Anchored in Precarity and Lethality: The Unseen Labor of Lebanon's Fishermen in Postwar (Northern) Lebanon - Guest Speaker Dr Lara Khattab School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Doha, Institute

The presentation is based on her research over the past two years with the fishermen community in Lebanon. While the research covers both the North and the South, the current presentation will focus on selected research findings from the fieldwork conducted in the North. It is based on interviews with fishermen, their union, the coop, ministries, and international organizations that have been involved in the fishing sector. The presentation shines a light on how the fishermen's informal and seasonal work, which is often considered marginal and invisible to the sectarian elites, is tied to state abandonment, economic marginalization, and the sectarian elite's assault on the public maritime property, all of which render fishermen's work more precarious and more lethal. As such, I argue that informality is not only a loss of job security in the post-Fordist era. Informal and seasonal work is the historical condition of workers in the Global South (Munck 2013); it is not only precarious, but also lethal. It is rendered invisible to the postwar neoliberal political economy of Lebanon, which hinged upon a deliberate attack on the productive sectors. It is thus the site of “state” abandonment but for state repression when such sectors transgress the boundaries of “permissible action.” As such, when the 2019 financial crisis deepened, fishermen joined the waves of migration, either facilitating migration or leaving Lebanon. They were met with securitization and repression by a state deeply entangled in the EU's imperial policies of migration management and control.

While abandoned by the post-war state and model, the presentation will also focus on how the fishermen's union, despite being marginal to the post-war economy, turns into a site of struggle and control by the sectarian elites. The fishermen's union, once a defender of fishermen's rights, was turned from a defender of fishermen's rights into a union that served the narrow interests of its current leadership. The entrenchment of the latter's position within the union hierarchy owes to a number of factors inclusive of the role played by sectarian elites and funding agencies.

Lara Khattab is an Assistant Professor at the Conflict Management and Humanitarian Action Program. Her main research interest revolves around issues of development at the national and sub-national levels in post-transition and in post-conflict contexts as well as labor processes both formal and informal.