War from the South: Resistant Ecologies in a Landscape of Occupation

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | In South Lebanon, war is lived as an environment, a milieu. War is not an event so much as a haunting condition that seeps into the landscape and lives over the longue durée. Those who remain – and many do – do what they can to survive: tobacco farmers ally themselves with what they call a “bitter crop” that flourishes in an arid warzone with minimal labor while pastoralists walk in explosive fields with their mine-evading goats. These multi-species alliances flourish through their ability to survive the deadly intentions and infrastructures of war. Dwelling alongside two steadfast families in the borderlands of South Lebanon, this paper moves away from tropes of trauma to grasp a militarized world from within the lived terrain of its operations. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these resistant ecologies make continuous being possible within an insistently deadly region. Grasping life from disastrous war-zones not only decolonizes theories of war authored from an aloof Global North, it also brings to light unsung alliances of hope for life-ongoing.

Munira Khayyat teaches Anthropology at the American University in Cairo. Her book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival will be published in 2022 by University of California Press.

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