Trashing the sectarian system? Lebanon’s “You Stink” movement and the making of affective publics

Abstract

During the summer of 2015, a garbage management crisis emerged in Beirut after Lebanon’s main landfill was shut down without finding an alternative, and piles of trash grew bigger on the streets, triggering a wave of contentious politics. An activist movement emerged early during the ongoing crisis: called “You Stink,” the movement is led by seasoned activists who display the usual social media savvy and artful protest tactics that echo activism in the Arab Uprisings. Based on a preliminary reading of the movement’s actions and demands, and of the state’s response, this article provides an exploratory analysis of the symbolic world of “You Stink,” focusing on affect and the body, and proffers some initial observations on the extent to which “You Stink” may contribute insights into research on social movements.

“The history of the city,” wrote the Chinese social theorist Wang Min’an (2011), “to a large extent, is a history of struggle against rubbish” (p. 350). During the summer of 2015, a garbage management crisis emerged in Beirut after the Lebanon’s main landfill was shut down without finding an alternative, and piles of trash grew bigger on the streets, triggering a wave of contentious politics. Greater Beirut produces 3000 tons of garbage per day, and the growing piles brought popular discontent to a boiling point (Samaha, 2015a). Within a week of the beginning of the crisis, the Minister of the Environment estimated 22,000 tons of refuse on the streets (Wood, 2015). An activist movement emerged early during the ongoing crisis: called “You Stink,” an eminently hashtag-able name, the movement is led by seasoned activists who display the usual social media savvy and artful protest tactics that echo activism in the Arab Uprisings. What may be different about “You Stink,” however, is that it is the latest in a string of movements—all short-lived—that have claimed a secular-progressive mantle in a country with a deeply entrenched sectarian political system, where politics is nearly always already sectarian. In the spirit of Wang’s claim, what does a garbage crisis tell us about the failure of the polis?

Based on a preliminary reading of the movement’s actions and demands, and of the state’s response, conducted between late July and late October 2015, this article offers an exploratory analysis of the symbolic world of “You Stink,” focusing on how the movement’s repertoire of contention aimed at extracting a non-sectarian definition of citizenship, by taking ownership of garbage management and disposal, and thus focusing on the depiction of an alternative body politic opposing citizens to an entrenched, corrupt, and venal elite. In doing so, I will briefly begin exploring the ways in which “You Stink” constitutes both a continuation and a rupture with Arab uprising activism, and provides some preliminary observations on the extent to which “You Stink” contributes new insights—whether in terms of theory or geography—to research on social movements.

Lebanon has seen its share of social movements since the Civil War, which started in 1975, and involved, in addition to local militias, armed forces from Israel, Syria, the United States, and France, and officially ended with the 1989 Ta’ef Agreement. None of these movements succeeded in becoming a strong public, in Nancy Fraser’s coinage, and integrate itself into the country’s governance structure. Most of these movements have either broken apart under pressure from Lebanon’s entrenched sectarian political system or have been absorbed by that very structure. The most spectacular example of this is the Independence Intifada of 2005, which brought hundreds of thousands, and by some account more than a million, people to Beirut squares in demonstrations and counter-demonstrations concerning the role of Syria in Lebanese affairs (Kraidy, 2010). Although those protests stemmed from a mix of genuine bottom-up activism and from orchestration by sectarian elites with help and funding from Western and Arab countries, they were quickly recuperated by sectarian elites. Another scenario of failure comes across when one looks at “The People Want to Topple the Sectarian System,” a movement that arose in Lebanon in 2011 and 2012 in conjunction with the Arab Uprisings, but which, after an eye-catching national graffiti campaign, retreated into irrelevance due to a weak organizational structure and the unrelenting pressure of sectarian politics (Kraidy, 2016).

As of this writing in October 2015, “You Stink,” known by its colloquial Arabic name Tol’et Rihetkun, or in media classical Arabic as al-harak al-sha’by (The Popular Movement), has resisted ostensible neutralization and cooptation attempts by various players within the sectarian political system. How long this will last is uncertain, as the sectarian system has showed extraordinary resilience in the past. Nonetheless, after 6 months of sporadic skirmishes between “You Stink” activists and the Lebanese government and its security forces, some temporary lessons can be drawn, if for no other purpose than laying potential guideposts for future, systematic, research on the movement, which I plan to undertake.

As far as I am concerned, this most recent of Lebanese social movements is an auspicious opportunity on two fronts: the first is the symbolism of the body, and the second is the role of affect in activism and social movements. The first issue, with which I have been concerned since conducting a project on the political impact of Arab reality television (Kraidy, 2010) and which I explored more fully in my latest project on activism in the Arab Uprisings (Kraidy, 2016), allows us to explore how notions of the body politic can operate in the context of a chronically dysfunctional state exposed as such by the symbolism of garbage. The second issue that interests me is the initiation of an inquiry into the extent to which affect may trump entrenched sectarian political loyalties, an issue that has not been explored in the wake of the explosion of activism during the Arab Uprisings, and in light of my partial knowledge of the literature on contentious politics, has not been fully explored in studies of activism (one notable exception is Papacharissi, 2015, although it is focused mostly on social media and online engagement). What follow, then, are some initial and exploratory thoughts on these two related aspects—body symbolism and affect—through the prism of the “You Stink” movement.

The body as political metaphor in a sectarian system

The body has operated as a metaphor for political power for a long time. The corpus has played an important role in the thought of Hobbes, Rousseau, and a legion of theologians and philosophers who adopted the ideas of Plato in medieval Europe, as detailed by Ernst Kantorowicz in his magisterial compendium on the Medieval doctrine of the “King’s Two Bodies,” one biological, temporary, and disposable, the other political, eternal, and essential. Similarly, the Islamic Golden Age thinker and renaissance man Abu Nar al-Farabi thought of the perfect state as a healthy, seamlessly functioning body, although al-Farabi saw the heart as the “commanding organ,” whereas European theologians considered the head as the supreme member of the body politic (Kantorowicz, 1957/1997; see Marlow, 1997, on al-Farabi; for a discussion of body politics in the contemporary Arab world, see Kraidy, 2016).

The context we are dealing with presents an interesting twist on the metaphor of the body politic. As a polity, Lebanon has been multi-cephalous since at least the Civil War of 1975–1990. The sectarian system, sometimes known as political “confessionalism,” that resulted from the National Pact that forged Lebanon’s independence from the French in 1943, envisioned a consociational democracy in which the President would be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of the House of Deputies a Shi’i Muslim. The Pact held for a few decades, but it effectively imploded with the Civil War that started in 1975. During the war, Lebanon devolved into militia-controlled enclaves, a de facto striated body politic. Rival coexisting governments with sub-national jurisdiction competed for national legitimacy, and Prime Ministers “boycotted” Presidents of the Republic. The Ta’ef Agreement, negotiated under Saudi patronage and on Saudi soil, that officially ended the war and created a new republic, moved some of the President of the Republic’s prerogatives to the Council of Ministers. The Lebanese–Saudi business mogul Rafiq al-Hariri dominated Lebanese political life between 1994, when he was appointed Prime Minister, until his assassination by car bomb in 2004, which triggered the Independence Intifada—a moment of antagonism that tantalizingly dangled a mirage of post-sectarian politics, before the miasma of political sectarianism returned in full force. Throughout the Civil War and in the postwar era, the identity of the “head” of the body politic was often in question.

Hariri’s killing can be understood as an early episode in a series of events that occurred against a backdrop of, and contributed to, sharply rising Sunni–Shi’i tensions in the Middle East in the wake of the rise of al-Qaeda, the Anglo-American Invasion of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, a proxy Cold War between Saudi and Iran that occasionally heats up as in Yemen, and the rise of that interplanetary ballyhoo, Islamic State, known in the Arab world by its derogatory acronym Da’esh. The onset of the Syrian uprising, soon morphed into civil war, intensified tensions in Lebanon, where the political scene has been split between two major political formations, “March 8,” dominated by the Shi’I Hezbollah, and “March 14,” led by Hariri’s Sunni Future Movement, both named after major demonstrations in the context of the Independence Intifada in 2005 (Kraidy, 2010). Here, we find Lebanon’s long simmering divisions exacerbated and amplified by virulent expressions of sectarianism on a regional—Middle East—scale, and propped by global geopolitical tensions.

By the time the garbage crisis hit the headlines in July 2015, Lebanon had suffered a protracted period—longer than 1 year—of paralysis and dysfunction. Political polarization has led to a debilitating political paralysis since the term of President Michel Suleiman ended in May 2014, and Parliament, disabled by a politically motivated and regionally mandated lack of quorum, failed to elect a President. At the same time, parliamentary elections were not held for alleged security reasons, so Members of Parliament simply voted themselves into extended terms.

In terms of body politics metaphors, then, Lebanon had been without a head for 14 months when the garbage crisis emerged. Rhetorical volleys about the imperative to elect a president wafted out of statements by Lebanese, Arab, and Western actors worried that Iran was orchestrating the vacuum to enable its partner Hezbollah to deepen its control of the Lebanese polity. In a sense, then, the period between March 2014 and July 2015 can be understood as a protracted, slow motion beheading of the Lebanese body politic. In this logic, the garbage crisis exposed a decapitated, therefore aimless and rotting, body politic—the nation as decomposing corpse.

Symbolically and metaphorically, then, a key contribution of the “You Stink” movement was to make this political rot hyper-visible by not only investing into the symbolic capital of garbage, with its tropes of putrefaction, odor, dirt, nausea, disease, corruption, but by insisting on a notion of citizenship grounded in a body politic imagined to be non-sectarian and subject to the rule of law. One of the movement’s mottos, “kellon ya’ny kellon”—“all of them means all of them”—was a rallying cry, expressed on the street, on social media, and during press conferences, to keep the movement focused on a political class that includes all politicians (from all sects), none of whom was better than the others, thus preempting attempts at cooptation by sectarian forces. By doing so, “You Stink” also “owned” the issue, and turned it into the fulcrum for a notable non-sectarian social movement—Ownership, as we shall see, is a hallmark of social movements built around a single, central issue, from which they expand the scope of their demands.

Garbage and social movements: owning the problem

“You Stink” is by no means the first social movement motivated by garbage. There is a significant body of literature in sociology and communication studies that has underscored the fact that growing trash piles and the failure of authorities to manage waste has often triggered episodes of contentious politics. In the United States, several activist movements arose to confront governmental neglect to collect and dispose of garbage, or official decisions to saddle communities—often poor or minority, sometimes rural but mostly urban—with the garbage of others. These episodes of contention involve many political players. As David Naguib Pellow (2004) put it in Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago, the Chicago “garbage wars” were all consuming political struggles that involved “… interactions among several stakeholders—industry, the state, labor, communities, and the environmental movement.” Another fascinating episode of garbage contention was the Young Lord’s Organization in New York, who used piling garbage as a way to mobilize the Puerto Rican community but also used garbage itself as an instrument of contention by gathering it in key places to block movement and confront people with it (Enck-Wanzer, 2006). Closer to Lebanon, the Egyptian city of Alexandria has witnessed several activist campaigns revolving around garbage, although none of these scaled up to the national level. Nonetheless, campaigns like “Egypt Will Not Fall to Garbage” and “Clean Your Country” exposed official neglect (Ramadan, 2015).

Although “You Stink” can to a large extent be considered a NIMBY—Not In My BackYard—movement, it invoked the nation as the metaphorical backyard, even though it concentrated its contentious actions in Greater Beirut. The Lebanese crisis movement actually started with a more strictly, that is, local, NIMBY movement: “Close Naameh Landfill,” a group of local activists in the coastal town of Naameh, South of Beirut, where a major landfill opened in 1997, ostensibly as a stopgap measure, that nonetheless endured for two decades. After succeeding in raising enough of a stink to close the landfill on 17 July 2015, and triggering the crisis, “Close Naameh Landfill” joined in “You Stink’s” protests. “For three or four days or maybe a week or so they live with it—they have to forgive us,” said Ajwad Ayash, a member of the group. “But we have been living with it for years. And the only solution is for them to put pressure on their leaders, their responsible officials to solve this problem in the right way” (Wood, 2015). And what the movement advocated as the right way suggested an expansion of the movement’s goals: The “… solution [was] … ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’” (Wood, 2015). Under pressure, the government had agreed to shut down in July without agreeing to an alternative, so Sukleen, the Hariri-era private company that has had trash management monopoly for most of the postwar era “simply stopped collecting the trash.”

Goal expansion is often characteristic of NIMBY social movements. Such groups’ goals are “not exclusively narrow, single-issue, or reactive” (Shemtov, 1999, p. 91). This is unequivocal in “You Stink” (and “We Want Accountability,” a related group’s) demands: resignation of the Minister of the Environment, a sustainable waste management strategy and plan, parliamentary elections and tackling corruption in the political class, and later, sanctioning police officers involved in brutality against demonstrators. The movement initially gave the government 72 hours, before new demonstrations would hit the streets (Blanford, 2015).

Far from being “practical” demands focused on garbage, these are in fact radical claims that advocate nothing less than a radical reformation of the entrenched, sectarian, political system. “You Stink,” after this analysis, ought to be understood as much more than a NIMBY movement. At the same time, the scale, scope, and ambition of the group’s demands mark a high likelihood of failure.

Nonetheless, a chief accomplishment of the group is its ownership of the garbage crisis. This does not necessarily refer to the group of veteran activists operating strictly under the “You Stink” name, but encompasses a variety of environmental and urban groups, that, together, took the lead in diagnosing and proposing solutions to the garbage crisis in Lebanese public discourse, in the process exposing the depth and breadth of government corruption and incompetence. Ownership entails developing frames that include a sense of moral obligation, environmental expertise, and a deep involvement in assessing and pressing for solutions to problems. Ownership is an “innovative rhetoric” that signals “cognitive independence” from official discourse (Shemtov, 1999, p. 92, after Snow & Benford, 1988). Such activist rhetorical work also identifies “ineffective and untrustworthy authorities as part of the problem” (Shemtov, 1999, p. 93, after Krauss, 1989). How out of touch authorities were became obvious when the Minister of the Environment called on Lebanese to “cooperate in finding garbage dumps for all our waste, and we should not say that the government has shirked its duty” (Samaha, 2015b).

The making of trash publics: a place for affect?

By owning the garbage crisis and framing it in public discourse, the activists wrested it from the authorities’ hands and opened it up to public scrutiny, deliberation, and contention. By marking the authorities as not only a part of, but a major source of, the problem, the activists opened up a moment of what Laclau and Mouffe would call “antagonism,” a contentious standoff that enables the imagining of a better future. This moment came after a series of indignities. A leading activist said, “It is one more thing on top of everything else in this country: No electricity, no water, no proper internet, no roads, corruption and … there’s no president and then you have the garbage” (Wood, 2015).

More evidence of ownership emerged. There was evident coordination, or at least a strong convergence of agendas, when it came to sustainable waste management focused on recycling rather than incineration. Several environmental organizations in Lebanon echoed these demands—and some offered concrete proposals—for a practical, sustainable, garbage management plan. They wrested expertise from the authorities, by the same token exposing the government’s incompetence and corruption.

Several clashes in August 2015 claimed “You Stink” first broken bones and lacerated skins. As one protester in an early August demonstration said, “you can tell by looking around [that] this protest is basically being attended by Beirut’s ‘elite’—the activist crowd, rather than the masses”; Walid, a 32-year-old resident of Beirut, said,

at the same time, if you’re not going to come down to protest against this issue, then you shouldn’t complain about the state of the country … The garbage is a metaphor for everything else that’s happening in the country where the government has really reached a new level of dysfunction. (Samaha, 2015a)

A movement whose leaders were middle-age professionals in information technology and the arts, and whose activities elicited a very classed discourse with an undercurrent of sectarianism, suggests that social class can operate as an obstacle to the formation of large, mobilized publics.

Another way to frame the question “how does a social movements emerge?” is to ask, “how do publics take form”? To Dewey, publics rise through conversation; to Habermas, they form through rational deliberation; to Warner, publics coalesce around texts that attract them through circulation. Dewey and Habermas being hampered by an iconoclasm that is shockingly out of place in today’s visually saturated public sphere, Warner’s perspective is perhaps best suited for our purposes. But after examination, it seems that even Warner’s notion of the public sphere, according to which publics form around circulating texts, falls short. With motivation and repertoire grounded in garbage, the “You Stink” movement poses a special challenge to the study of the symbolic dimensions of activism from a cultural perspective. For “[G]arbage … cannot be easily textualized” (Enck-Wanzer, 2006, p. 183). Although the movement’s logo features a man throwing away a bag of garbage, connoting dumping politicians in the trash heap, and although the movement gave rise to graffiti that bear resemblance to the muralist activism of the Arab Uprisings, no visual meme—broadly recognized, widely circulated, iconic—representations of the movement emerged. As a result, figuring out what symbolic fragments the “You Stink” public coalesced around is a complicated endeavor that compels a search for motivational forces beyond textual and visual representations of movement identity, aspirations, or demands.

Garbage, of course, is a social construction. I do not mean this as a denial of the materiality of garbage, and of its affective potency. What I mean by social construction is that garbage does not exist in nature. It only comes to be in society. Garbage, as Wang Min’an (2011) wrote, is “the unwanted things of society … in the animal world, there is no rubbish … things can only acquire the potential to become rubbish when they don social clothes and break into the human world” (p. 344). Said differently, even after “… garbage was experienced and constructed, verbally and visually, as a central material problem in its own right” (Enck-Wanzer, 2006, p. 184), in that case during the Young Lords offensive in New York, one question persists here, in the case of “You Stink”: how does this material problem make people care enough about it that it generates social contestation?

Using the body as an analytical prism is one way of grappling with the question. For garbage, its mess, its stench, its putrefaction evokes disgust. And disgust is a visceral, that is to say fundamentally embodied affect. With affect understood to encompass embodied intensities before they become socially defined in terms of emotions, and so on, the “You Stink” movement offers clues that affect ought to be considered as an analytical tool by social movement researchers, if for nothing else that it enables an examination of embodied activism and protest beyond textuality and representation. After all, as Patricia Clough suggested, “… the turn to affect did propose a substantive shift in that it returned critical theory and cultural criticism to bodily matter which had been treated in terms of various constructionisms under the influence of post-structuralism and deconstruction” (Clough, 2008, p. 1). Disgust is a peculiar affect, which in the United States is associated with right-wing attitudes toward others, like homosexuals, minorities, and the poor. As Hancock’s work on the “welfare queen” has demonstrated, there are connections between what she calls “public identity,” formed via a combination of stereotypes and moral judgments rendered on entire groups, and the “politics of disgust” (Hancock, 2004).

Thinking of activism in terms of affect enables a more comprehensive view of the role of the body in political contention. Blackman and Venn follow Bruno Latour to argue that affect ought to be “enfleshed” and “embodied” as a “particular kind of process-in-practice,” which includes modes of “noticing” other than the linguistic and the visual (Blackman & Venn, 2010, p. 9). Expanding the scope of attention, a central issue in the formation of publics, beyond the linguistic and the visual, that is to say, the textual and the representational, enables an “intersectional rhetoric” that includes the body, in addition to words and images (Enck-Wanzer, 2006).

In a second wave of contentious action that followed demonstrations that the police repressed with various levels of violence, “You Stink” activists began enacting radical body acts, like the ones that were central to the Arab Uprisings (Kraidy, 2016). On 14 October 2015, two “You Stink” activists attempted to burn themselves in front of the Military Court in protest against police detention of their comrades. In the previous weeks, some of their comrades went on hunger strikes. Although hunger strikes were not well publicized and self-immolations failed, they signaled a ratcheting up of tensions in the on-and-off skirmishes between “You Stink” and the government. The Health Minister announced his ministry would cover medical expenses to treat the two burned men, but the jailed activists were not released.

From recent history, we know that self-immolations need to be taken seriously, for they sometimes trigger cascades of contention that can topple governments. That was the lesson of Mohamed Bouazizi. Like Bouazizi and several self-immolators before him, two “You Stink” activists set themselves alight in proximity to a culpable symbol of authority. In doing so, they signaled their discontent toward the militarization of their struggle with the authorities, and a slide toward military trials. Of course, Lebanon is different from Tunisia, but in both, increases in embodied protest signal the high stakes of the battles between activists and entrenched systems of power.

Although the stakes are high and the road ahead tortuous, the “You Stink” movement succeeded in turning garbage into an instrument of contention, incorporating detritus into the symbolic toolkit of political activism. At this stage, and in the context of this exceedingly preliminary exploration of “You Stink” and the contentious symbolism of garbage, it is too early to determine whether this movement will succeed in forging a post-sectarian sphere of political action, where many others before it have failed. But as Alberto Melucci wrote,

[C]ontemporary movements operate as signs, in the sense that they translate their actions into symbolic challenges to the dominant codes. Collective action … raises questions that transcend the logic of instrumental effectiveness and decision-making by anonymous and impersonal organizations of power. (Melucci, 1989, p. 12)

In that sense, by turning collective revulsion at the sight and smell of garbage into political energy, by challenging and exposing the official discourse of power and expertise, and by exposing the Lebanese political system as a decapitated, rotting corpse, in summation—trashing the sectarian system—the “You Stink” movement compels us to consider affect in research on social movements, and to incorporate the body more comprehensively in research on instruments and repertoires of contention.