Navigating Dahiyeh, negotiating everyday peace: mediation practices across Beirut’s Southern Suburbs

Abstract

How do ‘ordinary’ residents in violently contested cities navigate everyday conflict? Who do they turn to and how do they induce more powerful actors to step in and resolve their conflicts? How do socio-spatial structures shape everyday mediation practices? And what do these practices tell us about the constructive potential of cities? To explore the duality of destruction and construction in contested cities, we draw on fieldwork conducted across Beirut’s Southern Suburbs (Dahiyeh), bringing it into dialogue with a Bourdieusian framework to analyse residents’ experiences of informal mediation as everyday urban peace practices. While these practices are shaped by Dahiyeh’s particular context, they speak to practices in other urban contexts, in both the Global North and Global South. We make theoretical contributions by bringing the everyday peace and urban peacebuilding literatures together and contributing to their vernacular, spatial and practice turns, and by developing a spatialised subaltern reading of Bourdieu. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.