Life During Wartime

Munira Khayyat's spectacular new book on the South Lebanon warscape

Every week, I write about a new book in the field of Middle East Studies (or, let’s be real, whatever I’ve been reading lately and feel like writing about. Here’s this week’s review essay!

Munira Khayyat, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press, 2022)

Two years ago, I convened a POMEPS workshop about the seemingly endless conflicts across the Middle East which led to the publication of the collection MENA’s Frozen Conflicts. While it was a great collection, Samer Abboud (author of one of the very best books on Syria’s war) and Sami Hermez (author of a terrific book on Lebanon) pushed back on the “frozen conflicts” framework. That concept, they argued, just didn’t capture the full nature of these conflicts - the blurred lines between peace and war, the psychological impact of the omnipresent possibility of renewed violence, the transnational forces locking the conflict into place, the transformative effects of protracted conflict on every aspect of economy, politics and society. Ever since, I’ve been devouring the literature on warscapes, produced primarily by scholars of African conflicts but rarely deployed in the MENA context.

I couldn’t have been more excited when I discovered over the course of organizing an edited volume on the topic that Munira Khayyat of the American University of Cairo had a brand new book stepping forcefully into that very space. A Landscape of War is a remarkable book, one that reimagines war and space in genuinely original ways through a close look at the enduring legacies of unending war in South Lebanon. You can listen to our conversation about the book on last week’s podcast here.

Khayyat’s theoretical approach to the warscape is firmly grounded in space: “I ask how life is lived in a place of war.” She takes landscapes seriously, focusing on the deep connections between humans and the land, as well the plants and animals with which they share it. Those landscapes and their inhabitants are shaped by war, but war does not define their existence. As in much of the warscapes literature, A Landscape of War highlights the everyday lives which continue through the chaos and violence, where periods of calm are intermittently and routinely interrupted with extreme eruptions of brutality. She builds here on critical work by scholars such as my GW colleague Steven Lubkemann, Carolyn Nordstrom, Daniel Hoffman, and Veena Das — making her mark with her distinctive focus on “resistant ecologies” and the centrality of the land itself.

She seeks to normalize the experience of war without glamorizing it, a difficult balancing act at the best of times. “The battlefields of South Lebanon,” she writes, “are the landscapes of everyday living and of livelihood. An ethnography of life and war must approach this matter-of-factly, just as southern villagers do.” The people she meets in South Lebanon are profoundly shaped by war, as is the landscape ravaged by Israeli bombing, the deliberate targeting of the trees which might provide cover to guerillas, and the detritus of unexploded cluster munitions. But they continue to live their lives, cultivating their fields, herding their goats, and clinging to their homes. Her ethnography is launched on the opening page with a methodological note which has stayed with me since I first read it: “We are talking about what everyone talks about when anyone talks about anything around here: war. Of course, war is never mentioned.”

This is more than a methodological observation. Khayyat seeks to present a theory of war from the Global South, one which doesn’t take as normative the rather exceptional experience of Americans and Europeans who have largely “outsourced” war to the Global South. Too many theories of war, she argues, ignore the lived realities of much of the world, where war is not something which is fought or launched but rather something which is experienced and survived. She moves her gaze beyond the event of war to consider “violent structures and infrastructures such as capitalism, nationalism, and empire.” In this broader view, war can’t be seen as “a negative space where the social is suspended.” It is the norm, not the exception, and — appropriately drawing on the pathbreaking work of Achille Mbembe — she theorizes the will to life within landscapes structured by war.

South Lebanon makes for a good place to develop these theoretical observations. The southern borderland with Israel has been the place of war for many decades, caught up in the PLO’s guerilla war against Israel between 1967-1982, occupied by Israel and administered directly or by its proxies from 1978-2000, massively bombarded in 2006, now controlled and militarized by Hezbollah. When war was not directly being waged, the potential for sudden eruptions always existed and the physical legacies of previous rounds always shaped the physical landscape and human possibilities. “The Israeli war machine,” Khayyat observes, “following the environmental logic of modern warfare, took on the landscape as adversary: attacking the physical terrain, squatting upon hilltops (atop ruins and shrines), uprooting entire forests of pine, pistachio, and ancient olive, burning broad swathes of woodland, mining the red earth south of the borderline, and maintaining vast areas as no-entry zones. The landscape tells the story.” As just one example, “by flooding the landscape with explosives, Israel in South Lebanon sought to transform the environment of the borderland into a deadly weapon.” This left the area with highest concentration of unexploded cluster munitions and land mines on the planet — a condition which surprisingly centers the humble goat, light and nimble enough to graze without exploding the munitions, in one brilliantly evocative chapter.

I won’t try to do justice here to each of her beautifully crafted chapters. One tells the story of tobacco farming, an agricultural mode well adapted to warscapes not only because of the hardiness of the crop but also due to its intense and gendered labor demands. Another chapter tells the story of the goats, physically able to navigate the heavily mined fields without triggering the munitions. A third chapter zooms in on Mleeta, the Hezbollah museum of resistance and the lanscape within which it is rooted. Another looks at the life trajectories of the collaborators, pragmatists who worked with the Israeli occuption and then remained after its departure. Read these chapters yourself. They are richly rewarding.

Khayyat’s approach to the warscape differs from the one I’ve been developing in my own research agenda in ways which I find highly generative and productive. Her ethnographic focus and distinctive rootedness in space produce insights which all of us working in this genre will need to engage. A Landscape of War is one of the most original books I’ve read in a while, provocative and rich, at times frustrating and always engaging. Anyone interested in the structuring effects of protracted warscapes — of which the MENA region today has far too many — will want to read this and think seriously about its implications.