A Break in the Future - Fuad Musallam

Investigates how Lebanese activists work through failure to keep the possibility of political change alive A Break in the Future considers how activists keep hope alive and work toward future change when social movements fall apart and protests fail. Anthropologist Fuad Musallam investigates the endurance of political possibility in Beirut, Lebanon, between the Arab uprisings of 2010–11 and the Lebanese uprising of October 2019. Despite a regional collapse of political hope and a local inability to effect change in the context of political stasis, postponed elections, and the degradation of civil infrastructure, between every protest cycle a sizable number of people remained engaged and built toward future political opportunities. Through an analysis of activist strategies, Musallam explores the ways in which we grasp different phases of political (dis)engagement together. The book is motivated by a desire to better understand how to keep political possibility alive. To make sense of how possibility endures, this book looks at the ebb and flow of political engagement together, that is, not only at the peaks of recent mobilizations but also at the times in between when, at first glance, little seems to be happening on the ground. Musallam explores how activists cultivated and maintained their political subjectivity—the active and engaged sense of self that motivates political action—across the decade's high and low points. He finds this political subjec
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