War and the City

Download or read book War and the City written by Sara Fregonese and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War and the City examines the geopolitical significance of the Lebanese Civil War through a micro-level exploration of how the urban landscape of Beirut was transformed by the conflict. Focusing on the initial phase of the war in 1975 and 1976, the volume also draws significant parallels with more recent occurrences of internecine conflict and with the historical legacies of Lebanon's colonial past. While most scholarship has thus far focused on post-war reconstruction of the city, the initial process of destruction has been neglected. This volume thus moves away from formal macro-level geopolitical analysis, to propose instead an exploration of the urban nature of conflict through its spaces, infrastructures, bodies and materialities. The book utilizes urban viewpoints in order to highlight the nature of sovereignty in Lebanon and how it is inscribed on the urban landscape. War and the City presents a view of geopolitics as not only shaping narratives of international relations, but as crucially reshaping the space of cities.