Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

This paper examines Lebanon’s Litani hydroelectric project to explore how infrastructure and debt create and maintain spatial and power relationships that shape sociopolitical possibilities. It examines how communities incorporate themselves into political-religious formations in order to struggle for equitable access to infrastructure and resources. These struggles, in turn, shape how communities conceive of ethics, identity, and the proper relationship between government and governed in a diverse society. In 1955, Lebanon’s Office National du Litani (ONL) received an outsized World Bank loan to fund the Litani hydroelectricity project. The infrastructure created new material connections between the disenfranchised peripheries and the capital. When construction completed in 1965, the infrastructure produced electricity for Beirut by extracting water from rural, predominantly Shi‘i areas. A movement coalesced around claims of popular sovereignty and petitioned parliament to equitably redistribute the Litani waters. The ONL and Bank circumvented parliament to maintain their infrastructure and loan repayment schedule. Equitable redistribution became a rallying cry for reformist Shi‘i religious scholars, who made redistribution integral to a broader process of claiming equal rights on a sectarian basis. These projects indelibly transformed Shi‘a-state relations. Infrastructural-financial arrangements such as the Litani constitute durable relationships that persistently shape the formation of state and society. While the Lebanese state was formerly conspicuously absent from the rural peripheries, the Litani project made the state conspicuously present. The infrastructure materialized inequalities between the capital and hinterland. The durability of these infrastructures ensures that these inequalities remain central to demands for equal rights until the present.