Negotiating Obligation Amidst Organized Abandonment
Open Access DepositedRelatedness and Belonging in Contemporary Lebanon
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This dissertation examines how obligation is conceptualized and enacted amidst chronic organized abandonment in contemporary Lebanon. It approaches obligation not as a fixed norm, but as a terrain through which multiple relational processes unfold. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research in Beirut between 2022 and 2024, I trace how journalists, community kitchen members, and neighborhood residents reckon with competing scales of obligation
invoking, tiering, sedimenting, and reckoning. Together, these frames show how obligation shapes political and moral economies and becomes a way of inhabiting and navigating organized abandonment—not by resolving it, but by making life possible within its constraints, even as obligation’s terms are continuously worked on and remain unsettled.
what it requires, to whom it extends, and what fulfilling it entails under conditions of organized abandonment. Approaching obligation as a terrain means examining it as an infrastructure through which people become connected, and through which attention, resources, care, and exclusions flow. Thinking with Lauren Berlant (2022), this perspective shows that obligation’s apparent fixity and malleability are sustained through continuous relational work. I trace these dynamics through four interrelated analytic frames
toward strangers, family, neighbors, sect, nation, memories of past violence, and imagined futures. I situate this inquiry within Lebanon’s specific sociopolitical context, drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2022) concept of organized abandonment and Bassel Salloukh’s (2025) theory of Lebanon’s postwar integral state to foreground how organized abandonment is actively produced and unevenly distributed. Rather than centering whether and how people are obligated to the state, and how the state is obligated to the people—and building on, while stepping to the side of, anthropological approaches that examine obligation through reciprocity and exchange—I examine how people negotiate the terms of obligation itself
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