Hybrid Governance in Crisis: Faith-Based Urbanism and the Reconstruction of Nabatieh

Abstract

South Lebanon has endured successive episodes of violence, most recently the 2023-2025 Israeli war and continued strikes after the ceasefire, leaving behind destroyed homes, landscapes with mounds of rubble, and a profoundly disrupted urban life. In Nabatieh, Israeli airstrikes devastated the urban core, targeting its main artery, the souq, and destroying hundreds of homes and businesses. In the absence of a state-led coordinated recovery plan, the main Shia faith-based actors of the city, Hizbollah (a religious-political party), Amal Movement (a sectarian-political actor with a faith background) and Al-Nadi Al-Husseini (NH) (a longstanding formal religious welfare organization), along with Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) mobilized after the ceasefire to respond to the urgent needs of reconstruction amid continued Israeli bombardment. This thesis seeks to investigate how urban governance in Nabatieh is operated among the different actors, and how it impacts urban development in the locality, especially in the aftermath of the ongoing Israeli war and the heavy damages incurred in the city. Methodologically, the thesis combines semi-structured interviews, field participant observations, available data, and GIS-based mapping of pre-war urban interventions and post-war reconstruction initiatives. The analysis focuses on faith-based actors and civil society organizations involved in these interventions across Nabatieh’s war-affected neighborhoods. Findings reveal that these interventions produced a hybrid form of faith-based urbanism, governed by different relational forms of competition and complementarity among the triad of actors (Hizbollah, Amal, Al-Nadi Al-Husseini), with CSOs playing a more limited role. This resulted in a fragmented and unequal built environment driven by uneven resource access, parallel infrastructures, and political competition shaping spatial priorities. Moreover, the findings indicate that governance in Nabatieh is produced through the cumulative, and often incoherent, addition of projects and infrastructures rather than through a shared plan, resulting in a patchwork-like “micro-project” urbanism in which an integrated and holistic approach to recovery is largely absent. At the same time, smaller community initiatives suggest a potential nucleus for more recovery-oriented coalitions, even if their influence remains constrained under current power arrangements. The thesis contributes to the critical urban studies literature by unpacking the underexplored role of faith-based actors in shaping hybrid forms of urban governance in contexts marked by protracted violence and state retreat.