Crisiswork: Activist Lifeworlds and Bounded Futures in Lebanon

The world's attention has often turned to Lebanon in moments of crisis, including, recently, during the Beirut Port Explosion in 2020 and the 2024 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Less told is the story of how such major events, and other predicaments from Lebanon's long history, have mobilized a thriving network of activists whose lived experiences of multiple crises have shaped their politics, belonging, and vision of Lebanon's future. Crisiswork presents a story of Lebanon through the lens of activist lifeworlds, showing how, amid crisis, both political structures and everyday life become a terrain of generative possibility. Through an ethnographic investigation into the relationship between crisis and political imagination, Yasemin İpek examines activism as an open-ended process, looking at the diversity of experiences that leads to ambivalent political engagements. She follows a range of self-identified activists—including unemployed NGO volunteers, middle-class consultants, and leftist entrepreneurs—as their crisiswork, and response to contradictory pressures, leads them to new ways of being and acting. Crisiswork demonstrates how class-based and other inequalities on local and global scales affect the lived realities and political imaginations of activists. It provides an innovative analytical framework for understanding the complex political and social struggles against crises in the global South.