Sara Fregonese

Beyond the ‘Weak State’: Hybrid Sovereignties in Beirut:

Depictions of Lebanon in international politics have historically represented it as a ‘weak state’ whose domestic sovereignty is eroded by nonstate actors viewed as anomalies to extirpate. The War on Terror has been no exception. Since at least 2002 international efforts have aimed at reinforcing Lebanons ‘weak’ domestic sovereignty against ‘extremist elements’. These approaches adopt a classic understanding of sovereignty as the achievable, exclusive, and measurable control by a state over a bounded territory. Such an understanding is misleading and even obstructive of peace for Lebanon. The accepted view of Lebanon as a ‘weak state’ suffering from chronic conflict and the myth of its capital Beirut as cyclically destroyed and reconstructed actually normalise imaginative geographies that ultimately impact on international action. Through the concept of ‘hybrid sovereignties’, this article goes beyond traditional views of legitimate state power and irregular nonstate ‘dissidence’ as dwelling in distinct legitimacy categories. Engaging theoretically with epistemologies of hybridity, and relying empirically on official foreign policy statements, archive material, and interviews conducted in Beirut between 2005 and 2010, the article considers Lebanese sovereignty as resulting from complex hybridisations between state and nonstate actors. Firstly, I review scholarly approaches to sovereignty and engage with the notion of hybridity to set a basis for discussing Lebanons sovereignty beyond the ‘weak state’ discourse. Secondly, I show that ‘weak state’ approaches to Lebanon fail to account for differential views of sovereignty and weakness from inside the Lebanese political system. Thirdly, I use the notion of hybrid sovereignties to interpret political violence during two moments of intrastate conflict: the early phases of the civil war in 1975–76, and the May 2008 clashes in Beirut. In both moments, distinctions between accepted binaries, such as state/nonstate, legitimate/illegitimate, security/insecurity, and domestic/foreign, blurred. Both state actors and nonstate militias performed sovereignty practices increasingly resembling each other, and coconstituting each other through Beiruts physical environment. Exposing Lebanons hybrid sovereignties demystifies the self-fulfilling prophecy of the ‘weak state’ rhetoric and its deadly consequences for Lebanon.

Mediterranean geographies of protest

This special issue of Euro-commentaries tackles the question of what links unprecedented anti-regime uprisings in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, with the largest protests in decades in several European cities. Beyond the specificities of individual cases, uprisings on both sides of the Mediterranean have highlighted strong and often violent collisions between resistance movements and state security. How are these collisions reshaping urban and political geographies in the Mediterranean? The papers presented here explore different aspects of the 2011 protests, and share the view that these are shaped by concerns for social justice, human rights and democracy, which are not a prerogative of the Arab world, but indicate instead more complex geographies.

Hotel Geopolitics: A Research Agenda

This article sets a new agenda for research into the geopolitics of hotels. Moving beyond the study of hotels as neutral sites of leisure and tourism, hospitality mediated by financial exchange, we argue that hotels need to be researched as geopolitical sites. Hotel spaces – from conference rooms to reception halls, from hotel bars to corridors and private rooms – are connected to broader architectures of security and insecurity, war- and peacemaking. We present six themes for this research agenda: hotels as projections of soft power, soft targets for political violence, strategic infrastructures in conflict, hosts for war reporters, providers of emergency hospitality and care, and infrastructures of peace-building. We conclude that the geopolitical potential of hotels emerges from two spatial dimensions of the relation of hospitality: hotels’ selective openness and closure to their surroundings, and their flexible material infrastructures that can facilitate and mediate geopolitical processes. Research on geopolitics, and its engagements with the everyday materialities that shape war and peace, must take seriously the hotel as a geopolitical space.

Holidays in the danger zone. Entanglements of war and tourism

Of all places where I least expected war to creep up at me, is the tourist review website Tripadvisor. Prompted by a feature in The Observer on 28 January 2018, I searched for Vilina Vlas spa hotel...