The Durative Politics of Uncertainty

The anthropologist Ghassan Hage likens political life in Lebanon to a state of “permanent critical condition” in the medical sense, in which the very capacity to imagine political possibility is foreclosed.Footnote ⁹ Centering the routine practices of the Litani power plant workers, I want to understand what it might mean to live through a protracted temporality of uncertainty without succumbing to what Hage describes as “a politics of people continuously staring at the abyss.”Footnote ¹⁰ In the polluted watershed, where Lebanon’s financial crisis, deepening since 2019, has left the Litani River Authority unable to afford even preventive maintenance on the plants, I ask: How do power plant workers experience time through labor, ongoing distress, and infrastructural transformation? And how can their experience be understood on a national scale? Thinking through their intergenerational involvement with the LRA as well as the changing waterscape, I suggest that they endure hardship in ways that cannot be read as simply weathering one crisis while waiting for the next. In attempting to sketch the politics of endurance these workers forge, I join a conversation on the temporal logics of living in contexts of continual insecurity and precarity and trace how time is organized inside one of the Litani’s power plants, as well as in relation to broader sociohistorical forces of development and state-building.Footnote ¹¹

In my inquiry about how time is experienced in the watershed, I hope to address an obstinate problem I encountered while conducting fieldwork in Lebanon between 2021 and 2022: How can one make sense of time when merely talking about the future often feels impossible? Beyond Lebanon’s worsening socioeconomic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the explosion at the Port of Beirut in August 2020, what rendered the future unthinkable was a pervasive sense that there were not any openings for improvement, whether at the level of collective imagination or in the many projects unfolding in the villages surrounding the Litani dam.Footnote ¹² Attempting to rationalize this political stasis, my friend Ghada, with whom I stayed in the village of Saghbine, often described how defiance not only seemed ineffectual but also could entail a risk of obliteration. In state-led efforts, most ongoing initiatives—such as the LRA’s constructed wetland that I visited in the village of Jib Jinnine—followed a tempo of containment. Rather than embodying the modernizing ethos of development, once exemplified by the construction of the Litani dam and its associated power plants, these projects aimed at mitigating the effects of pollution on humans and nonhumans alike, while simultaneously advocating for a sustainability framework still firmly rooted in capitalism. Examining this temporal singularity more closely is not simply a rebuttal of the imperatives of progress or its reverse—other scholars have already critiqued development’s assumed teleology.Footnote ¹³ Instead, my concern is to give form to the emergent temporalities and politics that persist, especially in the absence of more coherent and directly confrontational practices of emancipation.

The harnessing of the waters of the Litani River, the electrification of the Lebanese countryside, and the expansion of state and market power into rural territories generated distinct spatiotemporal processes in the rural West Bekaa, where power could operate in contradictory and unsettling ways. The space of the power plant renders more visible the intersections of infrastructural temporalities (the rhythms of work and delays involved in building or maintaining infrastructure, as well as the temporal breaks between central planning and everyday life) with varying state configurations, local political relations, and historically and geographically situated forms of social and cultural struggles.Footnote ¹⁴ To elaborate on this locally specific mode of governmentality, which I approach through the notion of tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi, I draw on both Judith Butler’s notion of subjectivation alongside Saba Mahmood’s broadening of agency beyond normative categories of freedom. Their work illustrates how unequal relations of power produce the very capacities to respond to them. Mahmood’s example of the virtuoso pianist, which she invokes to challenge liberal notions of agency, especially helps me clarify how tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi constitutes a historically grounded, pragmatic politics that reworks power relations. In that account, the pianist in training is disciplining herself through sustained and, at times, even painful practice regimens. Extending this image allows us to imagine how the pianist, having mastered her instrument, does not merely submit to its form, but transforms the very art of playing. In a similar vein, LRA workers do more than endure or resist domination, they reinterpret the terms of power itself.

Methodologically, rather than framing time solely through the dominant trope of crisis, which, as Janet Roitman argues, can become a blind spot in the production of knowledge, this essay aligns with anthropological studies concerned with the temporal politics of hydraulic infrastructures.Footnote ¹⁵ To highlight how the passing of time is etched in part by the flow of water, I follow three LRA staff—Rimah the engineer, Abou Imad the patrol officer, and Robert the plant technician—as they bridge spatial and temporal disjunctions in their daily work, between past and present as well as between the inside of the power plant and its constitutive outside.Footnote ¹⁶ Their practices, operating within both embodied and materialist registers, suggest an ability to unmoor oneself while staying put—a motion-in-stasis that exceeds what Hage, remarking on the existential immobility caused by permanent crisis, describes as a form of stuckedness.Footnote ¹⁷ In its place, Rimah, Abou Imad, and Robert forge “a collective life from below,” both literally and figuratively.Footnote ¹⁸ Located near the village of Markaba, the power plant I examine is embedded deep within the Mount Lebanon range, on its eastern flanks. In this subterranean setting, their interactions with a decaying infrastructure are not simply responses to technical arrangements but also constitute explicit engagements with political economic questions usually sidelined in development discourses.Footnote ¹⁹ Although these practices sit uneasily within more legible models of how contestation is conceptualized in Lebanon, they are still materially and affectively significant. They account for various movements at diverging scales—whether from rural to urban life, or from ambitious development projects to their abandonment. Above all, they reflect the inchoate itineraries and imaginaries of what Hage calls “spaces of viability,” or the capacity to imagine compromised terrains, such as Lebanon, as places where one might still make a living.Footnote ²⁰ As Robert explained to me, this capacity is shaped by a sense of gratitude for having been able to remain, however precariously, in place.

The impression of having been momentarily spared raises the difficult question of how large-scale social and historical structures relate to the intimate, embodied ways people navigate them. This question, once again, comes into focus through these farmers-turned-workers’ contingent and reciprocal form of living together with the river, its infrastructure, and the public body overseeing its management. Robert, Abou Imad, and Rimah’s intergenerational involvement with the LRA and the different job positions they have held within the infrastructure offer ethnographic descriptions of time “at work” in the power plant.Footnote ²¹ They illustrate how relationships with the Litani, marked by both mutual benefit and harm, are grounded in everyday sensory experience while simultaneously responding to changing sociohistorical circumstances.

The remainder of this essay is structured as follows: I begin with the contested histories of the Litani infrastructure and highlight its role as a temporal device; I then show how my interlocutors rework dominant notions of national time in the dull and damp environment of the power plant. Neither homogenously empty, nor aligned with the cadence of a developmental telos, their experience of time is also not, to paraphrase the medical metaphor of Hage, a flat line in end-of-life care for a country in critical condition. Instead, their practices actualize a temporal formation that continually unsettles normative distinctions over what is considered good or deemed bad and reconfigures the temporalities of insecurity, particularly those marked by an infrastructural divide, between the imagined interior of the nation and its outside.Footnote ²² The sources of insecurity are many: austerity, ecological and infrastructural degradation, the shrinkage of public services, the retrenchment of government jobs, and the erasure of safety nets for workers. In and around the Litani infrastructure, the social relations and power fields of neoliberalism, which produce these inequalities, also condition the means and opportunities through which to contain their detrimental effects.Footnote ²³ Always a relational arrangement with the river, the power plants, and the LRA, tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi names the ways workers are governed and how they respond, naturalizing political economic structures of uncertainty and precarity. As domination and exploitation are recast within labor relations, they are simultaneously challenged through kin or village relations as well as through workers’ sense of a common responsibility, forged when working together in the arduous setup of the plants.

The Developmental Time of the Litani

A focus of geopolitical narratives since the turn of the 20th century, the Litani is regarded as a national river rising within Lebanese territory, near Baalbek, and joining the Mediterranean Sea at Qasmiyya, in South Lebanon.Footnote ²⁴ In official and popular discourses and in the collective national imagination, it figures as a national infrastructure and resource, a contested border, and kin-like neighbor. Its Qaraoun Dam—featured in official school curricula as a symbol of national development, with lessons on its construction and the role of the Litani River in state-building—serves as a site where fraught national histories are sedimented.Footnote ²⁵ Overall the Litani dam and power plants stand as an emblem of Lebanon’s charged context—as not just a developmental infrastructure, but also as a temporal formation shaped by war, ruin, and global and local forces inseparable from experiences of capitalist modernity. In this section, I want to consider how the Litani emerges as a polysemic form in which nature, technological arrangements, and politics converge to express workers’ personal experiences with hardship and time.

Contemporary figurations of the Litani emphasize its role as a contested border, delineating competing territorial visions and national sovereignty and security claims. Reflecting long-standing Zionist interest in the river’s waters, the Litani marked the rough northern boundary of Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon from Operation Litani in 1978 until Liberation Day in 2000, and as of December 2025 marks Israel’s so-called security zone.Footnote ²⁶ However, these geopolitical renderings only partially capture how the river comes to matter in everyday life. It was in this context that I first became attentive to how the river functioned as a political and temporal device, while listening to my interlocutors’ stories about the broad transformations brought about by the dam’s construction. Stories Rimah, Abou Imad, Robert, and others relayed about the riverscape, work on the dam or in the plants, or daily life in their villages following electrification in the mid-1960s usually began with “when the Litani came” (lamma ʾaja al-Litani). My interlocutors spoke of the Litani in ways that blurred the distinction between the river itself, the infrastructure built to harness it, and the bureaucracy that ensured its operation. Their widespread gloss did not mark a discrete historical moment, which I had initially understood as the construction of the dam. Instead, the palimpsestic usage of the term condensed multiple overlapping processes, capturing the tangled connections between nature, technology, and politics that infrastructural development activates.Footnote ²⁷ It also conveyed the dilemmas of the age of the Anthropocene: when it came, the Litani promised well-being, abundance, and progress; and yet here it was, like a shadow, a “return, in monstrously inverted form, of a series of progressive promises made decades earlier.”Footnote ²⁸

What were those initial promises? During the second half of the 20th century, the Lebanese state implemented the Litani Project with the intent of fostering sound economic growth, particularly in the industrial and agricultural sectors.Footnote ²⁹ Funded through the country’s first loan from the World Bank and with technical support from foreign initiatives such as the Point Four Mission, mashruʿ al-Litani (the Litani Project) is often considered Lebanon’s most important investment in technological modernity since independence.Footnote ³⁰ Dictated by the imperatives of economic development, it aimed at efficiently contributing to the country’s plans for electrification and entailed the construction of a large dam in the village of Qaraoun in the rural West Bekaa, as well as two power plants in the nearby villages of Markaba and Awali.Footnote ³¹ Beyond national economic ambitions, the project was embedded in broader development ideologies that divided the world between developed nations and those deemed perpetually lagging. These ideologies imposed their own orderings of time—what Kirtsoglou and Simpson call a “chronocracy”—and the regulation of specific historical regimes, calibrated to the dominant and progressive rhythms of the nation–state, technological intervention, and capitalist transformation.Footnote ³² In this light, development in the Middle East, far from being a finished historical project, becomes a protracted process implicating global and local forces that permeate the everyday life and future of communities affected in the longue durée. Footnote ³³

With the implementation of the hydropower project, the Litani came to public attention during the 1950s and the 1960s. The first two decades following Lebanon’s independence in 1943 constituted a period of intense state institution–building and development, as well as struggles over the nature of the state itself.Footnote ³⁴ This trajectory was not without interruption. The 1958 civil war disrupted work on the Litani project while also stalling the economic abundance Lebanon had experienced until then, driven by the regional oil boom and waves of nationalization in neighboring countries that sent Arab capital flowing into Lebanese banks.Footnote ³⁵ In the wake of these transformations, the Lebanese state’s regulatory roles and modes of technoeconomic intervention, including the Litani Project, aligned with the interests of capital and the country’s social and economic elites, occasionally weighing the careful question of national unity but not that of social justice.Footnote ³⁶ Although the civil war in 1975 would irreversibly alter this state ethos, the Litani River, its infrastructure, and its bureaucracy continued to be mobilized in both regional and communal claims. It is during this period that Imam Musa Sadr, a prominent Shiʿi religious and political leader and the founder of Harakat al-Mahrumin (the Movement of the Deprived), advocated for marginalized rural communities in the Bekaa and South Lebanon, upholding their right to the waters of the Litani.Footnote ³⁷ Imam Sadr framed access to natural and economic resources like the Litani as inseparable from social and political justice and as essential for mobilizing an excluded Shiʿi community within Lebanon’s sectarian system.

What were the monstrous returns of the initial developmental promises carried by the polysemic Litani? Although the construction of the dam coincided with a rural exodus to Beirut and a massive wave of migration to Australia and the Americas, the Litani power plant workers I met are the descendants of those who stayed.Footnote ³⁸ Their families, who once worked the land, sought employment with the state after they were turned into “developmental refugees,” displaced-in-place once the dam was completed and the region’s most fertile soil was drowned under 200-million-meter cubes of water.Footnote ³⁹ Their dislocation recalls what Georgina Ramsay, critiquing anthropological framings that exceptionalize and thereby otherize refugee experiences, describes as living with a “sense of a dispossessed future,” determined by forces greater than what individuals themselves can control.Footnote ⁴⁰

Alongside the creation of a rural surplus population came the pollution problem. Coupled with postwar haphazard urban sprawl, which brought developments lacking adequate sanitation infrastructure, the Litani dam gradually transformed into a choke point and sink for dumping untreated wastewater and sewage, precipitating the river’s ecological degradation. With the Syrian war prompting massive displacement to the Bekaa after 2011 and the onset of Lebanon’s financial crisis in 2019, new meanings clustered and crystallized around the Litani. Once recognized as a neighbor (al-jār), riparian communities, journalists, and bureaucrats alike increasingly referred to it as a “dead river” that poisoned the communities and landscapes through which it flowed. During fieldwork, many friends told me they viewed the river as a synecdoche for the state’s abandonment of its responsibilities toward its citizens. In villages such as Hosh al-Rafqa and Bar Elias, in the northern and central Bekaa respectively, residents deplored the lack of political will to diagnose and address the Litani pollution-health problem. Farmers suffered from the LRA’s decision to cut the polluted water supply in 2016 without offering any alternative for irrigation, and families, affected by the rise in the incidence of cancer cases in the upper Litani Basin, as well as power plant workers (like Abou Imad and Robert) bemoaned the difficulty in accessing proper care.

With these protracted histories of instability, the developmental time of the Litani is marked by punctuated, rather than rupturing, events that reproduce power relations even as they reshape their form.Footnote ⁴¹ The ethnography shows how political life is constituted through such recursive temporalities: tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi draws attention to specific connections between time and space, the eventual and the durational, the structural and the historical in at least three distinct ways.Footnote ⁴² For one, describing relations to the river or the state as an alliance of convenience contrasts somewhat with how critical moments in Lebanon’s history might be narrated. Tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi foregrounds the building of the dam as the consolidation of a politics of development that privileges urban elites over rural communities, consumerist lifestyles over productive economies, and the preservation of unequal power structures over social redistribution. Rather than signaling a decisive transformation, this politics embeds instability into daily life, making the ongoing reproduction of inequality one of development’s most enduring temporal rhythms in Lebanon. For another, it foregrounds vernacular understandings of crisis.Footnote ⁴³ Let me elaborate: during fieldwork, as Lebanon was caught in the whirlpool of currency devaluation and economic collapse, crisis (ʾazma) became the referent through which LRA workers considered their long-standing years of work in the Litani watershed. Comparing their lived time to earlier periods of hardship, they articulated crisis as a temporal condition in which connections between past and present are recognized as moments of uncertainty about the future. Third, tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi illuminates practical ways to mitigate precarity. Wrought by neoliberal capitalism, from the evisceration of social safety nets to deepening ecological damage, precarity encompasses both the loss of stability and rights caused by recent transformations in labor structures and a broader ground of instability linking human and nonhuman worlds.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Lebanon, tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi captures LRA workers’ response to what Anna Tsing calls “the condition of trouble without end,” shaped by expansionist development policies and dynamics of exploitation, extraction, and domination.Footnote ⁴⁵

Listening to workers’ narratives about their conditions of work, however, I have found it difficult to answer with certainty the question “What is precarious?”Footnote ⁴⁶ Is it the polluted Litani River, the power plant workers, or the houseplant that Robert brings into the control room that does not survive overnight? In its material history and semantic ambiguity, the Litani offers tangible insights into that question, bringing into focus the delays and demands of everyday labor in the power plant. When Rimah depicts his family’s connections with the river infrastructure as tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi, he also is describing the ways that unequal labor relations in the power plants, although detrimental, nonetheless afford a continually negotiated form of shelter. Workers’ deeds render the invisible costs of hydropower production more apparent: they inhabit an arrested temporal space carved out of the mountain and care for the Litani (river, infrastructure, and state) at the cost of the decay of their own bodies. How they produce their spaces of viability reminds us, once more, of the way that creative life and ongoing processes of destruction are always coeval.Footnote ⁴⁷ These competing registers of power, or what politics lingers after infrastructural development, is what I turn to next—not so much what is left over, but rather what people are left with, and how they craft their lives in the holds of perpetual crisis.Footnote ⁴⁸

Tarabut Maslahi, or the Enduring Time of Politics

A few weeks following my tour of the power plant with Abou Imad, I visited the headquarters of the LRA in Beirut. Another friend had arranged for me to meet with Rimah, an engineer and key staff member in charge of technical operations on the Litani dam and in the power plants. As Rimah, his parents, and other members of his extended family had worked with the LRA over two generations, I was curious about their experiences of time spent toiling for the Lebanese state. The family hailed from a quaint hamlet in the West Bekaa, nestled on the eastern slopes of Mount Lebanon and overlooking the valley. When the Litani dam was built, technological modernization began to change how village communities, including Rimah’s family, related to the river. His parents were both recruited to work as technicians in the corollary hydropower plant erected on the outskirts of their village. Their steady employment with the state allowed them to send Rimah, their eldest son, to Beirut to study engineering at a prestigious private university. Upon completing his degree, Rimah returned to his village and, following in his kin’s footsteps, he too joined the LRA. His first job was as a power system supervisor at the nearby power plant in the 1980s, before he gradually climbed the echelons of the bureaucracy to become one of the nation’s highly regarded and most competent electrical engineers. He oversaw the proper functioning of the Litani River’s three power plants and coordinated LRA’s technical cooperation with Electricité du Liban (EdL), Lebanon’s state-run power company, which, prior to the country’s 2019 economic crisis, controlled most of the national electricity sector. From farmers in the Bekaa to eminent technocrats in Beirut, Rimah and his family’s lived history exemplified the unruly processes inherent to capitalist expansion and modernization in Lebanon.

Although Rimah still paid the plants occasional visits, he spent most of his time in his office in Beirut. When I arrived in the building for my meeting that day, the elevator was not functioning. Although I assumed it was due to electricity rationing, what seemed like a minor disruption was, in fact, symptomatic of the broader structural shifts that defined my time in the field. In the West Bekaa, Abou Imad described these extraordinary circumstances in superlatives: the world’s worst financial crisis in modern times; the world’s largest nonnuclear explosion. There, the spectacular infrastructural fallout, rapidly devaluing currency, and overnight impoverishment of entire communities concealed other, slower forms of social and ecological inequalities. The conversation I had with Rimah in Beirut centered on both the spiraling conjuncture of crises that had engulfed Lebanon and their refraction through people’s everyday lives, particularly in villages around the dam. What I learned from our discussion then was not just about his and his family’s longue durée of experience working with state institutions. I also got a closer glimpse into the way time passes—and what it means to cope—in a context in which national insecurities become conditions of life.

At the LRA headquarters, my conversation with Rimah gave me language to describe how people who did not suffer the fate of rural exodus and remained in the villages became connected with the river after the Litani infrastructural project. I was particularly struck by his portrayal of how work continued in the power plant throughout somber moments in Lebanon’s history, particularly during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In between more technical explanations regarding the LRA’s contribution to the national electrical output, Rimah recalled how the area surrounding his village was divided during the occupation. Pro-Israeli militias controlled one end of town, which fell under Israel’s so-called security zone, with the hydropower plant located in the middle of the borderland. Then, as now, Rimah asserted that the Litani was central to geopolitical concerns. “Society was … how to put it … divided but electricians who worked at the plant had a kind of laissez-passer from both sides throughout the war, so we’d meet there,” he had clarified. That hydropower production continued throughout the Israeli occupation (1978–2000) and the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) and that LRA workers still reached the power plant daily, despite the bombing and chaos, was astounding to me. People even had an expression for it: “engaged to the power plant” (khatib al-maʿmal), they would say, signaling the implication of workers’ bodies in the daily labor of manning equipment, crossing checkpoints, and keeping the plant running against all odds. For the workers and their families, tending responsibly to their tasks at the power plant surpassed the pragmatic concern of fulfilling a daily job. It reflected courage and a broader masculine ethical commitment. In the view of the many LRA workers I met, the task of keeping the infrastructure running at any given time was life-giving to their families and neighboring village communities. When I specifically asked Rimah if it was the war, the need for electric power, or the necessity of survival that elicited this engagement he added: “It wasn’t just because of, or during, the war, I don’t think … With the Litani, a kind of tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi [form of living together] with the people of the region was born.”

Conceived of as a symbiotic form of living together with the Litani that is commensal, parasitic, and mutualistic all at once, tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi is a manner of attachment that resists full legibility. The interrelation between the river, infrastructure, and the state that this phrase expresses is both fixed and, paradoxically, adaptable to fluctuating sociopolitical and environmental conditions. Through their “engagement to the power plant,” even during the civil war and the occupation, workers upheld a visceral commitment to a common cause, maintaining the vital functioning of the infrastructure.Footnote ⁴⁹ Despite this altruism, their connection to the Litani encompassed strictly pragmatic considerations: keeping the infrastructure running was not wholly idealistic or self-sacrificing. Whether for personal or economic survival or political gain with local militias, LRA workers were getting something in return. Gesturing toward mutual solidarity and, at the same time, opportunistic benefit, tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi expressed a multilayered relation of contingency within the Litani’s broader communities. It concerned socioeconomic relations and productive activities as much as affective involvement and embodied experience. I left the LRA building later that morning with the realization that the Litani infrastructure stood on the shoulders of the people of the region just as they, in turn, depended on it. For its workers, the amalgamated Litani was not merely a condition of life in the villages since the implementation of the infrastructural project. It was its constitutive foundation.

In Rimah’s narrative, workers’ engagement with the power plant, often at their own risk and peril, depended on the social, political, and material conditions of war. While I was in the West Bekaa, it was the steady ecological degradation of the Litani, its organized abandonment, and the absence of state-provided services that shaped the relationship of power plant workers to the river.Footnote ⁵⁰ How they responded did not mirror more typical national discourses of spectacular financial and societal collapse. Instead, their narratives pointed toward a modular experience of time, punctuated by crises of various kinds: from the 1958 civil conflict to the Lebanese Civil War, from the state’s gradual disinvestment in infrastructure to the port’s spectacular detonation, and from the devaluation of the Lebanese currency in the 1980s and 1990s to the more recent financial collapse. “My family left in the 1990s, when the currency collapsed, but then we were back. We’re not leaving this time, where would we even go?” Rimah explained. At once ethical commitment, communal responsibility, and struggle for survival, his account of relations to the Litani evoked a dense web of local alliances and intergenerational kinship, always in excess of interest-based relations. This mode of engagement with the Litani, by which here I also mean a way of contending with power, is durative in nature, trailing continuous reaches of influence rather than aiming at formal enfranchisement.Footnote ⁵¹

Tarabut Maslahi As Social Protection

My meeting with Rimah opened the possibility for me to reflect on my visit to the power plant with Abou Imad and discern the fractures in otherwise apparently unified ideological structures. The scenic car ride I took with Abou Imad, and how I followed him into the power plant, had built for me a striking image of technological power, much like an aerial view onto a lone oil rig surrounded by endless ocean. In her account of the helicopter ride that takes her to an offshore oil platform in Equatoguinean waters, Hannah Appel precisely describes such views from outside or above as revelatory.Footnote ⁵² In contrast, her more grounded ethnographic approach reveals a complex and tangled set of sociopolitical and economic relations that make up the infrastructure and sustain it. Like the offshore oil rig, the Litani hydropower plant buried in the mountain appeared as a deliberately engineered space of visibility and invisibility. Constructed as a “technological zone” and a site for standardized operations and technical know-how, the plant initially seemed disembedded from its social, economic, and political contexts, giving me an impression of spatial and temporal isolation, and evoking both the natural and the technological sublime.Footnote ⁵³ As I later understood, however, the hydropower plant formed part of the warp and weft of ecological and political life in this region of the West Bekaa. A topological space, it prompted, maintained, and simultaneously transformed neighboring communities’ relationships to both the river and the state over time.Footnote ⁵⁴

When the Litani Project was implemented in the second half of the 20th century, it prioritized hydropower production over irrigation, thereby, in the words of its second chairman, Henry Naccache, “forever sacrificing the social development of rural communities.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Like Rimah’s parents or Abou Imad’s, the LRA workers whom I met in the villages surrounding the Litani had secured employment in the state at that time by relying on kinship, village, sectarian, or political party ties. Abou Imad’s father was part of the community who literally built the dam. When his small auto body shop in the village shut down, Abou Imad turned to his father’s political connections for work in the Litani. Robert—another power plant worker I got to know in Aitanit, a village also overlooking the dam—had cumulated small jobs and completed his military service before he was recruited to the Litani “through a local connection” and by virtue of “being from the region,” as he told me. Abou Imad and Robert’s stories illustrate how economic action could be defined by one’s social network, political affiliations, or regional identity, and how these in turn helped curb intensifying inequalities.

Qualifying these relations as a form of nepotism, clientelism, or corruption, or attributing them to the decontextualized workings of “compassionate communalism,” is to frame them as technical problems.Footnote ⁵⁶ Within such a frame, they invite technical solutions such as transparency or good governance. However, as Tania Li argues in her study of development interventions in Indonesia, rendering issues technical in this way forecloses political and economic questions about power, inequality, and the structural conditions that shape such exchanges in the first place.Footnote ⁵⁷ What would it mean to think of these relations in political terms, as a form of tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi? How Robert landed a permanent position in the LRA can be understood as a demand for social protection that remains, nonetheless, contained within capitalism. These countertendencies, engaging unequal relations and structural conditions to mitigate their very effects, evoke Karl Polanyi’s notion of a double movement of economic liberalism: the creative, even if contested, ways different social groups safeguard themselves against “the general degradation of existence.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Calling on “local connections” and “being from the region,” to use Robert’s words, invokes a sense of origin and belonging and a reliance on relationships that continue over time. They are therefore inherently temporal practices produced by those who remain in the villages to mitigate the effects of neglect. Enabling families like Rimah’s or Robert’s to navigate the compulsion to participate in market-based systems, this unruly embeddedness works directly against the power plant’s disciplining logic and its technopolitical drive to operate in isolation. However, it also unsettles the distinction between good and bad relations.

Although the power plants were allocated around two hundred full-time positions, fewer than fifty permanent workers were employed during my fieldwork. Over the years, the civil war, political rivalries, long years of austerity, budget cuts, and a restructuring of public services had radically altered public hiring and recalibrated the life of public servants to the rhythms of precarity and insecurity. When public servants quit their jobs, retired, or left the country, they were not being replaced. Gradually, permanent, full-time positions were replaced by muyawimūn or saʿatiyūn, the daily or hourly workers who were hired directly by ministries and other public bodies like EdL or the LRA instead of going through the competitive examinations of Majlis al-Khidma al-Madaniyya (the Council of Civil Service), which regulated recruitment, promotion, and evaluation of civil servants. Because Lebanese legal frameworks do not formally recognize a category for the muyawim, workers who performed gig work, hourly labor, or temporary jobs were employed through a convenience-driven approach. Through kinship, family, religious, and other social ties, influential members of the political parties who oversaw ministries could appoint workers with little regard for public administration laws and merit-based hiring processes stipulated by Majlis al-Khidma. Some—like Karam, a power plant worker who was first hired in the early 2000s to measure water flows—were even paid a minimal wage without having to report to work. Unlike full-time, permanent civil servants, the muyawimūn were deprived of a steady monthly salary, union membership, social security, and illness benefits, as well as end of service indemnities and a pension.

Workers I spoke to had been hired through one of these two channels. Their relationship to the Lebanese state—their employer—constituted a deeply political form of attachment. Rather than legality and the ethical governance usually promoted by international development organizations, their way of living with the river and its infrastructure was grounded in pragmatism, articulating what is expedient or possible within Lebanon’s landscape of chronic crises. That some workers received salaries without ever showing up to work, others were hired without much consideration for competence or skill, and most toiled under precarious conditions reflected the ambivalence of tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi. On one hand, the convenient muyawim contracts offered people a semblance of material security, sometimes the only one available to them, tempering the compulsory logics of the market. On the other, it standardized irregular labor, low wages, and the absence of social protection, further eroding the facade of fairness, professionalism, or redress in public institutions. Taken together, these dynamics both produced and undermined social well-being, while simultaneously reinforcing the status quo.

Tarabut Maslahi As Embodied Experience

In recent years, most LRA workers kept working in the power plants despite the devaluation of their salary, fragmentation of the union, and increased cost of the river’s pollution on their health and well-being.Footnote ⁵⁹ Having developed a severe pulmonary disease, Robert, like Abou Imad, had managed to get his relocation to a desk job in Beirut approved. “It was quite a struggle that required different forms of talking to people,” Robert clarified to me one morning, as we were both sipping Arabic coffee at a café near the LRA headquarters in Beirut. As Julia Elyachar argues, diverse forms of social interaction, such as those Robert listed to me, produce tangible effects that become central to the political and economic fabric of life.Footnote ⁶⁰ Like the Cairene women in Elyachar’s ethnographic study of microfinance initiatives in Egypt, the men of the Litani maintained connections with bosses, colleagues, uncles, distant cousins, and other men from their village without necessarily seeking specific goals. Alongside this mode of sociability, however, was the recognition that such connections could carry deep significance. Listening to Robert describe the different positions he had held at the Markaba power plant since the early 1990s, a time when the Lebanese state still recruited full-time public servants, also allowed me to grasp the way that this communicability is registered in the body and maintained over time.

Throughout our conversation at the café, Robert insisted on giving concrete shape to yet another connection forged with the Litani that I had glimpsed when I toured the Markaba power plant with Abou Imad and perceived its separation from the outside world. “In 2005, I finally ‘went inside’ (fatat la juwwa),” Robert avowed, recounting his admission into the plant’s control room. It is with this striking phrase that he repeated three times, “went inside,” that Robert marked the pivotal transition undergone by those who reached the control room, all the while insisting that I could never fully fathom what it meant. “When you go inside, it’s something else, you engage all your senses to learn how the machines work. You must feel, listen, observe, learn, take risks.” He maintained that workers were isolated and alone, that it was not possible for them to learn the job while reading from a manual, and that they acquired the necessary skills only after they went inside and learned how to listen to the turbine. Robert described the space of the power plant as not just underground but inside the mountain. “The filters installed are not enough because you are inside the pollution. Inside the humidity, the noise, and the smell. There is no sun inside. One day I brought a plant to work, it died because of the vibrations. In less than six hours I promise you it was already dead.”

Perhaps Robert meant to underscore a lived experience I was not made privy to during my short visit to the plant. Perhaps he wished to emphasize the ambivalence, recognized only viscerally, of a symbiotic interconnectedness with the Litani that subtly shifts moral and ethical sensibilities. I was left unsure. Was being inside a condition reserved only for those stationed inside the plant’s control room? Or did it extend to anyone who worked for the Litani, in other words, those who inhabited a temporal and spatial condition characterized, like tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi, by a steady yet ambivalent connection to Lebanon’s compromised ecology, its technopolitical modes of regulation, and systems of power? Robert’s account of the time zone inside the control room helped me understand how an involvement with the Litani as form disrupted social time and blurred human and nonhuman boundaries. During my visit to the plant with Abou Imad, I initially assumed that workers stationed in the control room (I saw two men sitting on plastic chairs staring idly at a screen) were simply waiting for something to happen. Robert challenged my presumption, detailing how they entered a machine zone to perform their work, their bodies negotiating a multivalent and nonneutral relation with technology.Footnote ⁶¹ Inside this mountain, the screens, the sounds, the glass windowpane of the control room, and the vibrations were all tools they engaged for the generation of electricity and the upkeep of the Litani infrastructure.

Taking on a sensory awareness of the machines took a significant toll on workers’ health. Like Abou Imad and his son, Imad, who also worked in the control room, Robert suffered not only from the difficult working conditions but also the inability to access proper care. He enumerated the many afflictions he’d been struck by, describing how his health began to decline as early as 1997, right after he “went inside.” In addition to a very serious respiratory illness, he’d developed a wide spectrum of conditions, including diverse allergies, skin disease, insomnia, migraines, debilitating and mysterious viral and fungal infections, and limited mobility in his left arm that he imputed to the plant’s extreme levels of humidity. The waiting I witnessed among LRA workers in the control room was marked by strain and burdened by the risks of labor. At once technique of the body and ethical relation to others, it constituted a form of action and intent inseparable from the bodily toll of infrastructure, the daily tensions of socioeconomic insecurity, and the moral weight their roles carried within their communities and villages.Footnote ⁶² As Robert put it, “Despite it all, we are proud of what we have been able to accomplish … Everything in this country has gone to ruin, but not the Litani. The reason: our own culture of work with the Litani,” invoking a dignified sense of endurance overridden by bodily exhaustion.

During my time in the field, a nationwide power outage deprived households, hospitals, schools and universities, key national infrastructures (like the Beirut airport), corporate buildings, municipalities, and other government institutions of electricity. While the rest of the country received zero hours of power from EdL, villages surrounding the Litani dam were supplied with at least twenty-two hours of electricity daily from the power plants, a prized privilege they held onto dearly. Knowing how to inhabit the control room—a technical yet intimate knowledge—guaranteed this privilege. However, it also was increasingly threatened by government austerity, the river’s pollution, the economic crisis, and the replacement of permanent staff with muyawimūn. In Robert’s view, the shift eroded the transmission of an indispensable knowledge recognized and remembered in the body.Footnote ⁶³ “The generation recruited after I was, we disciplined them,” Robert proudly declared, framing the initiation as a kind of required inheritance. To bridge these opposing tendencies, what was being passed on was an entire temporal predisposition, in which daily precarious laborers were drawn into an “inside,” like the temporal closure of the control room. Power plant workers engaged the Litani to adjust to new relations of force while reworking them. It also offered a striking example of how temporalities of austerity operate in economies wracked by crisis by creating a form of suspended, enclosed time.Footnote ⁶⁴