Nisrine Mansour

Bedouin in Lebanon: Social discrimination, political exclusion, and compromised health care

Global inequalities in health have long been associated with disparities between rich and poor nations. The middle-income countries of the Levant (Lebanon, Syria and Jordan) have developed models of health care delivery that mirror the often complex make-up of their states. In Lebanon, which is characterized by political clientelism and sectarian structures, access to health care is more contingent on ethnicity and religious affiliation than on poverty. This case study of the Bedouin of the Middle Bekaa Valley of Lebanon is based on interviews with policymakers, health care providers and the Bedouin as part of a study funded by the European Commission between 2006 and 2010. The study explores the importance of considering social discrimination and political exclusion in understanding compromised health care. Three decades after the Declaration of Alma Ata (1978), which declared that an acceptable level of health care for all should be attained by the year 2000, the Bedouin community of Lebanon remains largely invisible to the government and, thus, invisible to national health care policy and practice. They experience significant social discrimination from health practitioners and policymakers alike. Their unfair treatment under the health system is generally disassociated from issues of wealth or poverty; it is manifested in issues of access and use, discrimination, and resistance and agency. Overcoming their political exclusion and recognizing the social discrimination they face are steps that can be taken to protect and promote equal access to basic reproductive and child health care. This case study of the Bedouin in Lebanon is also relevant to the health needs of other marginalized populations in remote and rural areas.

Statelessness and Tribal Identity on Lebanon's Eastern Borders

Lebanons eastern borders are a particularly understudied region of the country. This area is home to a number of refugee communities (Palestinian and Armenian) as well as recently settled and displaced Bedouin from the June 1967 war. This tribal community is both invisible in some regards and prominent in others. Barred from citizenship for many years, the Bedouin community is increasingly playing an active role in Lebanons political scene while maintaining its cross-border connections transcending the nation-state. This paper examines the multi-layered Bedouin identities in the context of Lebanons varied citizenship categories. It assesses the significance of cross-border attachments as well as recent developments in local, national and regional politics.

Unmaking the Arab/Muslim Child: Lived Experiences of Media Use in Two Migratory Settings

Recent interest in Arab child audiences is mostly related to the penetration of digital media to the Arab region and the rise of discourses on ‘counterterrorism’, Islamic radicalization and Islamophobia. More often than not, audience-focused inquiry has adopted, as a starting point, the uniform default category of ‘Arab/Muslim’. As these analytical categories are conflated, the implications of such teleological epistemologies cannot be missed. In this article, I dislocate these ontological and epistemological assumptions about Arab child audiences by refocusing the inquiry on children’s own processes of meaning-making amid their negotiations of socioeconomic, political, migratory and media ecologies. This inquiry, conducted between 2013 and 2015, explores these spaces by zooming into the findings of ethnographic research and playful interventions with two Syrian and Palestinian children living in the two contrastive migratory settings of Beirut and London. This micro-analysis questions dominant understandings of Arab childhood and screen media use today, and discusses the potential for adopting a multifaceted approach to the inquiry.

War and Memory in Lebanon

In War and Memory in Lebanon, Haugbolle gives a thorough account of the way in which various political, military and civil society actors constructed war remembrance and amnesia in means for post-conflict political healing. His account focuses on the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’, refreshingly departing from the overwhelming academic focus on the root cause of the civil war in Lebanon (1975–1990). The book constitutes a comprehensive mapping of cultural production in one of the most complex contemporary contexts affected by conflict. The analysis, expressed in captivating and lucid language, relies on various cultural products, including the mediatised (and mediated) accounts of politicians and former fighters, as well as audio-visual and literary media of the politically committed genre. Haugbolle presents a central argument that the Lebanese national identity, historically shaped as a patchwork of conflicting violence-inducing claims, effectively created a war over post-conflict identity based on politics of war amnesia and remembrance. Far from a circular argument, the analysis traces the non-linear historical mutation of post-conflict identity and the conditions that affect its circular remaking. The central argument unfolds in five chapters and starts by depicting the change in political partisanship from traditional leadership tomilitia leaders in 1970 and the fragmentation of post-conflict memory of this period. The politics of post-conflict memory crafting are detailed in chapters 3 to 7. At the macro policy level, postconflict reconstruction offers an opportunity for state and non-state actors to implement a general policy of amnesia, replacing history with ‘culture’. At the civilian level, the narratives of the middle class cultural agents are depicted as a heterogeneous nostalgic mix centred on victimisation and concern with representing ordinary people. The perspectives of former combatants, or the ‘little men’, revolve around the myth of ‘war of others’ and perceptions of self-victimisation followed by disillusionment and the realisation of the futility of the ‘cause’. Many combatants redeemed themselves in the post-conflict era by embracing the compromise of coexistence. The negotiation of memory in the urban public space addresses the question of whether the civil war created the sectarian divide of the city, or merely concretised it. Finally the renegotiation of memory in recent years shifted from a concern with ‘remembrance’ to a search for ‘truth’, including a cult for ‘martyred politicians’, exemplified by the assassination of PrimeMinister Rafik Hariri and the Independence Intifada. The book succeeds in opening up several opportunities for analysing the social and political anxieties of post-conflict negotiation of national identity through a retrospective construction of memory in the public space. Haugbolle builds his argument around mainstream definitions of public discourses of memory production as a dichotomy between political and cultural processes sustained by the organisational roles of actors. This angle of analysis places various actors on uneven ground, regulating the power of ‘voice’ attributed to various actors. The distinction between ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ representation outlined in chapter 2 led to privileging cultural agents and idealising ‘culture’. Haugbolle draws extensively on the accounts of the Lebanese intelligentsia and cultural elites and elevates them BOOK REVIEWS