Beyond the Frontier: Militarization, Representation, and Everyday Life in Dahiyeh

Abstract

Dahiyeh is often framed as a militarized area beyond the reach of the Lebanese government, but this is a flattened perspective that presents Lebanon as a ‘failed state’. An infamous part of Beirut, it is home to working class Beirutis, internally displaced Lebanese, refugees, and migrant workers. Its streets are populated with checkpoints, roadblocks, informal neighbourhood watches, and political posters, comprising an infrastructure of spatial violence which both the Lebanese state and state-like forces use to claim and maintain their territorial sovereignties. This infrastructure is dynamic. It disappears, reappears, and moves through time and space, making visible the complex and hybrid nature of territory and sovereignty within Dahiyeh. This spatial violence is accompanied by top-down visual representations that reinforce the predominant narrative of Dahiyeh as militarized, effectively selling the necessity of external intervention.

This thesis argues that the everyday lives of Dahiyeh’s inhabitants and visitors reveal a far more complex picture. They unfold within a dense web of hybrid sovereignties in which daily entanglements and negotiations with spatial violence are routine. These encounters constitute more than ‘just’ resilience; they become acts of resistance through which residents of Dahiyeh counter the militarization of their home. I offer counter-representation as a bottom-up approach that foregrounds lived experience and focuses on small-scale interactions with urban space. Through site observation, photography, and written reflections, I analyze how Dahiyeh’s hybrid sovereignties entangle with the spatial violence of daily life. I expose how militarized representation flattens Dahiyeh, then contrast this with a collection of counter-representations. In a context so commonly understood through distant observation, these counter-representations reveal the everyday encounters with sovereignty that are so often overlooked in discourse of Beirut and Dahiyeh as contested, hybrid, and militarized. By combining conventional top-down understandings and representations of Dahiyeh with the fine-grained, specific lived experiences of its residents, this thesis offers a more nuanced understanding of Dahiyeh’s complexity and ever-shifting nature.