I began this chapter by relating how Interior Minister Baroud, in his align-ment with the traffi c police in particular and crackdown on illegality more generally, openly shared citizens’ sentiments about an ineff ective and cor-rupt state. Within a confl ict-laden and business-as-usual political climate, Baroud, by playing the part of a lone protagonist standing up to crime—
even that of the powerful—seemed to represent the kind of hoped-for alternative latent in comments made by both police and civilians that “there is no state.” Baroud’s own trajectory illustrates not the impossibility of this alternative, that of a fair and just state that provides for and protects even its
most ordinary citizens, but certainly the kinds of conditions challenging its realization.
In May 2011, Baroud resigned from his position aft er a fi nal confronta-tion with General Rifi , director of the ISF. During a bizarre media-covered power play, Rifi , Baroud’s subordinate, publicly fl outed Baroud’s orders to resolve a confl ict Rifi had escalated with another government offi cial. In his resignation speech, a dejected Baroud, who came off as a naïve idealist-reformer beaten down by the intricacies and divisiveness of Lebanese poli-tics, spoke about the breakdown of the Lebanese state. In his fi nal hour as a member of government, Baroud once again identifi ed himself with regular folk fed up with the status quo.
Baroud’s resignation illustrates one of the key fi ndings of my research:
everyday interactions with the state in their traffi c encounters leave Beirut’s citizens discontented and with unfulfi lled aspirations for the well-functioning, respectable, and protective state that could be. His departure signaled the ways in which people, sometimes even those at the helm of governance like Baroud or the would-be state-makers such as the traffi c police, maintain unmet expectations about a state that could, and should, work bett er. In this sense of disaff ection with the state, which is an outcome of unfulfi lled desires for, in part, security and safety, we see a diff erent kind of retreat of the state than that which we tie to the ushering in of neoliberal governmen-tality. Th is retreat is marked by the precedence of players participating in high-stakes games of political confl ict and negotiation over concerns for the common good. In a space where people say there is no state, the traffi c encounter in fact represents a crucial site of state-making. In a city wracked by confl ict, in a militarized urban landscape territorialized by divisive political claims, the policing of traffi c might also be understood as a seam that endeavors to fasten together, under the domain of state authority, civic space itself.
Th e encounter of the traffi c police and driver provides an ethnographic view of bureaucratic embodiment in public space, one that illustrates the kinds of mundane practices that go into the project of state-making.
It shows us too the multiplicity of actors who, as Abrams phrased it ([1977] 1988), make up what a “state” is thought to be.
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CONCLUSION
In June 2013, I was riding in a service taxi driving along the Beirut highway that heads north from the airport area to downtown. It is an elevated highway that aff ords passengers a panoramic view of building rooft ops. On one rooft op, just off to the side of the highway was a distress-ing sign of the times: swaydistress-ing in the light breeze was the black fl ag of the al-Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affi liate fi ghting in Syria against the Assad regime.
In summer 2013, the impact of the Syrian civil war was visible throughout the city. Th e sight of the al-Nusra Front fl ag, for example, demonstrated the war’s splintering eff ect on Lebanon’s already jagged political and security landscape, as supporters of groups fi ghting the Syrian regime clashed with those, like Hizbullah, who backed Assad’s forces. Hizbullah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah had just recently made the public announcement that Hizbullah soldiers were fi ghting alongside the Syrian army in order to defeat rebel groups who controlled areas that bordered Lebanon.1 Never before had Hizbullah guerrillas waged war outside Lebanon. Th ese border areas in the east, the sites of rocket-fi re exchange between armed groups, became just one of the many violent hotspots in the country that challenged the state security apparatus as militarized factions who supported the Syrian rebels in the northern city of Tripoli and an Islamic extremist group in the southern city of Saida also carried out regular att acks on Lebanese army deployments.
A deteriorating security situation and deepening political divides were not the only eff ects of the war in neighboring Syria, as the arrival of what is estimated to be, at the time of this writing, more than a million refugees strained Lebanon’s resources.2 One service driver put it this way: “Th e
Syrian war is burning Lebanon.” Th is was his response to my question kayf al-wada ‘a?—literally, “How is the situation?” but really more like “How are things going?” All these Syrians who have come into Beirut, he went on to say, “they are coming in and taking our jobs; they start driving taxis that are not registered, and now there are too many taxis on the road. We can’t survive like this.” During summer 2013, I heard many comments like this one about how people were being squeezed by the war. While the majority of Syrian refugees were living in sett lements and villages in other parts of Lebanon, many Syrians, from a range of class backgrounds, had come to Beirut and, for the fi rst time, not as male laborers on their own, but as fami-lies. Beirutis remarked on how the presence of Syrians was contributing to climbing rents, to increased competition for jobs,3 and to a palpable sense of crowdedness in the very few free public spaces that city residents could call their own. On the streets of the city, Syrian license plates on private cars from areas roiled by war—Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Damascus—were a common sight. In this sense, the Syrian war and catastrophic humanitarian situation it has produced have placed both Syrians and Lebanese who live and work in Beirut and elsewhere in the country in an increasingly inse-cure position as they have had to forge lives amid a contentious and violent political-economic landscape.