Abstract
AbstractFailure is often taken as an endpoint: anathema to political organizing and the death knell of social movements. To the degree that radical movements themselves dwell on failure, participants often consider the focus pathological. This article explores how, in the aftermath of the falling apart of long‐term initiatives, Lebanese political activists were able to maintain their capacity to engage in transformative action. At a time when activists felt ‘failure in the air’, narrating prior political experiences communally, in formal and informal contexts, became crucial to (re)imagining one another as activists. Such stories narrated failure to compel collective action in the future, making failure itself a political resource; not the end, but a beginning. Throughout, this article engages in an affirmative anthropology that keeps alive the costs of failure even as it shows how radical political actors generate their capacity to act and their potential to imagine otherwise.
Highlights
‘Our protests don’t really matter to those in charge – the police just leave us to it’. It was December 2013, and I was sitting with David1 in the run-down garden behind Captain’s Cabin, a cheaper bar in the west Beirut neighbourhood of Hamra where we both lived, and an area that acted as a home space in the city for left-wing and independent activism
My original intention had been to become involved with one particular movement, Take Back Parliament (TBP), whose aim had been to get people elected to parliament from beyond the ranks of traditional political elites
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Summary
Failure is often taken as an endpoint: anathema to political organizing and the death knell of social movements. ‘Our protests don’t really matter to those in charge – the police just leave us to it’ It was December 2013, and I was sitting with David in the run-down garden behind Captain’s Cabin, a cheaper bar in the west Beirut neighbourhood of Hamra where we both lived, and an area that acted as a home space in the city for left-wing and independent activism. These parliamentary elections were summarily postponed in June 2013, and the period that followed was one of retrenchment and little high-profile political engagement Activists wrestled with their own feelings of burnout from an intense eighteen months of organizing, alongside questions of what might even constitute viable political action with parliamentary and constitutional life at a standstill and the conflict in Syria continuing to make itself felt.
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