 2013), building mutual empathy rather than mutual non-interference (Yassin 2012)? Is this possible without engaging deeply with beliefs, values and everyday lived religion, including difficult-to-discuss differences? ...
In Lebanon, civil society organisations engaging youth in interreligious activity face a twofold challenge: how to build a rich, sustainable, socially engaged religious pluralism based on mutual empathy and trust among young people, and how to do so against a backdrop of often-ossified post-war identities, geographies and patterns of living. This chapter contributes to the academic literature on interreligious engagement in Lebanon by presenting a snapshot of the most recent youth work of two of the most active organisations in this area: Adyan and Dialogue for Life (DLR). We argue that these organizations help to build a third way between calls for the re-confessionalisation and de-confessionalisation of Lebanese politics. A challenge remains of how to translate values of emotionally engaged religious pluralism, cultivated in ‘spaces apart’ within civil society, into both everyday life in Lebanon and into the state’s institutions.
Literature on faith-based responses to forced displacement has described, but not fully unpacked or theorized cross-religion humanitarian aid in ‘South–South’ contexts. This article interrogates the various ambiguities, particularly spiritual ambiguities, inherent in faith-based humanitarianism where local providers are the minority religion. In unpacking these, we identify three modes of faith-based aid to Muslim Syrian refugees by local churches and Christian charities in Lebanon and Jordan: hospitality, humanitarian, and spiritual development. These may present successively deeper opportunities for fostering openness to spiritual pluralism. We argue for greater appreciation of what we call spiritual ambiguity in interfaith humanitarianism. While humanitarian space is always shaped by a web of power relations, it is vital to develop new, more nuanced ways of thinking about cross-religious faith-based humanitarianism beyond Western neo-colonialism or refugee strategizing.
