Transnational Pathways and Politico-economic Power

Globalisation and the Lebanese Civil War

Bibliographic Data

ID3948161
AuthorsNajib B Hourani (Michigan State University, corresponding author), Najib Hourani
Year2010
Volume15
Issue2
Pages290-311
Publication date2010-05-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650040903486934
OpenAlexW1998422209
LanguageEN
Citations received18

Celebrants of neo-liberal globalisation and their critics ascribe to the rationality of finance capital enormous power. It opens new territories, produces new cultural forms and creates a hierarchy of cities and the spaces within them. How might this image change when viewed from spaces allegedly excluded from capitalist globalisation? For many, Lebanon during its 1975–1990 civil war was such a place. The international financial institutions and their Lebanese allies presented neo-liberal reform as the necessary prerequisite for post-conflict re-integration with rational processes of capitalist globalisation. Through a multi-sited political economy of one financial network operant in wartime Lebanon, I show that the "militia economy" was never outside larger processes of financial globalisation. I argue that it was integrated into a global realm consisting not of financial corporations operating according to a universal capitalist rationality, but rather one of similarly constituted networks of capitalists, companies and other institutions working within and alongside a variety of states in pursuit of politico-economic power

Civil society · Economic power · Economic system · Economics · Globalization · Market economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Rationality · Realm · Law · Middle East Politics and Society