Mona Harb
Biographic Data
| ID | 181135 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mona Harb |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mona |
| FAMILY NAME | Harb |
| SIGNATURE | HARB M |
| AFFILIATIONS | American University of Beirut |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5734-3376 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 108 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Urban crisis as infrastructure, not event
Beirut is routinely labelled a ‘crisis zone’. Yet calling Beirut ‘in crisis’ risks misrecognising its urban condition. Crisis here is not an exception; it is the everyday grammar through which the city is governed, inhabited and imagined. I advance three claims: (i) Beirut exemplifies permacrisis – a structurally reproduced, open-ended condition rather than an episodic shock; (ii) permacrisis generates a politics of waiting and ‘stuckedness’ that…
Rebuilding post-blast Beirut
Disaster Governance and Aid Effectiveness
In the aftermath of the Beirut Port Blast of August 2020, the World Bank, the European Union, and the United Nations co-designed an aid response for Lebanon, named as the “Reconstruction, Recovery and Reform Framework.” The 3rf is akin to other frameworks produced in the aftermath of disasters and conflicts, also referred to as “country platforms.” This paper provides an assessment of the effectiveness of the 3 rf , underscoring its institutional…
The promises and pitfalls of disaster aid platforms
Purpose Using critical disaster studies and state theory, we assess the disaster aid platform named Lebanon Reconstruction, Reform and Recovery Framework (3RF) that was put in place by international donors in the aftermath of the Beirut Port Blast in August 2020, in order to examine the effectiveness of its inclusive decision-making architecture, as well as its institutional building and legislative reform efforts. Design/methodology/approach The…
Federalism and Decentralization in the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa
Unplanned links, unanticipated outcomes
Much of the literature covering forced population displacement has neglected spatial implications, dealing with place as mere context. Building on a case study of the city of Halba (Lebanon) where it maps a process of contingent encounters through which disparate resources, individuals, and groups are stitched together to generate large-scale housing projects that shelter refugees, this paper demonstrates the importance of studying displacement t…
Mapping Covid-19 Governance in Lebanon
Many states, including Lebanon, have used the Covid-19 pandemic as an occasion to reassert their power and to consolidate their policing and repressive apparatuses. We are far from a seamless scenario, however. Rather than a mere reproduction of the sectarian political system, we argue in this paper that the governance of the pandemic in Lebanon reveals tensions between powerful political parties, weakened public agencies, as well as multiple sol…
‘Stay Home Without a Home’
This Update reports from a webinar on the impacts on the right to housing and linked political struggles of the lockdown measures put in place globally amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Three main threads emerged through the conversation: the impacts of the pandemic are deepening pre-existing housing inequalities, while governments’ responses are largely insufficient; activists and contentious actors worldwide are changing their framings and repertoire…
Using the clustering method for a heterogeneous reading of Lebanese youth
How to better study youth in ways that can capture their complex subjectivities? While qualitative methodologies succeed rather well at unpacking youth’s holistic selfhoods, quantitative tools are often more rigid at apprehending their multifaceted lives. Some tools such as multiple correspondence analysis do allow for a more nuanced and thorough understanding, and are particularly opportune in contexts where the studied group is heterogeneous in…
Entrepreneurial Refugees and the City
Lebanon is hosting more than 1 million Syrian refugees. For a country of its size, and a population of around 4 million, this influx of Syrians into Lebanon has exposed many of its already established ailments. A prevailing perception is that Syrians are establishing businesses and competing with the Lebanese, leading to violent reactions on the part of host communities. In this article, we seek to debunk the reductionist framing of ‘the Syrian r…
Eco-City Projects
International standards exist for evaluating building or neighborhood sustainability. Nonetheless, they are still not available for large-scale developments. Of special interest to practitioners is how to ensure that sustainability requirements of large-scale projects are well integrated in a master plan. This paper provides design managers of new eco-cities with a framework to integrate sustainability in the pre-project planning phase. A case st…
Le Thomas Catherine, Les écoles chiites au Liban. Construction communautaire et mobilisation politique. Paris, Karthala-Ifpo, 2012, 419 p
Dans ce riche et dense ouvrage sur les écoles au Liban, C. Le Thomas étudie de manière approfondie les dynamiques plurielles, voire contradictoires, de la communautarisation chiite, notamment au sein du Hezbollah. Le champ éducatif au Liban est à la fois un élément-clé de la reconstruction nationale, « du dispositif de mobilisation politique et sociale des acteurs communautaires » et un lieu de socialisation à la fois religieuse et politique, où …
Leisurely Islam
Leisurely Islam
South Beirut has recently become a vibrant leisure destination with a plethora of cafés and restaurants that cater to the young, fashionable, and pious. What effects have these establishments had on the moral norms, spatial practices, and urban experiences of this Lebanese community? From the diverse voices of young Shi'i Muslims searching for places to hang out, to the Hezbollah officials who want this media-savvy generation to be more political…
Contesting urban modernity
The urban scholarship on Beirut often focuses either on the reconstruction of its downtown area controlled by the private real estate company Solidere, or on its poor southern suburbs (Dahiya) dominated by the Shi‵i Islamic political party, Hizbullah. Downtown is strongly associated with an urban ‘modern’ model that generates pride for Lebanese, while Dahiya is defamed as a less modern urban space, unworthy of consideration as part of Beirut’s ur…
Choosing Both Faith and Fun
Challenging both polarized depictions of Muslim youth and scholarship that over-privileges piety as a focal point in Muslims' lives, this article highlights the complexity of the moral worlds of Shi'i youth in Lebanon. Through ethnography of youth choices when going out, we argue that youth practices and discourses of morality are multiple and flexible in their deployments, perhaps especially when it comes to ideas about leisure. This interpretiv…
Living Beirut's Security Zones
Over the past decade, security has gained enormous attention in the urban literature, reflecting its visibly increasing presence in cities worldwide. It is now widely acknowledged that security is a structuring force for cities both historically and now. Few scholars have however looked at the implications of security on the daily practices of urban dwellers. Based on extensive fieldwork during which we developed a street by street survey of secu…
Politics, Culture, Religion
What might the wreckage of a former prison in south Lebanon that was destroyed during Israeli bombardment in 2006 have in common with a series of “family-oriented” amusement parks built by a corporate investment group? How might these sites be related to an ecotourism facility high in the mountains above Saida and the 70-some cafés and restaurants that have opened in the southern suburbs of Beirut since 2000? Aside from being fieldsites in our on…
La gestion du local par les maires du Hezbollah au Liban
On sait peu de choses sur l’action municipale du Hezbollah, bien que près de 15 % des conseils municipaux libanais soient élus sur ses listes. Un premier examen de la question révèle comment les maires du parti doivent conjuguer dans leur travail de gestion locale plusieurs cadres institutionnels : partisan, légal et territorial. Trois conseils municipaux dirigés par des cadres partisans sont étudiés ici afin de montrer les priorités et les valeu…
City Debates 2008
Faith-Based Organizations as Effective Development Partners? Hezbollah and Post-War Reconstruction in Lebanon
Defining Hezbollah as a faith-based organization (FBO) may seem unusual as it is normally labelled by many Westerners as a terrorist organization and is thus rarely examined as an ‘ordinary’ or legitimate political player. Yet, this is the position I adopt here. This chapter considers Hezbollah as a Lebanese political party which has been in charge of the elaboration and implementation of development policies for middle and lower-income Shi’i gro…
Les mots de la stigmatisation urbaine
Banlieue, bidonville, ghetto, slum, taudis... Souvent un mot désignant un espace urbain qualifie en même temps les populations auxquelles on l'associe, en leur assignant une identité comme concentrée en un vocable. Directe ou biaise, brutale ou euphémisée, la stigmatisation urbaine concerne des lieux marqués par la pauvreté, la dégradation, toutes sortes de menace sur lesquelles est porté un regard inquiet par les classes supérieures, les mouveme…
Know thy enemy
The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims an…
La banlieue du Hizb'Allah. Images militantes du Beyrouth d'après-guerre
The Hezbollah Suburbs Alternative Images of Post-War Beirut The headquarters of the Hezbollah Shiite political party in the southern suburbs of Beirut is presented to the world as a centre of instability. Precise rules govern, however, social and economic life inside this ghetto-like area. The political movement is backed up by a powerful symbolic arsenal of posters, slogans and a TV channel that pervades public space and keeps the fighting spiri…
Development, civil society and faith-based organizations
Living Beirut's Security Zones
Over the past decade, security has gained enormous attention in the urban literature, reflecting its visibly increasing presence in cities worldwide. It is now widely acknowledged that security is a structuring force for cities both historically and now. Few scholars have however looked at the implications of security on the daily practices of urban dwellers. Based on extensive fieldwork during which we developed a street by street survey of secu…
Choosing Both Faith and Fun
Challenging both polarized depictions of Muslim youth and scholarship that over-privileges piety as a focal point in Muslims' lives, this article highlights the complexity of the moral worlds of Shi'i youth in Lebanon. Through ethnography of youth choices when going out, we argue that youth practices and discourses of morality are multiple and flexible in their deployments, perhaps especially when it comes to ideas about leisure. This interpretiv…
Know thy enemy
The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims an…
Entrepreneurial Refugees and the City
Lebanon is hosting more than 1 million Syrian refugees. For a country of its size, and a population of around 4 million, this influx of Syrians into Lebanon has exposed many of its already established ailments. A prevailing perception is that Syrians are establishing businesses and competing with the Lebanese, leading to violent reactions on the part of host communities. In this article, we seek to debunk the reductionist framing of ‘the Syrian r…
Mapping Covid-19 Governance in Lebanon
Many states, including Lebanon, have used the Covid-19 pandemic as an occasion to reassert their power and to consolidate their policing and repressive apparatuses. We are far from a seamless scenario, however. Rather than a mere reproduction of the sectarian political system, we argue in this paper that the governance of the pandemic in Lebanon reveals tensions between powerful political parties, weakened public agencies, as well as multiple sol…
Unplanned links, unanticipated outcomes
Much of the literature covering forced population displacement has neglected spatial implications, dealing with place as mere context. Building on a case study of the city of Halba (Lebanon) where it maps a process of contingent encounters through which disparate resources, individuals, and groups are stitched together to generate large-scale housing projects that shelter refugees, this paper demonstrates the importance of studying displacement t…
Contesting urban modernity
The urban scholarship on Beirut often focuses either on the reconstruction of its downtown area controlled by the private real estate company Solidere, or on its poor southern suburbs (Dahiya) dominated by the Shi‵i Islamic political party, Hizbullah. Downtown is strongly associated with an urban ‘modern’ model that generates pride for Lebanese, while Dahiya is defamed as a less modern urban space, unworthy of consideration as part of Beirut’s ur…
Using the clustering method for a heterogeneous reading of Lebanese youth
How to better study youth in ways that can capture their complex subjectivities? While qualitative methodologies succeed rather well at unpacking youth’s holistic selfhoods, quantitative tools are often more rigid at apprehending their multifaceted lives. Some tools such as multiple correspondence analysis do allow for a more nuanced and thorough understanding, and are particularly opportune in contexts where the studied group is heterogeneous in…
City Debates 2008
La banlieue du Hizb'Allah. Images militantes du Beyrouth d'après-guerre
The Hezbollah Suburbs Alternative Images of Post-War Beirut The headquarters of the Hezbollah Shiite political party in the southern suburbs of Beirut is presented to the world as a centre of instability. Precise rules govern, however, social and economic life inside this ghetto-like area. The political movement is backed up by a powerful symbolic arsenal of posters, slogans and a TV channel that pervades public space and keeps the fighting spiri…
Politiques urbaines dans la banlieue-sud de Beyrouth
La banlieue-sud de Beyrouth constitue une des zones les plus controversées de la capitale du Liban. Aujourd’hui, elle est considérée comme un espace sous-équipé qui, par sa population - 1/3 du Grand-Beyrouth - et son étendue, rivalise avec Beyrouth-municipe. Dans le cadre du processus de reconstruction de la capitale, elle représente donc un enjeu aussi bien politique qu’urbain. La banlieue-sud est en grande partie gérée par des partis politiques…
La Dâhiye de Beyrouth
La banlieue sud de Beyrouth est un bastion communautaire qui se démarque de la capitale par ses caractéristiques politiques, spatiales, communautaires et sociales – évoquant ainsi plusieurs images relatives à son territoire, ses habitants et ses leaders. Cet article l’histoire de sa stigmatisation urbaine, à travers le parcours de son nom commun devenu, dans l’usage, nom propre (dâhiye en arabe – qui signifie banlieue). L’analyse porte d’abord su…
La banlieue du Hizb'Allah. Images militantes du Beyrouth d'après-guerre
The Hezbollah Suburbs Alternative Images of Post-War Beirut The headquarters of the Hezbollah Shiite political party in the southern suburbs of Beirut is presented to the world as a centre of instability. Precise rules govern, however, social and economic life inside this ghetto-like area. The political movement is backed up by a powerful symbolic arsenal of posters, slogans and a TV channel that pervades public space and keeps the fighting spiri…
Know thy enemy
The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims an…
Les mots de la stigmatisation urbaine
Banlieue, bidonville, ghetto, slum, taudis... Souvent un mot désignant un espace urbain qualifie en même temps les populations auxquelles on l'associe, en leur assignant une identité comme concentrée en un vocable. Directe ou biaise, brutale ou euphémisée, la stigmatisation urbaine concerne des lieux marqués par la pauvreté, la dégradation, toutes sortes de menace sur lesquelles est porté un regard inquiet par les classes supérieures, les mouveme…
Faith-Based Organizations as Effective Development Partners? Hezbollah and Post-War Reconstruction in Lebanon
Defining Hezbollah as a faith-based organization (FBO) may seem unusual as it is normally labelled by many Westerners as a terrorist organization and is thus rarely examined as an ‘ordinary’ or legitimate political player. Yet, this is the position I adopt here. This chapter considers Hezbollah as a Lebanese political party which has been in charge of the elaboration and implementation of development policies for middle and lower-income Shi’i gro…
Politics, Culture, Religion
What might the wreckage of a former prison in south Lebanon that was destroyed during Israeli bombardment in 2006 have in common with a series of “family-oriented” amusement parks built by a corporate investment group? How might these sites be related to an ecotourism facility high in the mountains above Saida and the 70-some cafés and restaurants that have opened in the southern suburbs of Beirut since 2000? Aside from being fieldsites in our on…
La gestion du local par les maires du Hezbollah au Liban
On sait peu de choses sur l’action municipale du Hezbollah, bien que près de 15 % des conseils municipaux libanais soient élus sur ses listes. Un premier examen de la question révèle comment les maires du parti doivent conjuguer dans leur travail de gestion locale plusieurs cadres institutionnels : partisan, légal et territorial. Trois conseils municipaux dirigés par des cadres partisans sont étudiés ici afin de montrer les priorités et les valeu…
City Debates 2008
Living Beirut's Security Zones
Over the past decade, security has gained enormous attention in the urban literature, reflecting its visibly increasing presence in cities worldwide. It is now widely acknowledged that security is a structuring force for cities both historically and now. Few scholars have however looked at the implications of security on the daily practices of urban dwellers. Based on extensive fieldwork during which we developed a street by street survey of secu…
Leisurely Islam
Leisurely Islam
South Beirut has recently become a vibrant leisure destination with a plethora of cafés and restaurants that cater to the young, fashionable, and pious. What effects have these establishments had on the moral norms, spatial practices, and urban experiences of this Lebanese community? From the diverse voices of young Shi'i Muslims searching for places to hang out, to the Hezbollah officials who want this media-savvy generation to be more political…
Contesting urban modernity
The urban scholarship on Beirut often focuses either on the reconstruction of its downtown area controlled by the private real estate company Solidere, or on its poor southern suburbs (Dahiya) dominated by the Shi‵i Islamic political party, Hizbullah. Downtown is strongly associated with an urban ‘modern’ model that generates pride for Lebanese, while Dahiya is defamed as a less modern urban space, unworthy of consideration as part of Beirut’s ur…
Choosing Both Faith and Fun
Challenging both polarized depictions of Muslim youth and scholarship that over-privileges piety as a focal point in Muslims' lives, this article highlights the complexity of the moral worlds of Shi'i youth in Lebanon. Through ethnography of youth choices when going out, we argue that youth practices and discourses of morality are multiple and flexible in their deployments, perhaps especially when it comes to ideas about leisure. This interpretiv…
Le Thomas Catherine, Les écoles chiites au Liban. Construction communautaire et mobilisation politique. Paris, Karthala-Ifpo, 2012, 419 p
Dans ce riche et dense ouvrage sur les écoles au Liban, C. Le Thomas étudie de manière approfondie les dynamiques plurielles, voire contradictoires, de la communautarisation chiite, notamment au sein du Hezbollah. Le champ éducatif au Liban est à la fois un élément-clé de la reconstruction nationale, « du dispositif de mobilisation politique et sociale des acteurs communautaires » et un lieu de socialisation à la fois religieuse et politique, où …
Eco-City Projects
International standards exist for evaluating building or neighborhood sustainability. Nonetheless, they are still not available for large-scale developments. Of special interest to practitioners is how to ensure that sustainability requirements of large-scale projects are well integrated in a master plan. This paper provides design managers of new eco-cities with a framework to integrate sustainability in the pre-project planning phase. A case st…
Entrepreneurial Refugees and the City
Lebanon is hosting more than 1 million Syrian refugees. For a country of its size, and a population of around 4 million, this influx of Syrians into Lebanon has exposed many of its already established ailments. A prevailing perception is that Syrians are establishing businesses and competing with the Lebanese, leading to violent reactions on the part of host communities. In this article, we seek to debunk the reductionist framing of ‘the Syrian r…
‘Stay Home Without a Home’
This Update reports from a webinar on the impacts on the right to housing and linked political struggles of the lockdown measures put in place globally amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Three main threads emerged through the conversation: the impacts of the pandemic are deepening pre-existing housing inequalities, while governments’ responses are largely insufficient; activists and contentious actors worldwide are changing their framings and repertoire…
Using the clustering method for a heterogeneous reading of Lebanese youth
How to better study youth in ways that can capture their complex subjectivities? While qualitative methodologies succeed rather well at unpacking youth’s holistic selfhoods, quantitative tools are often more rigid at apprehending their multifaceted lives. Some tools such as multiple correspondence analysis do allow for a more nuanced and thorough understanding, and are particularly opportune in contexts where the studied group is heterogeneous in…
Mapping Covid-19 Governance in Lebanon
Many states, including Lebanon, have used the Covid-19 pandemic as an occasion to reassert their power and to consolidate their policing and repressive apparatuses. We are far from a seamless scenario, however. Rather than a mere reproduction of the sectarian political system, we argue in this paper that the governance of the pandemic in Lebanon reveals tensions between powerful political parties, weakened public agencies, as well as multiple sol…
Unplanned links, unanticipated outcomes
Much of the literature covering forced population displacement has neglected spatial implications, dealing with place as mere context. Building on a case study of the city of Halba (Lebanon) where it maps a process of contingent encounters through which disparate resources, individuals, and groups are stitched together to generate large-scale housing projects that shelter refugees, this paper demonstrates the importance of studying displacement t…
Federalism and Decentralization in the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa
Development, civil society and faith-based organizations
The promises and pitfalls of disaster aid platforms
Purpose Using critical disaster studies and state theory, we assess the disaster aid platform named Lebanon Reconstruction, Reform and Recovery Framework (3RF) that was put in place by international donors in the aftermath of the Beirut Port Blast in August 2020, in order to examine the effectiveness of its inclusive decision-making architecture, as well as its institutional building and legislative reform efforts. Design/methodology/approach The…
Urban crisis as infrastructure, not event
Beirut is routinely labelled a ‘crisis zone’. Yet calling Beirut ‘in crisis’ risks misrecognising its urban condition. Crisis here is not an exception; it is the everyday grammar through which the city is governed, inhabited and imagined. I advance three claims: (i) Beirut exemplifies permacrisis – a structurally reproduced, open-ended condition rather than an episodic shock; (ii) permacrisis generates a politics of waiting and ‘stuckedness’ that…
Political science (20 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (18 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (7 works) · Geography (6 works) · Humanities (6 works) · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts (6 works)