Review of Mohamad Hafeda’s Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut (2019)

Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut investigates the immateriality, spatiality and temporality of the bordering practices of political and sectarian conflict. The book is a practice-led research project that employs art processes including interviews, documentations and media representations to work with residents and negotiate the border conditions of: administration, surveillance, sound and displacement. It proposes a method of negotiating; one that considers how artistic research can itself be considered a form of a critical spatial practice and, in particular, a bordering practice – what the book terms critical bordering practice. This enables the rethinking of border positions including those between disciplines and spatial conditions, and eventually the transformation of certain borders particularly the divisive position of political and sectarian narratives.