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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book reexamines sectarianism as a process, as opposed to an essentialized or primordial identity, through a focus on the urban infrastructures and services provided and managed, in part, by institutions affiliated with sectarian parties and religious organizations, as well as municipalities and transnational organizations. It builds on the careful work of scholars who situate the production of sectarianism in Lebanon as a modern social and political phenomenon that is dynamic and processual. The remainder of the chapter discusses the “roots” of sectarianism from the Ottoman Empire to the French mandate, Armenians in Lebanon, the making of an Armenian public sphere in Bourj Hammoud, and the civil war of 1975–90 and its aftermath.

This chapter focuses on the permanently temporary housing regimes of two Armenian refugee camps in Bourj Hammoud—Sanjak and Arakadz—in order to examine the various technologies that municipality and political actors use to mobilize notions of belonging to the “community” through informal property. While Sanjak is slated for destruction, and more than half of it has already been demolished, there has been little public outcry or discussion in Bourj Hammoud. Arakadz, on the other hand, while not necessarily protected from the possibility of eventual destruction, circulates as an image of nostalgia, an important locus of collective memory for Lebanese Armenians. Both Sanjak and Arakadz are informal neighborhoods where the municipality has granted Armenians only temporary property rights, but what accounts for this difference? How do some people and neighborhoods get excluded and others included through the mobilization of notions of authenticity, community, and belonging and the temporary regimes of informal property?

This chapter jumps beyond the neighborhood scale to a city-to-city collaboration between Bourj Hammoud and a foreign municipality as a means of challenging Lebanese state infrastructure projects. It analyzes the ways in which the overlapping jurisdictions of power go far beyond the fragmented infrastructures of the neighborhood block to transnational circulations of expertise and resources. In doing so, it demonstrates how the popular notion that Lebanon's infrastructural and conflict-oriented problems could be solved through a strong centralized state or through the ideology of decentralization completely ignores the way that municipal governance works through overlapping jurisdictions. While Lebanese centralized state-sponsored infrastructure projects have had a destructive impact on environmental and social conditions in Bourj Hammoud, municipality-endorsed initiatives have often been equally destructive.

This chapter takes a closer look at the way in which political actors and popular discourses mobilize sectarianism as an explanation for conflict as well as justification for actions taken in the aftermath of violence, creating a sectarian narrative that appears rigid, intractable, and deeply historical. Moreover, the sectarian explanation appears to give it a sense of unending repetition. The aftermaths of three violent incidents that took place in Beirut in recent years shape the analysis: a 2009 fatal shooting in a Beirut neighborhood that was quickly forgotten; a larger street clash in Beirut in 2010 that was perceived as a harbinger of political instability; and a fight in 2011 in Bourj Hammoud that launched a large-scale eviction of Kurdish and Syrian migrant workers. This final example is explored in the most ethnographic detail and reveals just how a wholly new kind of “sectarian conflict” (between Armenians and Syrian-Kurds) emerges as an explanation in the aftermath of a violent incident.

This chapter argues that in Lebanon, economic networks of credit and lending can further contribute to the production of sectarianism as well as the narrowing of the definition of who can be an adequate member of the sectarian “community.” It discusses women's rotating credit associations or shirkets and the rise of a microlending facility that sought to formalize and contain these practices under the more centralized control of an official, Armenian-run organization. The desire to control or replace the shirket practices can be traced back to political actors' long-standing fear of women's informal networks as a potential site of crosscutting relationships that defy narrow sectarian logics of social relations and are therefore threatening to the sectarian social order.

This chapter examines the role of notions of gender propriety in differentiating access to Armenians women's organizations in Bourj Hammoud. It focuses on the work of two distinct types of institutions—a transnational Armenian NGO and the various women's organizations affiliated with the Armenian Dashnag Party. A closer look at these organizations show how gender, particularly the performance of normative notions of gender roles and gendered propriety, enables or disables access to the networks that produce the Armenian community in various forms. Access to these channels of services and their attendant resources differs based on women's abilities to mobilize gender, kinship, and family relations, particular kinds of class positions and professional training, linguistic skills, and even spatial, neighborhood connections. Gender propriety and class positioning allow women to connect social infrastructures, to network into other networks glossed as Armenian middle class or Dashnag Party base.