Complex Integrated Necropolitics: Hopelessness and Defuturing in Neoliberalized Lebanon

Despite numerous social movements, including the significant revolutionary moment of 2019, Lebanon's sectarian neoliberal system remains entrenched. Through qualitative in-depth interviews with grassroots political activists, this article analyzes a pervasive hopelessness affective cluster. The article argues that this hopelessness is constituted by necropolitical violences enacted by the Lebanese state, political parties, and 'society altogether' across both spectacular public violence and more insidious forms of everyday violence. This complex integrated necropolitics, the article argues, shapes a defuturing foreclosing sociopolitical change. Grating against dominant narratives that emphasize and celebrate resilience and action, this article accordingly calls for a serious consideration of affective barriers to action – such as hopelessness – constituting the present and its (re)production.