Beyond the Lines
Sarah Parkinson's brilliant new book shows what really holds insurgencies together
I couldn’t do blog posts last week because I was in Amman, Jordan for various meetings. I’m back now, and so is my weekly review essay of a greaet new book on MENA politics!
Sarah E Parkinson, Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 2023)
What holds long-term insurgencies and militant organizations together in the face of extreme violence and superior military force? Many studies of militant organizations have emphasized the role of ideology, whether Marxist, nationalist or Islamist. Others have emphasized the availability of resources, relations with the local community, or support from external actors. In her masterful new ethnographic study of Palestinian militant organizations in Lebanon in the 1980s, Sarah Parkinson focuses instead on what she calls the “backstage labor”: the logistics, intelligence, medical, finance, human resources, and publicity work which facilitates organizational continuity, resilience and survival. Much of that work, of course, is done by women — and largely invisible not only to counter-insurgents but also to the academic literature.
Listen to Sarah Parkinson discuss Beyond The Lines on the POMEPS Podcast
Beyond the Lines decenters and recenters political science approaches to protracted insurgent movements. It doesn’t ignore ideology, external support or resources, or downplay the violence inherent in both insurgent action and counterinsurgent practices. But, Parkinson points out, insurgency is not just fighting: it is sustaining an organization and a community over the long term, typically in the face of enemies and rivals who would very much like to destroy both. Holding such an insurgency together means doing all the daily, quotidian things which sustain life: health care, schools, weddings, youth organizations, publications, document forging, communication, smuggling, and so much more. Understanding all of that requires a different kind of theoretical and methodological gaze than is commonly adopted in studies of MENA insurgencies and civil wars.
Parkinson builds her analysis of insurgent organizational survival on immersive ethnographic research. As anyone familiar with her pathbreaking journal articles and public interventions might expect, her discussion of her methods is a contribution in its own right. She writes transparently about the benefits and costs of being embedded within the communities she studies, drawing on the experience of political anthropology to guide her navigation of a wide range of research and social challenges. I would hope that scholars hoping to study insurgent movements - or any organizations, really - would pay as close attention to Parkinson’s metholodogical notes and observations as they do to her analytical conclusion.
Her careful attention to the social relationships among the women in the communities she studies proves to be a master key to unlocking the hidden networks and relationships which enable - or debilitate - organizational adaptation. Beyond the Lines isn’t a book about women — a word noticably absent from the title — but rather a book about insurgent organizations whose resilience and success simply can’t be explained without taking into account the role of women. That’s a critical distinction. While Parkinson might not say so quite this boldly, my takeaway is that any study of insurgent organizations which does not take into account the role of its women is going to have serious problems — even if women in those organizations don’t take part in the fighting (as Parkinson drily notes, a competent woman able to forge and smuggle documents and manage logistics for field hospitals is worth rather more to an organization than an interchangeable young fighing man with an itchy trigger finger). Organizations which survive figure out how to build smuggling apparatuses which can evade the gaze of enemy forces, develop hidden logistics capabilities and maintain communications. It was often women who could navigate those roles - especially, as she carefully details, when mass incarceration and killings of men leaves critical roles open for the women to fill.
The book focuses on a selection of Palestinian insurgent organizations in the 1980s, but its scope ranges over the full militant field of Lebanon across its decades of civil war. Parkinson particularly sets out to explain organizational adaptation. She lays out a carefully demarcated scale of forms of organizational adaptation, driven by necessity as much as by ideology or strategic choice. There’s different degrees of adaptation, some lasting only as long as required by the situation and some resolving into long-term transformations of networks, hierarchies and practices. Readers will get a full sense of the different stages of violence in all its spatial and temporal distribution, but with the violence decentered into an important but in no sense the only factor shaping the insurgent organizations.
One of her key contributions is a careful disaggregation of the effects of different forms of violence, in ways which go far beyond the typical distinction between targeted and indiscriminate violence. Parkinson notes that counterinsurgent practices typically involve a wide range of overlapping modalities, and that the targets may not experience the violence in the ways intended by the perpetrators. Air strikes against specific military targets, for instance, may be coded by the attacker as targeted strikes, but feel quite indiscriminate to those on the ground.
Siege warfare, such as the 1976 siege of Tel al-Za’tar, Israel’s seige of Beirut in 1982, and the War of the Camps produced very distinctive types of shared experience, collective identity, and organizational adaptation. Members of rival organizations forced to endure siege may come together in the name of survival, while members of an organization who lived through siege may lose respect for the authority of their own leaders who lived outside the besieged neighborhood. Targeted assassinations, by contrast, can spread doubt and suspicion through an organization, as fears of informants compromising critical information and identities corrupting operational networks of trust. Parkinson’s ethnographic approach shines in her treatment of the different social meanings of death, not just in how some deaths result int production of martyrs but in a wider range of the honorable to dishonorable, the meaningful to the senseless, the productive and the destructive of group cohesion.
Beyond the Lines is an early candidate for best book of the year in MENA political science. Beyond its theoretical and methodological contributions, it’s beautifully written and sharply observed in ways familiar from the best political anthropology. It should prompt a discipline wide rethinking of the nature of insurgent organizations, and provoke some important discussions about the necessity of both incorporating women and gender into all levels of analysis and of deep ethnographic immersion for understanding the meaning of different forms of violence and adaptation. This is a must-read for anyone working in MENA political science, and stands with the best books in the broader disciplinary and transregional comparative politics ouevre on insurgencies and warscapes. You’ll be hearing a lot about this one, so go ahead and read it now.