al-Nizam

Lebanon as a necrocapitalist state

Abstract

This article considers “necrocapitalism” as an analytic rubric and social system that governs Lebanon in its “post-War”.  I deploy the term “necrocapitalism” because the lives, deaths and psychic suffering of the population are either political and economic assets to be protected and cultivated (through sectarianism and clientelism) or, at worst, collateral cost, where life, physical well-being and psychic suffering are casually overlooked. Therefore, this article considers the political economy of sectarianism, kleptocracy, neoliberalism, and state capture within a series of ideological-affective mechanisms that bind elites to subordinates and the state to both. In thinking through what might characterize necrocapitalism in contrast to other forms of capitalism, this descriptive and analytic exordium considers Lebanese governmentality (a combination of sectarianism as a social system and the neoliberal-kleptocratic state) as a nizam, a system of governance, of social relations, and of psychic violence. Al-nizam is not only as the state and a particular ruling regime, but also a complex assemblage of social, political and economic relations, infrastructures and institutions of the state that the ruling class both captures, populates, exploits and undermines in a comprehensive social and political project to extract as much of Lebanon’s surplus capital as possible from the country regardless of the lives of those in it.