Abstract
Across the Middle East, military professionals, private militias, and other security actors often play a central role in the management of urban planning, public administration, and other state affairs. However, security studies scholarship offers few theoretical tools for understanding this deep and overt inter-twinement of security and governance, framing it as an outcome of authoritarian practices of coup-proofing or a symptom of ‘weak’ states. This article analyzes spatial planning and land management practices in Egypt and Lebanon to propose two concepts, ‘hyphenated identities’ and the ‘boundless security field’, as alternative theoretical tools for thinking about security. I argue that security logics are deeply enmeshed with the identity of the nation, its histories of conflict, and its experiences of state formation, creating a security field that is boundless and non-discrete. Within this field are a set of ‘hyphenated identities’, or categories of actors who perform dual roles as managers of security and managers of other governance matters. The influence of these actors on governance practices illustrates the extent to which security logics can be imbedded in the structures of the state and its modus operandi, thereby reinforcing the boundlessness of the security field.
Introduction
Security agents and organizations often play a central yet underestimated role in state governance. Particularly in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), military professionals, sectarian militias, and other security actors are involved in the planning and management of sectors such as urban development, industrial production, and public administration. Nevertheless, security studies scholarship offers few theoretical tools for understanding this deep and overt inter-twinement of security and governance. Often, it is framed as an outcome of authoritarian practices of coup-proofing (Albrecht, 2015; Quinlivan, 1999) or a symptom of weak or fragile states (Atzili, 2010; Kamrava et al., 2014).
Such frameworks, however, threaten to dismiss the entanglement between security and governance as an exception to the normal order of things. Existing theories of security often assume a context of Western liberal democracy in which security practices are understood to operate within spaces of exception – that is, circumstances, policy domains, places, and populations to which governing norms do not apply. Where scholars have noted the securitization of an expanding set of policy issues, including immigration, public health, and climate change (Kirk, 2020; Van Baar, 2011; Warner and Boas, 2019), the underlying assumption is of a movement from a previously ‘normal’ policy domain to one that is increasingly guided by security narratives or concerns.
Yet the lived experience of much of the Global South, and particularly the MENA region, suggests that security politics are – and, more importantly, always have been – ubiquitous. Security practices in these contexts are not limited to exceptional measures employed to challenge a set of real or imagined existential threats, but also encompass a range of governance tools, such as state planning, land management, and regulatory practices, employed in the everyday management of state affairs. Urban development in particular has often been driven by security objectives, particularly within zones of conflict or in deeply divided societies (Abu-Lughod, 2014; Henni, 2017; Khamaisi, 2019; Yiftachel and Yacobi, 2003). In this context, concepts of authoritarian politics and weak states offer little analytical value in terms of understanding how security politics operate within state bureaucracies or their impact on the policy domains with which they are so deeply intertwined.
As an alternative to these frameworks, this article takes seriously the call to retheorize from the periphery (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012; Connell, 2014), building on existing efforts to recalibrate the Arab Middle East as a locus for generating new conceptual tools for thinking about the politics of security. More often than not, the MENA region has been used either as an empirical testing ground for Eurocentric theory (Ardovini and Mabon, 2020; Greenwood and Wæver, 2013) or dismissed as an aberration in the name of Middle East exceptionalism (Bayat, 2001; Bellin, 2004; Salamey, 2009). More recently, however, it has also inspired postcolonial and feminist approaches that recognize the plurality of actors, subjects, and violences embedded within security regimes, as well as their intertwinement with the ordinary, the mundane, and the geopolitical (see Abboud et al., 2018; Amar, 2013; Barkawi and Laffey, 2006; Basham, 2018; Hazbun, 2015). In line with these efforts, I use the empirical realities of the region to articulate two concepts, ‘hyphenated identities’ and the ‘boundless security field’, for analyzing the imbrication of security politics in multiple policy domains. Using spatial and land management as a lens through which to examine relationships between security and governance, I adopt Bigo’s (2002, 2008) approach to defining security as a field encompassing a range of state and non-state actors, as well as their related practices and political economies. However, I argue that while the Paris School’s (Balzacq, 2011; Bigo, 2002, 2008) emphasis on bureaucratic politics and use of the security field are instructive, the concepts they propose, including the very notion of securitization, fail to analyze the historical depth and bureaucratic breadth of the security field in much of the MENA region.
Indeed, security practices are deeply enmeshed with the identity of the nation, its histories of conflict, and its experiences of state formation, creating what I call the ‘boundless security field’, or contexts in which the entire state is both physically and temporally engulfed by security politics. Within this field are what I refer to as ‘hyphenated identities’, or categories of actors who perform dual roles as managers of security and managers of other governance matters. These serve to imbed security logics and practices within the structures of the state and its modus operandi, reinforcing the boundlessness of the security field. I unpack these concepts through a historicized analysis of spatial and land management practices in Egypt and Lebanon. These cases emblematize the role of two types of security actors – formal armies and sectarian militias – in shaping urban planning practices in the region. Juxtaposing two widely divergent state models – Egypt as a classic example of coup-proofing and authoritarian politics, and Lebanon as an example of a ‘weak’ state – allows us to consider the analytical efficacy of these concepts in differentiated empirical contexts.
I draw on secondary data to provide a synthesis and reshaping of existing empirical materials into new theoretical tools. Owing to the difficulties of access and the opacity of military practices, there is a dearth of studies on the Egyptian military. However, a select number of scholars have been able to amass a vast wealth of material on the military’s business empire, including its role in infrastructural and urban development (see Abul-Magd, 2014; Marshall, 2015; Sayigh, 2019). In particular, Sayigh’s (2019) Owners of the Republic is the first report of its kind in terms of the breadth of empirical data on the Egyptian military. However, few efforts have been made to synthesize this wealth of material into a generalizable understanding of the relationships between security, governance, and the state. While investigations of the role of Lebanese paramilitary organizations in spatial and urban planning are more widely available (see Bou Akar, 2012, 2018; Fawaz, 2009; Fregonese, 2019; Harb, 2008; Haugbolle, 2006), these have largely been based in geography and planning studies, and thus do not engage with theories and concepts from the security literature. Nevertheless, their insights on the role of sectarian militias in shaping the built environment are instructive for security studies scholars seeking to understand the enduring bonds between security and governance.
A bounded security field?
A study of the imbrication of security with everyday governance must begin with an investigation of what Stritzel (2007) describes as practices operating ‘below the level of exceptionality’ (cited in Watson, 2011: 7). In contrast to the Copenhagen School’s emphasis on the role of discursive ‘speech acts’ in moving policy issues from the domain of normal politics to the domain of exception (Buzan et al., 1998: 26), proponents of the Paris School highlight the ways in which commonplace bureaucratic politics, relations of power, and economic considerations combine to bring security actors and concerns to the forefront of decisionmaking in a wide variety of policy contexts. Bigo’s (2002, 2008) work on the securitization of immigration policy in Europe is illustrative of this approach. The work of securitization, he argues, is produced by the internalized habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) of security actors, whom he names ‘professionals in the management of unease’ (Bigo, 2002: 64). Over the course of their attempts to compete with budgetary rivals, secure economic interests, and maintain institutional legitimacy, these professionals expand their field of operations into new policy areas.
Bigo’s framework hinges on the existence of a cadre of agents specialized in the declaration and management of threats. Their claims to ‘truth’ depend on their possession of numerical data, biometric technologies, and other statistical tools that allow them to ‘tell us who and what should inspire unease’ (Bigo, 2008: 21). Their credibility thus derives from exclusive access to specialized knowledge that casts them as experts in their field. This expertise, Bigo (2008: 24) adds, allows them to engage in bureaucratic ‘colonization’, or infiltration, of other fields, a process that occurs through unexpected ‘jumps’ into new activities and policy domains.
However, this framework makes a number of problematic assumptions. First, it assumes the existence of a distinct and bounded security field that can colonize other distinct and bounded fields. This leaves little room for a conception of fields as overlapping rather than discrete. Indeed, history is replete with examples of objects, disciplines, and practices whose genealogies are inextricably tied to the politics of security. Perhaps the most paradigmatic example lies in the military genealogy of the can of soup – a commonplace consumer item whose design was commissioned by Napoleon to replenish the military supplies of distant battlefields (Howell, 2018). Just as it would be inaccurate to describe as militarized an item that was always a product of military politics (Howell, 2018), it would be incorrect to suggest that canned-goods manufacturing has been colonized by the security field. In this context, the very concept of securitization loses its analytical value.
Second, in framing ‘professionals in the management of unease’ as specialized agents distinguished by their access to expert knowledge, Bigo overlooks other models of security governance. For instance, there are categories of security agents and organizations, such as sectarian and private militias, parastatal organizations, and other informal armed groups, that do not conform to the blueprint of professionalized agencies with access to privileged technologies. Moreover, these groups often rely on other sources of legitimation, such as their role in state-building or historical contributions to community and national defense. Indeed, even claims to expert knowledge can require intricate constructions of credibility that rely on multiple sources of legitimacy (Gieryn, 1999). Bigo’s emphasis on the specialized nature of these agents also ignores the possibility that security work can be carried out by agents with other primary roles, or that the ‘professionals in the management of unease’ may also be managers of other things.
Finally, Bigo (2002) refers to the Cold War as a watershed moment after which military and security agents began to seek new roles for themselves, thus paving the way for the expansion of the security field. While this is certainly true in the context of European immigration policy to which he refers, one must, in an effort at what Barkawi (2016) describes as the decolonization of war, take into consideration multiple and often marginalized histories of conflict and violence. It is necessary to consider longer arcs of history, particularly the histories of imperial violence, which shape not just the state-building experiences and security politics of postcolonial states, but also those of European and other imperial powers.
Hyphenated identities and the boundless security field
Security politics are intimately tied to histories of state formation. They are ‘the products of historical structures and processes, of struggles for power within states, of conflicts between the societal groupings that inhabit states and the interests that besiege them’ (Lipschutz, 1995; cited in McDonald, 2008: 576). Tilly’s (1975: 42) infamous phrase ‘war made the state, and the state made war’ has become an influential maxim in understanding the history of European state-building. However, in contrast to Tilly’s argument that the need for resource extraction during war efforts leads to the development of state control, the expansion of state capacities, and the eventual transition from absolutist to more legitimate forms of government, scholars have pointed to the role of an altered international context in severing the link between war-making and the formation of strong, effective, and representative states in the postcolonial era (Hamashi and Diyani, 2023; Heydemann, 2000; Leander, 2004; Sørensen, 2001; Taylor and Botea, 2008).
While the specter of war has played a central role in defining the character and legitimacy of many Arab states, their experiences of state-building suggest that it is more accurate to speak of the centrality of war-makers, rather than war-making, to the history and identity of the nation. This can be traced to protracted histories of conflict as well as the role of (state and non-state) military mobilization in early processes of nation-building and development planning (Johnson, 1962; Trimberger, 1978; Ziyadeh, 2019). As a result, several regimes have ‘embraced militarization as an everyday tool of governance as much as (if not more than) a means to ensure national security’ (Heydemann, 2000: 1).
In particular, the Middle East is home to two types of war-making organizations whose histories and relationships to the state-building project shape their continued influence on day-to-day state management: formal armies and sectarian militias. The political weight of the former can be observed in contexts such as Egypt, Turkey, and Algeria, while the latter have been at the center of political contestation in Lebanon and Iraq. I focus on the Egyptian Armed Forces and the remnants and offshoots of Lebanon’s civil war militias as emblematic examples of the influence of wartime actors on peacetime practices of spatial and urban planning, demonstrating how this influence blurs the distinction between war and peace, thus creating what I call the ‘boundless security field’.
The security field is boundless both physically and temporally. Physically, it cannot be ascribed to a discrete and traceable policy space. Rather, it overlaps with a mosaic of spaces – including the agencies and institutions of urban planning – that shape and are shaped by the politics of security. Though the force of the field may ebb and flow, one cannot point to a specific juncture in which it transitioned from a bounded to a boundless security field. Thus, it is temporally boundless insofar as it is inextricably tied to the very genesis and identity of the state. In this context, it is inefficacious to speak of the securitization of state governance, which has always been bound to the politics of security.
The boundless character of the security field is reinforced by the large role afforded to military, paramilitary, and other security agents in the management of state affairs. What Bigo (2002: 64) describes as the ‘managers of unease’, such as military professionals, private militias, and other security personnel, are often also managers of other things, including urban development, industrial production, and public administration. Accordingly, the tools utilized by these professionals are not confined to policing, surveillance, or related methods of control. They include additional tools of governance acquired through what I refer to as their ‘hyphenated identities’, or their dual roles as managers of unease and managers of other things. It is through these identities that security rationales become embedded in the modus operandi of state governance. In the remainder of this section, I rely on examples of planning practices in Egypt and Lebanon to unpack the concept of hyphenated identities, illustrate their impact on development strategies and the built environment, and explore how they reinforce the boundless security field.
Egypt’s officer-bureaucrats and businessmen-in-arms
Egypt is often cited as a quintessential example of authoritarian rule, one that is reinforced by the power and ubiquity of its security services, particularly the Egyptian Armed Forces (EAF) (see Owen, 2012; Pratt and Rezk, 2019). While the concept of authoritarian politics may be useful for reflecting on questions of citizen rights, transfers of power, and state repression, it does little to illuminate the pathways though which these services shape everyday governance, nor their effects on the policies that fall under their influence. These, I argue, are better understood through an investigation of two categories of hyphenated actors that play a significant role in shaping Egyptian spatial and planning practices: the officer-bureaucrat and what Grawert and Abul-Magd (2016) call ‘businessmen in arms’. While the former describes the staffing of civilian bureaucracies by retired army officers, the latter reflects the EAF’s expanding military economy. Both can be traced to a postcolonial history in which the armed forces played a vital role in the founding of the Republic, allowing them to wield considerable control over the political and economic structures of state governance.
Egypt has been ruled by a string of military officers over the course of nearly seven decades of independence. In 1952, it was a group of army officers that expelled British colonial powers and overthrew the country’s last ruling monarch. Military officers played a very visible and direct role in politics, most apparent in their appointment to key executive positions, including the cabinet of ministers and the gamut of state-owned public enterprises (Abdel-Malek, 1968; Abul-Magd, 2014; Cooper, 1982). Likewise, the armed forces were central to the new regime’s model of state-led development, under which they became a key driver of industry and provider of public services. Military engineers and contractors were placed in charge of land reclamation projects, public infrastructure works, the domestic manufacturing of consumer appliances and electronics, and the production of steel, fertilizer, and other industrial and agricultural inputs (Marshall, 2015). In spite of a number of subsequent shifts in the political and ideological orientation of the Egyptian regime, these activities continue to form a core component of the purview of the army, albeit in a different form.
Over the past decades, the role of the armed forces has evolved from one of direct military rule to more indirect forms of influence. Following Egypt’s defeat in the Arab–Israeli war of 1967, large numbers of military officers were purged from the state apparatuses, a trend that continued throughout the 1970s with the reduction of the number of officers in the cabinet, an increase in the number of civilian technocrats in the state bureaucracy, and a decrease in the number of military governors in provincial areas (Abul-Magd, 2014; Bou Nassif, 2013; Cooper, 1982; Springborg, 1989). However, some of these trends were reversed as part of a set of coup-proofing strategies adopted by the Mubarak regime in order to prevent the occurrence of a military takeover (Albrecht, 2015; Quinlivan, 1999). The most significant of these strategies was the return of military officers to positions of administrative, if not political, authority as a form of post-retirement career advancement during the 1980s and 1990s.
Egypt’s officer-bureaucrats are a product of the resultant penetration of public bureaucracies by retired military men. These officers perform a variety of civilian administrative and governing functions, yet their access to and authority within their post-retirement careers are a product of their service and rank within the army. For instance, retired officers occupy positions in local government, (civilian) oversight and administrative agencies, security services, research centers, public utilities, and numerous state-owned enterprises (Abul-Magd, 2014, 2017; Sayigh, 2012). Patterns of appointment also suggest a certain degree of ‘specialization’: army officers are most likely to serve in local government; seaport chairmen are drawn from the ranks of retired naval officers; former officers from the Signal Corps serve in the telecommunication and information sectors; and former air force officers occupy positions in civil aviation (Bou Nassif, 2013: 523). Thus, the governing structure of the Egyptian state in part appears to be a civilianized extension of its armed forces.
On the economic front, the EAF has evolved from an agent of state-led development to an entrepreneurial actor with a privileged position within a liberalizing economy. Its trajectory echoes that of several armies across the Global South that have been able to adapt to shifting political climates and economic incentives by adopting business as a secondary role (see Brömmelhörster and Paes, 2003; Siddiqa, 2007). The creation of these businessmen-in-arms is prompted by a number of pressures, including reductions in military budgets, the need to provide welfare for army officers, and pressures from international financial institutions to reduce spending and liberalize economies (Grawert and Abul-Magd, 2016). This adaptation, however, is not coincidental: it is facilitated by the historical privileges and duties accorded to military institutions over the years.
Thus, in addition to the EAF’s habitual role in industrial and agricultural production, the scope of its activities has expanded to incorporate a massive program of public infrastructure and housing projects, interventions in supply markets, and new patterns of real estate speculation (Joya, 2020; Marshall, 2015; Sayigh, 2019). The ostensible rationales for these activities range from the need to maintain the self-sufficiency of the armed forces and the desire to utilize the excess capacities of the military to the more socially minded aims of stabilizing prices and resolving shortages in civilian markets. Former leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces Mohamed Tantawi allegedly commented that ‘since the EAF is not busy with the main task of waging war, it can devote itself to other things in peacetime. . . . [T]his additionally offers advanced, realistic, and practical training for the army’s Engineering Authority’ (Sayigh, 2019: 117). Thus, to some degree, the expansion of the military’s civilian pursuits appears a function of the role it has carved for itself in times of peace.
While the hyphenated identities of Egypt’s war-makers are a product of the institutional circulation of its officer cadres, their influence is best illustrated through an examination of the spatial organization of state planning, through which the military has emerged as the ‘contractor, land agent, and manager’ (Sayigh, 2019: 101) of the country’s development strategy. This strategy hinges primarily on construction, culminating in a collection of desert reclamation projects and massive investments in infrastructure that coincide with the institutional skills, technical biases, and economic interests of the military establishment. It also illustrates the ‘symbiotic relationship’ between Egypt’s officer-bureaucrats and its businessmen-in-arms, in which a flow of contracts and resources from civilian bureaucracies into military enterprises is facilitated by the connections made by these men at officer school, the occupation by officers of positions on the boards of several interrelated enterprises, regulatory bodies, and administrative monitoring authorities, and the fact that retired officers remain under the jurisdiction of the military judicial system (Sayigh, 2019: 3).
The impact of this relationship on state planning and urban transformation unfolds through three interrelated trends. First, officer retirees are concentrated in (civilian) state agencies related to the built environment, including transport infrastructure, utilities, housing and urban settlements, and land reclamation authorities. Former officers head or sit on the boards of fifteen out of sixteen general authorities for transport (e.g. roads, bridges, tunnels), two of three general authorities for housing and new urban communities, and one of two authorities for land reclamation. They have also served as heads of the National Center for Planning State Land Uses for nearly two decades (Sayigh, 2019). Second, the Ministry of Defense controls several agencies and companies that are regularly contracted – without a process of competitive bidding – to manage and execute a wide range of large state infrastructure and public works projects. These include the EAF Land Projects Agency, the EAF Engineering Authority, and the National Service Projects Organization, an umbrella organization that includes, as of 2019, 35 military-owned companies, several of which specialize in land reclamation (Joya, 2020; Sayigh, 2019). Third, the Egyptian legal framework provides the EAF and its affiliated agencies with a number of distinct economic privileges, including control over land, access to conscript labor, preferential access to state contracts, favorable foreign-exchange rates, and the use of special permits to exercise extralegal oversight in petrochemicals, tourism, and other sectors (Marshall, 2015; Sayigh, 2019).
The military’s control over land and land uses is particularly significant. A series of laws and decrees since the 1970s granted the armed forces privileged control over strategic zones in border or coastal areas, as well as all desert areas not registered as privately owned or in use by an existing civilian entity (Sayigh, 2016, 2019). 1 Some of this control is a remnant of Egypt’s wars with Israel. For instance, the development in 1967 of military zones along the Suez Canal and to the east of Cairo – the latter housing military barracks and facilities – provided the EAF with prime real estate that it could leverage to steer development priorities, negotiate land deals, and shape the transformation of the built environment (Dorman, 2013; Sayigh, 2019; Sims, 2014). Following the 1979 peace treaty, the EAF’s role in the reconstruction of the Suez Canal zone likewise provided it with control over land and other economic resources (Sayigh, 2019). This period also saw the establishment of the EAF Land Projects Agency, which was granted the authority to sell or lease EAF assets. The power of the Agency was further expanded in 2015 by a decree that allows it to form for-profit corporations, thus facilitating the ability of the Egyptian military to use its preferential access to land as capital in commercial joint ventures (Sawaf, 2016). Thus, the Egyptian military is a key gatekeeper, manager, and beneficiary of most desert reclamation, urban expansion, and infrastructure construction projects.
These dynamics indicate the extent to which the country’s development strategies are imbricated with the peacetime activities of its wartime actors. Egypt’s officer-bureaucrats and businessmen-in-arms contribute to a pattern of state planning that relies on what Waterbury (1983: 49) refers to as a ‘flight forward’ logic, or the tendency of policymakers to avoid complicated problems – such as increasing population pressures in the capital – by seeking solutions in the desert (Sayigh, 2019). For instance, Sims (2014: 35) details a series of Egyptian ‘desert dreams’ between 1952 and 2014, ranging from agricultural reclamation projects to ambitious plans to construct new cities to absorb the country’s population growth. Most of these projects achieved limited success, as Sims estimates, for example, that 23 new towns and cities built between 1986 and 2006 had a total population of approximately 783,000 inhabitants, a far cry from the target 20.6 million (Sims, 2014: 142). Yet in spite of their poor record and the strains they place on scarce water resources, desert schemes continue to drive Egypt’s development priorities, culminating most recently in the construction of a new administrative capital east of Cairo. Likewise, in spite of the failures of agricultural reclamation efforts over the span of six decades, a new plan was inaugurated in 2015 for the reclamation of 1.5 million feddans 2 (Mada Masr, 2015; Sayigh, 2019).
This approach aligns with the military establishment’s technical bias and reputation as a capable manager of public works, as well as the interests of its specialized agencies and commercial arms, including engineering and survey departments, land reclamation companies, and technical consultancy bureaus (Sayigh, 2019; Springborg, 1979). Furthermore, desert projects are often accompanied by infrastructural investments in connecting roads and highways, the construction and management of which also often falls to the military. Indeed, Presidential Decree 233 of 2016 designated 21 national roads connecting new desert projects as well as popular tourist resorts as ‘strategic zones of military importance’, allowing revenue from commercial ventures and highway tolls to accrue to the armed forces (Sayigh, 2019: 31). In short, while Egypt’s development strategies and patterns of state planning cannot be reduced to a matter of military biases and interests, they also cannot be understood apart from them.
On a more granular level, the growth of entire urban agglomerations can be attributed to housing and investment projects undertaken by the military. For instance, the east Cairo district of Nasr City developed as a product of subsidized housing projects designed for use by army officers. Conveniently located adjacent to the nearby suburb of Heliopolis and several affiliates of the Ministry of Defense, the population of Nasr City grew from less than 100,000 inhabitants in 1976 to an estimated 730,000 in 2019 (Cairo Governorate, 2019; Springborg, 1987). At times, the speculative potential of land has also led to fierce negotiations between the Ministry of Defense and other government agencies over the planning and implementation of urban development schemes. For example, Dorman (2013) describes the reluctance of the armed forces to relinquish control of land to be designated for the GTZ-sponsored development of the Cairo satellite of El-Obour, as well as a World Bank project to extend municipal services to the capital’s desert periphery in order to redirect the expansion of Cairo’s would-be informal settlements.
These accounts suggest that military actors are much more than ‘professionals in the management of unease’ seeking to colonize other policy fields. Rather, they are actors whose exceptional privileges have been embedded in the structure of the state since the founding of the Republic and reinforced as these actors adapted to their peacetime roles. Nor do their privileges stem solely from their ability to ‘tell us who and what should inspire unease’ (Bigo, 2008: 21). Though the designation of strategic areas is an important tool in the acquisition of land-use privileges by the Ministry of Defense – a matter that is complicated by the fact that any maps showing the precise coordinates of these areas are kept secret (Sayigh, 2019) – these designations do not rely on particular invocations of threat or exceptional circumstances, but rather on the blanket prerogatives of the armed forces, especially in desert lands. It is thus a blurring of the lines between peace and war in which the opponents in a potential war are undefined and the need to prepare for war appears to be embedded in the identity of the war-maker rather than the threat. Likewise, while technologies of knowledge, surveillance, and control are certainly available to Egypt’s officers, they play a secondary role in this context to more ‘ordinary’ tools of governance such as contracting, regulatory practices, and administrative oversight. Simply put, managers of unease are the managers of state planning, a fact that reproduces the boundless security field.
Lebanon’s soldier-planners and broker-clerics
If Egypt is regarded as a quintessential model of the authoritarian state, Lebanon, owing to its fragmented political structure, the frequency of external interference in its internal politics, and the proliferation of armed non-state actors within its borders, has been relegated to the other end of the spectrum as the region’s classic example of a ‘weak’ state (Mouawad and Bauman, 2017; Owen, 2004). Challenges to this categorization notwithstanding (Hazbun, 2016; Mouawad and Bauman, 2017; Ramadan and Fregonese, 2017), the juxtaposition of this example against the Egyptian case provides an opportunity to assert the analytical value of the concepts proposed in this article.
Lebanon’s hyphenated identities are found not within the ranks of its formal army, but among the legacy of its religious militias. The sectarian bent of Lebanese politics can be traced back to the country’s colonial history. While Ottoman rule had already established a certain degree of self-government for the various confessional communities under its jurisdiction, Mandate-era policies enshrined sectarian identities in the legal structures of the French-created Republic. This included a stipulation in the 1926 Constitution that political office be distributed on the basis of confessional identity. Relatedly, individual and community access to welfare, social services, and political representation was mediated by religious and sectarian elites (Thompson, 2000). In the case of Lebanon, French divide-and-rule policies created a system in which the mediated distribution of social services often favored Maronite Christians over their Muslim and Druze counterparts (Ayubi, 1995; Khoury, 2016; Owen, 2004; Thompson, 2000). These patterns created a fragile political arrangement that contributed to the outbreak of a brutal civil war between 1975 and 1990.
The Lebanese civil war reinforced the patterns of mediated access that had characterized the colonial era. The principal mediators during this period were the country’s sectarian militias, including the Christian Lebanese Forces (LF), the Druze People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and the Shiite Amal and Hezbollah militias, all of which were affiliated with larger political movements and organizations. For instance, the LF was an umbrella organization of Christian militias that acted as the military wing of the Lebanese Front, a coalition of majority-Christian nationalist parties. Likewise, the PLA was the militant wing of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), itself a member of the leftist and pan-Arab Lebanese National Movement (LNM). Meanwhile, Hezbollah first emerged as a wartime militia and later evolved into a full-fledged political organization. Consequently, the war years witnessed the territorial carving of the country into what Picard (2000: 308) refers to as ‘autonomous sectarian “statelets”’, which was accompanied by the restructuring of economic space according to the resources controlled by each militia. Militias not only acted as warring forces and protection rackets, but also as economic patrons and redistributive agents. In addition to providing salaries, material goods, and social services to their communities, they controlled key economic sectors such as cement production and maritime transport, engaged in land speculation, levied taxes, and traded with rival militias (Picard, 2000). These activities continue to shape the role and identities of Lebanon’s religio-political groups in the postwar period.
While the conclusion of the war envisioned the elimination of the country’s sectarian divisions, the ranks, remnants, and offshoots of Lebanon’s wartime sectarian militias and identity-based organizations still constitute the base of its political parties, social welfare agencies, and governing bodies. Though the Taif Agreement of 1989 stipulated the disarmament of all militias, Hezbollah was allowed an exception in its capacity as a resistance force fighting Israel in the south. In addition to retaining its militant arm, the group has evolved into a key political party and social welfare provider. Meanwhile, the political wings of Lebanon’s disarmed militias continue to exert influence as political parties and members of the country’s law-making and governing bodies. In fact, the immediate postwar years saw the incorporation of militia leaders into a number of government bureaucracies (Picard, 2000). Collectively, these dynamics suggest the continued influence of Lebanon’s war-makers in times of peace.
The influence of religio-political organizations is further reinforced by the persistent ‘sectarianization’ (Hashemi and Postel, 2017: 4) of the legal and institutional architecture of the state. In 1990, a preamble was added to the 1926 Constitution declaring that ‘eliminating political sectarianism is a basic national objective, to be achieved according to a transitional plan’. 3 However, this plan has yet to be devised, leaving Lebanon in a protracted state of liminality. Temporary constitutional provisions that outline a distribution of parliamentary seats on the basis of religious identity remain in place, while the distribution of political office continues to abide by the 1943 National Pact, which stipulated that the President of the Republic be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of Parliament a Shiite Muslim. In sum, the enduring legacy of the country’s formative history is that ‘Lebanon quite literally enshrines religion in politics’ (Cammett et al., 2015: 107).
To the extent that religion and politics are intertwined in Lebanon, securitized religion is central to the very foundation of the Lebanese state. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fact that owing to fears that new demographic realities will alter the confessional basis of the power-sharing arrangement, the last national census was conducted in 1932 (see Maktabi, 1999). One can argue that, as a result of this history, religious identity is deeply enmeshed with the ‘ontological security’ (Croft, 2012; Giddens, 1991; Kinnvall, 2004) of the Lebanese political subject and agent. In Lebanon, the ‘security of being’ (Kinnvall, 2004: 764), including the right to political representation, access to social and material goods and services, and the ability to exercise citizenship, is tied to one’s sectarian identity. In such a context, in which the specter of ontological insecurity is built into the structural edifice of the state, the rights of citizenship continue to be mediated by religio-political organizations. The multiple roles played by these organizations, as well as their status as the former war-makers of the civil war period, combine to create a set of hyphenated identities within a boundless security field.
Lebanon’s hyphenated identities are best illustrated through an examination of the politics of urban transformation in Beirut, in which urban planning operates as a peacetime extension of competition between previously warring parties. These identities fall into two categories: the soldier-planner, typically a member of a sectarian organization or wartime militia who takes on a formal or informal role as a planning agent; and the broker-cleric, a religious figure or representative of a religious organization who engages in real estate operations to safeguard the security of their confessional community. These categories can be seen in action in Bou Akar’s (2018: 7) account of how, following the logic of what she describes as ‘the war yet to come’, sectarian organizations interfere in the real estate market, lobby planning agencies, subsidize housing projects, install infrastructure, and sponsor the construction of communal spaces. The tools of planning, she argues, are employed by these organizations in a strategic battle to maintain demographic and territorial control over particular neighborhoods and spaces.
One such battle unfolded between Hezbollah and the PSP over the zoning of the Beirut suburb of Sahra Choueifat, historically a swathe of Druze agricultural land and currently a predominantly Shiite neighborhood. The suburb’s zoning designation was altered eight times as Hezbollah pushed for high-density residential development while the PSP-dominated municipality defended industrial zoning as a bulwark against the encroachment of Shiite housing projects on previously Druze land (Bou Akar, 2012, 2018). Meanwhile, the Maronite Church, prompted by similar fears of Shiite encroachment into the historically Christian neighborhoods of Hayy Madi and Mar Mikhail, began purchasing vacant land and buildings in an effort to ‘keep the land “Christian”’ and help to ‘hold their ground against a larger scheme of “Islamization” and displacement’ (Bou Akar, 2018: 52).
Fawaz (2009, 2014) demonstrates similar dynamics at play during the reconstruction of Haret Hreik following its bombardment by Israeli forces in 2006, during which Hezbollah, a key player within the field of Lebanese postwar reconstruction (Harb, 2008), worked to catalyze the prompt resettlement of the predominantly Shiite neighborhood’s displaced residents. After encouraging residents to delegate reconstruction authority to the party, Hezbollah proceeded with a project that prioritized the on-site resettlement of all pre-war neighborhood dwellers in order to quickly resecure its territorial base. This plan did not take into consideration existing legal frameworks or building regulations, nor did it seek to redesign the neighborhood in order to improve the poor living conditions that prevailed owing to the high physical density of the space. Moreover, eight years after reconstruction, Hezbollah negotiated on behalf of residents for an exception to its building-code violations in order to legalize what were, by then, ‘a de facto reality on the ground’ (Fawaz, 2017: 1947).
The maneuverings described in these examples represent the breadth of the security field in both the material and abstract sense. In the first instance, they are the peacetime equivalent of territorial acquisition, executed by entities previously affiliated with or designated as war-makers. As such, what is at stake is not the mere acquisition of land, but a physical and symbolic reconfiguration of battle lines, frontiers, and buffer zones within the urban landscape (Bou Akar, 2018; Haugbolle, 2006). Second, they serve to expand our understanding of what constitutes security and which players or entities can be defined as security actors. Tasks of strategic defense, law and order, and tactical planning are not confined to soldiers, policemen, or intelligence officers, but extended to real estate brokers, master builders, and spiritual leaders. These identities mesh to create the soldier-planner and broker-cleric, who seek to protect a collective ‘security of being’ (Kinnvall, 2004: 764) by transforming the governance functions of the state into preemptory tools of defense.
Lebanon’s soldier-planners and broker-clerics demonstrate the extent to which the security field is not only enmeshed with, but constitutive of, other fields. Their hyphenation is a product of the multiple and time-tested roles of religio-political organizations as state representatives, political brokers, and service providers. This once again makes the security field non-discrete and therefore boundless, both in the physical and in the temporal sense. Like Egypt’s hyphenated actors, the soldier-planners and broker-clerics are tasked with the management of unease along with the management of other things, relying on everyday tools of governance rather than sophisticated technologies of knowledge and surveillance. In fact, the particular pathways through which they operate – namely through privatized land and housing markets – are often deeply imbedded in and reflective of the existing economic order (Bou Akar, 2018; Salloukh, 2019). However, in the Lebanese case, the ontological insecurity built into the confessional structure of the state, along with frequent external incursions into the state’s territorial sovereignty, makes the sense of threat more palpable and the security goals more clearly defined.
The boundless security field: A research agenda
I conclude by proposing a research agenda that further extends the boundaries of critical security studies beyond the analytical confines of securitization. First, security scholarship must engage more deeply with militarism and the politics of war as key constituents of the security field (see Stavrianakis and Stern, 2018). While studies of military politics have often been occupied with war-making and economies of war, I propose that what is needed is closer attention to war-makers, particularly to the activities and economies of war-makers in times of peace. This is especially relevant when one considers the blurred lines between war and peace and the often fragile underpinnings of nominal peace in conflict-afflicted regions. Postwar Lebanon is an illustrative example of Barkawi’s (2016: 203) observation that ‘the threat of war [often] overhangs the “peace”: shapes it, threatens to disrupt it, and orients it towards war. What emerges is not a distinction between peace and war, but one between armed force and its use, between the threat of force and its employment.’ This observation is also relevant to the discussion of desecuritization (Aradau, 2004; Wæver, 1995) and desectarianization (Mabon, 2019; Mabon et al., 2023), pointing to the necessity of moving beyond discursive politics and identity construction to understand the organizational and politico-economic factors that can promote or hinder these processes.
Yet, even in the absence of protracted conflict, one must consider how war-makers adapt to peacetime conditions by embracing new roles and occupations. While the business ventures of a number of armies in the Global South provide one example, one may also look to how military politics shape several ostensibly civilian policy domains across the globe. For instance, Lakoff (2017) demonstrates the role played by defense specialists and nuclear attack simulation experts in the management of public health. Similarly, Tate (2015) describes the efforts, in the context of bureaucratic turf wars and military budget cuts, of the US Southern Command to push for the militarization of US counter-narcotics operations in Colombia. The lines between development and defense have also become increasingly blurred with the gradual incursion of military actors into humanitarian operations (DiPrizio, 2002; Spearin, 2008). These examples point to organizational adaptation and survival as key components of studying the breadth and depth of the security field, as well as its implications on policy choices, political economies, and everyday living. They also suggest that what has been described as the securitization of public policy is not an aberration based in the exceptionality of circumstance or region, but an increasingly normalized component of governance across the globe.
Second, paying closer attention to war-makers in times of peace necessarily expands the stakes of security research. While the discourse on securitization often emphasizes the threats to democratic process and the erosion of civil liberties, the examples of Egypt and Lebanon suggest that the actions of security actors can shape housing and land markets, access to urban services, infrastructure investments, capital relations, and development patterns and priorities. This article has focused on the intersections between the security field and state planning in the built environment. However, a more systematic engagement with these stakes will also require a foray into additional disciplines as diverse as development studies, organizational sociology, and political anthropology. While these disciplines have engaged with issues related to war and conflict, they have not been concerned with security as a primary object of study. What is missing is a cross-fertilization of questions, vocabularies, and concepts in order to arrive at new theorizations of security. Displacing the notion of a bounded and discrete security field thus also entails displacing security studies as a distinct and isolated field of inquiry.
Finally, these examples point to the value and importance of theorizing from the periphery. The academic literature has often regarded the Middle East as a puzzling historical aberration that defies Western theories of democracy and development. This has prompted the ‘ghettoization’ of Middle East scholarship (Bayat, 2001: 151) amid a series of explanations as to why this region is still playing institutional catch-up to the assumed Western norm (Bellin, 2004; Heydemann, 2000). However, the examples of Egypt, Lebanon, and others demonstrate that the politics of security in these countries are not a result of a ‘lag’ behind Western states, but a product of entirely different histories of state-building, conflict, and colonial intervention.
Nor are these dynamics unique to the region. Indeed, both the history and the present of the Middle East interact to co-produce security trends in both the Global North and the Global South. For example, states like Egypt and Brazil – separated by distance yet connected through what Amar (2013: 16) describes as a ‘security archipelago’ of policing and control – have galvanized new modes of governance centered around moral and sexual discourses of ‘humanitarian militarism’. Likewise, Iraq has effectively served as a testing ground for the privatization of warfare and the proliferation of private military and security companies, as well as a lynchpin in the debate over the regulation of private force and military contracting. In this sense, these states act as laboratories for new forms of governing violence and (in)security, just as the Palestinian territories – and particularly Gaza – often serve as laboratories for the testing of new technologies and strategies of control (Hönke and Müller, 2016; Li, 2006).
Thus, to move towards theorizing from the Middle East, one must first unsettle its ‘peripheral’ status, and that of the Global South more generally. These geographies are not simply data points to test against a Eurocentric canon, but sites of theoretical production in their own right (Connell, 2014) from which one can glean new conceptual tools, methods, and politico-ideological trends. This is not only because they provide more glaring examples of the pervasiveness of security logics that appear in smaller and more controlled pockets across the globe, but also because the increasing precariousness of the world order suggests that the future of conflict may be best understood from the so-called periphery. In line with Comaroff and Comaroff’s (2012: 117) proposition that ‘the history of the present may be more acutely grasped, alike empirically and theoretically, from the vantage of what have been dubbed the antipodes’, one might suggest that the ‘antipodes’ in the case of security research are those spaces and nations that for years have been straddling the blurred lines between war and peace, and in which the makers of war have likewise adapted their instruments to the politics of peace.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Anna Stavrianakis, Delia Wendel, Isadora Cruxên, and Mark Brennan for their valuable feedback and support. I would also like to thank colleagues at the Arab Council for Social Sciences, the editors at Security Dialogue, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.