Title of Dissertation

Generating Hybridity: Social Perspectives on Beirut’s Neighbourhood Generators

Summary of the project

Since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, households in Lebanon unable to generate their own electricity have had to navigate a hybrid electricity system comprising an insufficient state run grid and numerous private neighbourhood grids. Those neighbourhood grids are powered by local diesel generators and often intertwined with sectarianized clientelist networks. The hybrid system results in electricity supply schedules within neighbourhoods which set shared material conditions for everyday routines and, in turn, social relations and neighbourhood social space.

While public debates and much of the academic literature approach electricity in Lebanon primarily as a political and economic crisis reflecting state failure and sectarian hegemony, its social dimension remains widely understudied.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut and following the trail from infrastructure to temporality to social space, this dissertation examines how residents experience energy hybridity in everyday life, how access to electricity can shape neighbourhood social space and how these spaces are linked to perceptions of state and sect through infrastructure.