Informal work and unionism in Lebanon MECACS Seminar Series Event - MS Teams

Despite Lebanon's constitutional commitments for “balanced economic development,” the country's second-largest city, Tripoli, bears the brunt of colonial and post-colonial legacies of marginalization that deepened in postwar Lebanon (1990-present). While some researchers described the city as the poorest on the Mediterranean (Nehmeh 2015), the limited academic literature on Tripoli focuses on Tripoli as a city of Jihadists (Lefèvre 2022), or as a “dethroned” secondary Sunni city (Gade 2022). Erased from such narratives are critical political economy perspectives that shine a light on the pronounced class antagonisms in this city and the violence of sectarianism and neoliberalism. Tripoli is the birthplace of the richest men in the Arab world (Bloomberg 2021). This class of businessmen-turned-politicians monopolizes vast economic sectors (banking, real estate, telecommunications, trade) by accumulating wealth abroad and through neoliberal dispossession. Juxtaposed against these wealthy businessmen are the working poor, who comprise 57% of Tripoli's population (Nehmeh 2015, 61). Among those working poor are seasonal fishermen whose livelihoods and communities are susceptible to violent dispossessions under Lebanon's political economy. This presentation focuses on the precarious working-conditions of the fishermen and shines a light in particular at how the union — the first fishermen's union in Lebanon 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. This research contributes to the profusion of literature on unionism in the post-Arab uprisings from the perspective of the marginal and the informal as is the case for fishermen.

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. Her research explores the communities in the Arab world and Latin America living at the intersection of precarity and violence. She is influenced theoretically by a comparative that places the Middle East in conversation with Latin America. Khattab was previously an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick Canada.