Crisiswork - by Yasemin İ & pek

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Crisiswork invites us to rethink social movements in Lebanon through activists' everyday narratives and perceptions of 'post-sectarian futures.' A valuable read for anyone seeking to understand local organizing in polarized settings as a landscape of opportunity and hope." --Tamirace Fakhoury, Tufts University

"Crisiswork is a powerful and moving account of the complexities and contradictions of activism in twenty-first century Lebanon. This elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated book brings us close to people trying to do something in response to the political disarray and violence of their world." --Sherry Ortner, University of California, Los Angeles

"An urgently needed intervention, Yasemin İpek troubles taken-for-granted binaries of activism and complacency to demonstrate how everyday forms of ethical engagement, care, and advocacy can generate political possibility. This subtle and rich ethnography is a form of 'crisiswork' in its own right--a gift in challenging times." --Jessica Greenberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

About the Author

Yasemin İpek is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs at George Mason University.