Research Grants Program | Cycle 6 Grantees and Projects

Karim Eid-Sabbagh, Lebanon, London School of Economics and Political Science

Project Title: Agriculture, Farmers and Development in the Context of War and Occupation: A Case Study of Southern Lebanon

This project concerns itself with questions of agrarian change in southern Lebanon. I focus my research on the transformation of agrarian productive systems in the areas bordering what is today Israel. South Lebanon was a theater of confrontation and war (1982, 1993, 1996, 2006) throughout the latter half of the twentieth century up until today. Wars, occupation and resistance made conflict, oppression and violence part of the social experience in the area and have played an important role in social and ecological transformation processes. I aim to understand and document the transformations of value relations, and specifically small farmer livelihoods and production practices through the period starting with the establishment of the southern border in 1948. I ask: “How were processes of (de-)valorisation of local agrarian relations of production shaped by war and occupation in South Lebanon since 1948? How have war and occupation affected processes of agrarian modernisation and the concomitant processes of social differentiation, gendered differentiation of labour and (semi-)proletarianisation, as well as ecological transformation/degradation? And how have farmers adapted to and resisted these processes?” The research combines ethnographic methods, interviews and participant observation with geographical spatial analysis, GIS, satellite imagery, aerial photography, and socio-economic data methods in a grounded theory approach. The research area south of the Litani River can be divided into roughly three different agricultural zones. The coastal zone, which is dominated by orchards; the hill lands spanning the coast to the Hasbani watershed where tobacco and olives are the main produce; and the Hasbani watershed where rain-fed wheat production and intensive irrigated vegetable and fruit production take place depending on water availability. Research will take place in 4-5 villages in south Lebanon. The villages were specifically chosen to cover the different agricultural systems in the area as well as their location inside and outside of the formerly Israeli occupied zone.