RGP Cycle Three Grantees and Projects
Fouad Maraei: Resistance, Piety, and Development: Hezbollah’s Capital of Resistance as Global City
The research is a one-year interdisciplinary project investigating the mechanisms of producing social change and communal aggrandisement in Lebanon. The purpose is to explore mechanisms through which politico-economic reforms and hybridised forms of urban (re)construction and governance practices empower subnational communitarian actors in their endeavour to reorder society and space. Focussing on Dahiyya, Beirut’s southern suburb/s, the research examines the intersections between spatial reordering and reconstruction, the inter- and intra-communal perceptions of political and social (in)equality and (mal)recognition, and the shifting patterns of inclusion and exclusion. The research argues that the culturally constituted and contextually embedded ‘Islamic milieu’ associated with Hezbollah is not merely a religio-ideological doctrine but a politic of aesthetic shaping the sensibilities, choices and imaginaries of the community. As such, the research shows, it exploits the intersections between society, the space within which it exists, and governance reforms to (re)produce spatial-cognitive projections with unique and contextualised referents. In constituting this project, practices and discourses are articulated to:
(1) challenge actual and perceived social and political (in)equalities; (2) champion a spatial- cognitive projection of the perceived progress, empowerment and civility of Lebanon’s Shi’a community; and (3) (re)construct an urban space governed by practices and perceptions that are thoroughly hybrid upholding principles of neoliberal urbanity yet anchored in the contextual realities of the Shi’a community. While these practices and discourses are emblematic of a communal struggle for political recognition and equality, they conceal new forms of social inequality and patterns of exclusion. This contradiction, the research contends, problematises the theoretical and conceptual indistinction between political and social (in)equality.
Dr. Fouad G. Marei is a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the Centre for Middle Eastern and North African Politics, Otto-Suhr Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin. He was awarded a PhD in International Relations from Durham University, UK in 2012. Fouad is a recipient of the 2015 Research Grant awarded by the Arab Council for the Social Sciences under the theme of “Inequality, Mobility and Development” for his research project “Resistance, Piety, and Development: Hezbollah’s Capital of Resistance as Global City”.
Based on extensive fieldwork in Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, his research focuses on state-society relations, political economy of development and political culture in deeply-divided and post-conflict societies. Fouad’s research involves actor-focused critical anthropologies of authority, the state, and order as well as on the politics of state redeployment, neoliberal governance reforms, and the role of Islamist actors in local-level governance.
In addition to academic research and teaching, Fouad worked with several NGOs and civil society groups in Egypt and Lebanon since 2005. In 2012/2013, he undertook policy-oriented consultancy fieldwork in conflict-stricken Syria and authored a number of policy papers examining in-country civilian opposition groups, local administration structures, and the emerging justice and security sectors in rebel-held areas. He is currently developing a comparative project examining the everyday practices of neoliberal governance reforms, the intersections between discourses of piety and good governance, and the expanding role of international developmentalism and ‘cooperation’ in the production of new spaces of statehood and ‘governmentality’.
