Akkar: A Region in Limbo?

Since its inception, the Legal Agenda (LA) has paid special attention to the Lebanese regions outside Greater Beirut and its urbanized coast. Journalistically, the LA has progressively covered the most important regional movements addressing environmental and socioeconomic issues, focusing on the demands of people who have been marginalized for decades by the centralizing forces of the Lebanese political, economic, and media system. Legally, we used strategic litigation to transfer key social issues from the periphery to the courts and thereby amplify them. Public property cases on Mina beach in the North, carcinogenic pollution around quarries in the Koura region, and other cases became national issues through legal proceedings and victories. In depth legal, sociological, and economic research exploring the power relations, development needs, and local practices and strategies in multiple regions (Bisri in the Chouf area and northern Bekaa, for example) soon followed. While all these cumulative efforts produced numerous printed and online articles and reports from 2011 onward, our first attempt to focus more exhaustively on a single region was the Hermel special issue published in 2021. The issue covered a wide variety of socioeconomic and political issues in this region long abandoned by the Lebanese state. Today, based on this growing experience with issues concerning the Lebanese periphery, the LA wishes to focus on another region marginalized by the central Lebanese elites, from public officials to private businesses to educational and development institutions and researchers. That region is Akkar.

What is the social, economic, demographic, and political profile of Akkar in 2022? What are the effects of the ongoing refugee crisis and current economic crisis on this already-marginalized region and population? What are its relations with its Syrian neighbor and other Lebanese regions, especially the North, Bekaa, and the center (Beirut)? What are the main issues concerning the local population today, be they nationals or residents, and how do they tackle them? What are the region’s resources, and what are the main development challenges facing it and the means of overcoming them amidst the current collapse of Lebanese institutions? How did power relations evolve in the last decades (Gilsenan, 1996) in relation to central issues like power, property, family, and work and important actors such as women, peasants, workers, and zuama? What are the current dynamics between the traditional zuama, the dominant political parties, and the new political movements visible since 2015, 2019, or even earlier? How does the sociopolitical history of Akkar help us better understand the current situation? These questions, among many others, will feed the Akkar special issue that the LA intends to publish in 2023.

For this purpose, the LA invites scholars, researchers, activists, experts, students, and professionals from the Akkar region or working in/on it and wishing to contribute to this special issue to send us an abstract (250-500 words in Arabic or English) before 15 November 2022. The abstract should explain the topic they wish to tackle, its relevance to a comprehensive publication on Akkar, and the methodology and sources they will employ. Selected authors will write a short to medium-length paper (2000-4000 words) that will be subjected to review and feedback and published during 2023 in the online and/or printed special issue. The Legal Agenda intends to make this publication a widely used and much-needed reference on Akkar today, one that paves the way for future intellectual and policy efforts to give this region the attention it deserves and the well-being it urgently needs.