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List of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Cities in the Space of Global Politics
Chapter 2: Modernity, Territory and Conflict in Lebanon
Chapter 3: Lebanon Salvaged: Sovereignty and Urban Space in the Republic of Lebanon (1943-1975)
Chapter 4: Towards War
Chapter 5: Lebanon Lost. The Urban Impact of Non-intervention
Chapter 6: De-subjugating Beirut's Urban Geopolitical Knowledges
Chapter 7: Beirut's Hybrid Sovereignties: The May 2008 Clashes
Conclusion
Afterword by Klaus Dodds
Index
Summary
War and the City examines the geopolitical significance of the Lebanese Civil War through a micro-level exploration of how the urban landscape of Beirut was transformed by the conflict. Focusing on the initial phase of the war in 1975 and 1976, the volume also draws significant parallels with more recent occurrences of internecine conflict and with the historical legacies of Lebanon’s colonial past.
While most scholarship has thus far focused on post-war reconstruction of the city, the initial process of destruction has been neglected. This volume thus moves away from formal macro-level geopolitical analysis, to propose instead an exploration of the urban nature of conflict through its spaces, infrastructures, bodies and materialities. The book utilizes urban viewpoints in order to highlight the nature of sovereignty in Lebanon and how it is inscribed on the urban landscape. War and the City presents a view of geopolitics as not only shaping narratives of international relations, but as crucially reshaping the space of cities.
