For the War Yet to Come: A Conversation with Hiba Bou Akar (S. 9, Ep. 6)

Hiba Bou Akar talks about her latest book, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut's southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Bou Akar explains, “So I start looking at the planning and how these residential complexes ended up mushrooming in an agricultural area but also next to inductees and eventually like a whole world starts opening to me about how… war displacement has shaped the housing market. There are political organizations that are fighting over territory after the war. And how planning is a tool in that conflict. It would sometimes be of negotiation and sometimes of contestation.” She goes on to say, “So the [idea of], For The War Yet to Come ends up being like this expectation of war that is either going to be like an Arab-Israeli war…or sectarian war, a regional war or whatever; that ends up shaping how people make decisions about where they live. Religious political organizations end up using this idea to keep people in strongholds. They intervene in the housing market…access to, for example, airports or to the waterfront etc...As a person who grew up in the Civil War and was personally displaced six times, I think I was haunted by the idea: What does it mean to live in a place where we were always expecting something disastrous to happen in the future?” “It was interesting to me because if you want to take a theoretical l lens I was like, people don't talk about when they think about land as Christian land you know like thinking about for example New York or other places in the world. And the fact that the land is talked about in…a religious terminology was interesting to me. And then when you map religion and sectarianism to land then anyone who is trying to just secure housing becomes like oh what is your religion, oh you're taking over , you’re Islamizing. And then you go from Islamizing for exam