Transnational Pathways and Politico-economic Power: Globalisation and the Lebanese Civil War

Abstract

Celebrants of neo-liberal globalisation and their critics ascribe to the rationality of finance capital enormous power. It opens new territories, produces new cultural forms and creates a hierarchy of cities and the spaces within them. How might this image change when viewed from spaces allegedly excluded from capitalist globalisation? For many, Lebanon during its 1975–1990 civil war was such a place. The international financial institutions and their Lebanese allies presented neo-liberal reform as the necessary prerequisite for post-conflict re-integration with rational processes of capitalist globalisation. Through a multi-sited political economy of one financial network operant in wartime Lebanon, I show that the "militia economy" was never outside larger processes of financial globalisation. I argue that it was integrated into a global realm consisting not of financial corporations operating according to a universal capitalist rationality, but rather one of similarly constituted networks of capitalists, companies and other institutions working within and alongside a variety of states in pursuit of politico-economic power.