Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut [Paperback]

Drawing on innovative research into sectarian-political struggle in Beirut, Mohamad Hafeda shows how boundaries in a divided city are much more than simple physical divisions and reveals the ways in which city dwellers both experience them and subvert them in unexpected ways. Through research based on interviews, documentation of various media representations such as maps, visual imagery and gallery installations,Negotiating Conflict in Lebanonexposes the methods through which sectarian narratives are constructed - arguing for the need to question, deconstruct and transform these constructions. Hafeda expands upon the definition of bordering practice by considering artistic research as a critical spatial practice which allows self-reflection and transformation of border positions. This study offers an alternative view to the mainstream narratives of what is meant by a border, and provides insights, methods and lessons that may be applied to other cities around the world affected by conflict and political-sectarian segregation.Mohamad Hafeda is Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture, Leeds Beckett University. He is co-founder of Febrik, a collaborative platform for art and design projects focussing on the dynamics of urban space, including refugee camps in the Middle East and marginal housing estates in London.

A compelling work of powerful reportage, careful analysis, and creative disruptions through which Hafeda masterfully engages the visible and invisible borders of today's cities. Taking Beirut as his landscape of intervention, the artist-author trespasses disciplinary boundaries as he navigates the distance between scholarly and everyday voices, but also the defining lines between art and social sciences, the audio-visual and the textual, the researched and the researcher, the governed and the governing, history and now, public and private realms, and more. Each of the four provocations presented in the book deconstructs outmoded assumptions ablĮ