Affective atmospheres, urban geopolitics and conflict (de)escalation in Beirut

Abstract

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Experiences of Urban Militarism: Spatial Stigma, Ruins and Everyday Life

“…With their focus on how people feel about urban securitization and warfare, emerging works on emotions in (post‐)conflict cities (e.g. Laketa, ; Fregonese, ) provide useful insights for understanding Palestinians’ experiences of spatial stigma in Lydda. For example, in a conceptual movement that is similar to Wacquant's ‘mental atmospheres’, Sara Fregonese () uses the concept of ‘affective atmosphere’ to explore how urban conflict in Beirut produces certain shared emotions that inhere in physical places and social relations.…”

“…Laketa, ; Fregonese, ) provide useful insights for understanding Palestinians’ experiences of spatial stigma in Lydda. For example, in a conceptual movement that is similar to Wacquant's ‘mental atmospheres’, Sara Fregonese () uses the concept of ‘affective atmosphere’ to explore how urban conflict in Beirut produces certain shared emotions that inhere in physical places and social relations. Along similar lines, Navaro‐Yashin (: 14–15) looks at displacement and ‘violent ruination’ in northern Cyprus, theorizing people's relationships with ruined environments as fundamentally affective relationships: ‘an environment of ruins discharges’ or ‘exudes’ emotions and, at the same time, ‘those who inhabit this space of ruins, feel’ emotions.…”

“…It also resonates with calls for a ‘domestic urban geopolitics’ (Rokem et al , : 4), and for ‘the analysis of urban geopolitics and everyday life’ (Yacobi, ). I have suggested that urban sociology's conceptual focus on processes of spatial meaning‐making in everyday life offers important insights into developing a perspective on militarized cities that theorizes ‘the quotidian, embodied, and micro‐scale practices that shape urban politics and conflict’ (Fregonese, : 2). In particular, I have drawn from the geopolitically significant work that Wacquant has produced in urban sociology, emphasizing how increased militarism inflects experiences of marginality and how residents of marginalized urban areas respond to the spatial stigmatization imposed on them.…”

“…While Wacquant focuses on collective psychology within stigmatized localities of marginality, other scholars have looked at everyday life in (post‐)conflict cities through the prism of emotions (Navaro‐Yashin, ; ; Fuccaro, ; Laketa, ; Fregonese, ) . For example, Yael Navaro‐Yashin () emphasizes people's affective relationships with a physical environment of military occupation and displacement made of vacant and semi‐destroyed buildings and walled‐in streets.…”

Phenomenographies: describing the plurality of atmospheric worlds

“…The coming-of-age of the phenomenology of atmospheres thus entails a set of questions related to their study and analytical power. Primarily, atmospheres have been incorporated in the methodological toolkits of several fields of research and practices that focus on the description of human activities and their spatial settings, ranging from urban geography, planning and geopolitics (Anderson, 2009;Adey, 2014;Ebbensgaard, 2017;Fregonese, 2017;Gandy, 2017), homes (Pink & Leder Mackley, 2016;Bille, 2017Bille, , 2019, festivals and rituals (Edensor, 2012;Kiib et al 2017;De Matteis, 2018;Eisenlohr, 2018), memory and heritage studies (Sumartojo, 2016;Micieli-Voutsinas, 2017), mobilities design (Jensen et al, 2015;Kazig et al, 2017) to music (Riedel, 2015;Scassillo, 2018;Bertinetto, 2019). Furthermore, atmospheres are also called into play when the understanding of lived space becomes prodromal to its transformation.…”