CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Younes, Racha |
|---|---|
| Title | "Toeing the Sectarian Line": Negotiations between the Spatial, Economic, and Ideological Consumption and Production of Counter-hegemonic Resistance for "Beirut Madinati" |
| Summary | This thesis begins by situating political sectarianism, in its complex systems of operation, as the historical hegemony around which Lebanese civil society congregates to make meaning of its own discord and create possibilities for alternative ideology. I depart from a Gramscian analysis of sectarianism as a historically and politically situated power-sharing mechanism wielded by Lebanese political elites to determine and perpetuate the economic, social, and ideological positions of their members. Within a dialectical framework of resisting sectarianism through political participation, I investigate the possibilities of emergence and conditions of resistance for counter-hegemonic movements in Lebanon. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Beirut, I mobilize the case study of the self-proclaimed counter-sectarian civil society movement “Beirut Madinati.” In particular, by interrogating the inner-workings of “Beirut Madinati,” I argue that this oppositional movement’s ability to resist is hinged on its access to and consumption of a neoliberal sectarian space, economy, and formal discourse, which led to its counter-hegemonic paralysis. Vis-à-vis the case of counter-sectarianism in Beirut, I conclude by emphasizing that instead of focusing solely on the conceptual ideological terrain of resistance, it is imperative to re-imagine scholarly and activism connotations of resistance to include its pragmatic materialization in its situated spatial context. |
| Supervisor | Rajaram, Prem and Geva, Dorit |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/younes_racha.pdf |
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