Theorising from Beirut’s Southern Suburbs: Spatialised Capital and Habitus in ‘Nested Everyday Security Fields’

Taking Beirut's Southern Suburbs (Dahiyeh) between 2016-23 as vantage point for theorisation, we bring residents' everyday security practices into conversation with Securitisation Theory (ST) and Pierre Bourdieu's sociological approach to contribute to decolonising, spatialising and vernacularising (Critical) Security Studies ([C]SS). Guided by vernacular practical knowledge, we develop a non-Weberian Bourdieusian framework to explain the spatial production of dominance – rather than monopoly – in the everyday security field of a postcolonial urban context. We introduce the notion of 'nested security field' to capture the fluid yet socially structured vertical and horizontal entanglements of everyday security assemblages to explain which actors residents turn to depending on place, incident, social position and dispositions.