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Deconstructing Risk PDF
Deconstructing Risk PDF
My research reads this tension through two images of the domestic space
that depict the future in Lebanon. One is an image of destroyed homes
from a risk assessment report predicting the next war between Israel and
Hezbollah, and the second is a life-size architectural visualisation show-
ing a luxury apartment block still to be built in Beirut, which is currently
visible on the hoardings that envelop its construction site. These images
are connected on a semiotic axis, as both are speculative; one is an image
of future destruction, whilst the other is an image of perceived opportu-
nity. Although both are uncertain, both have come to effect the realisation
of each other, as one, or the other, becomes seemingly more concrete. In
their uncertainty, both images require the viewer to not only observe and
Figure 1 (facing page): Image from Dream Ramlet, a construction project situated near the
ocean front Corniche, in Beirut, depicting one of the visualisations onsite, 2014. Image
courtesy of the author. 191
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Figure 2: Port Beirut, Lebanon. Jibrail Jabbur, 1930. Collection of Norma Jabbur. Image
192 courtesy of the Arab Image Foundation.
(De)constructing Risk
believe in the future they depict, but go so far as to ask their audience
to invest in and gamble on it. By this process, the images represent two
different potential futures, and act as modes of production that colonise
the future, producing a form of reality that is both felt in and affects the
present situation. In exposing the contradictions operating between these
two images of the perceived imminent or non-existent future threat within
this specific context, I explore the ways in which the unequal distribution
of risk contributes to the construction or deconstruction of the home as a
site of security. Ultimately, the aim is to better understand the effects of
this transformative condition as it impacts directly upon human subjects
within the home.
two sorts of people, those who are responsible, who toil the earth and
save what they obtain [] thereby creating a future horizon [] by
reframing themselves in the present they secure their own future.
193
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194
(De)constructing Risk
within its developed financial and insurance markets, and the analysis of
potential risk that comes from its geopolitical positioning. These multiple
observations of risk in the Lebanese context are not autonomous, but feed
into each other in ways that are registered, for example, by the real estate
market. To insure against a potential risk, an image of the possible worst-
case scenario is created to enable a level of preparedness. This is often
done by calculating a future based on archival and statistical knowledge
of the past.13 But what are the implications of reading the past as a way of
writing, or shaping a potential future?
What the War Will Look Like is the provocative title of a chapter in a risk
assessment report that imagined the possibility of an imminent Israel-
Hezbollah war in Lebanon. Written in 2010, the report forecasts the likeli-
hood of another conflict between Hezbollah and Israel that year, follow-
ing the war in 2006, by predicting the perfect storm of conditions that
would bring the cease-fire in place to an end. The front cover of the report
uses an image taken during the 2006 conflict that depicts the destruction
of a block of apartments in Beirut following an air strike by Israel.
In placing the image of the destroyed homes alongside the reports ti-
tle, The Next Israel-Hezbollah War?, the report re-activates this depiction of
the past as a potential future, or as the proposed future, as the report
would have it. Further, the written forecast in the section of the report
titled Past Wars describes the conditions and triggers that started the
six previous conflicts; it subsequently analyses these as a precedent for
re-mapping this past as a potential future.
The image on the front cover of the report is a vital example of a visual
technique applied in trying to communicate a forecast of the future. In
this case the image of destroyed homes adds a new dynamic as it operates
and communicates in excess of the written calculations, going beyond the
logic of calculus, and presenting itself as a truth claim.14 Askingwhile it
195
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Figure 3: Image from Dream Ramlet, a construction project situated near the ocean front
Corniche, in Beirut, depicting one of the visualisations onsite, 2014. Image courtesy of the
196 author.
(De)constructing Risk
Figure 4: Image taken during the 2006 conflict in Lebanon, featured on the front cover of a
report forecasting The Next Israel Hezbollah War written in 2010. 197
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Presented as fact, the report renders future events knowable and action-
able, forecasting an image of the worst-case scenario to enable a well-
prepared audience or clientele to act appropriately. Their statement goes
on to say:
199
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always the risk that it will not materialise, but can the very act of produc-
ing the image influence the likelihood of that projected eventuality?
AN INDUSTRY OF RISK
One of its acquisitions was Janes Information Group, named after Fred T.
Jane. Janes Information Group is widely known for publishing Janes Intel-
ligence Reviewfirst published in 1989 as Janes Soviet Intelligence Reviewa
monthly journal on global security and stability issues. Included in its first
issue were articles on the Soviet Air Defense system and Soviet Forces in
Germany. Among the first subscribers of Janes Soviet Intelligence Review was
Dan Quayle, the standing vice president of the United States. In 1991, in
response to the breakup of the Warsaw Pact, the magazine changed its title
to Janes Intelligence Review to broaden its global information horizons. Today
Janes 360 can be accessed as a resource for international security issues, state
stability, terrorism and insurgency, ongoing conflicts, organised crime, and
weapons proliferation.19 In acquiring both Exclusive Analysis and Janes
Information Group, amongst many others, IHS quickly became a global
intelligence corporation with a monopoly in the power of influence.
Although the 2010 report The Next Israel-Hezbollah War? can now be consid-
ered fictitious, the consultants and risk assessors that helped produce it are
now well-known experts on current and future events taking place in Leba-
non and other part of the Middle East. Their predictions of the future in Leb-
anon continue to influence and be published in media across the globe. Such
analysis produces a never-ending image of potential destruction; whether
true or false, this image contributes to the creation of a condition that has
real effects on the ground, and can be very difficult to counteract.
200
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The domestic spacethe home or the houseis the site where a complex
range of values converges; this set of values is rooted in the necessary func-
tion that the architecture of the home provides as a practical solution to
the human need for shelter from adverse conditions. Shelter is provided
by the architecture of the home as it forms a material layer, which in the
assessment of the potential strengths of that material, is that it should be
strong, durable, and able to withstand the adverse conditions or exterior
threat from which the human needs protection. By this process, the shelter
that the home provides is an essential human right. It is in part through this
role as protector that it gains value, becomes a home, and forms part of a set
of associated territorial boundaries that are valued and defended.
The right to land and the homes that are built upon such land was at the
core of the dispute that incited the civil war in Lebanon. In this way, the
home became part of a contested territory and a representative site of the
complex conflict that took place. Under a condition of heightened insecu-
rity produced through armed conflict or natural disaster, the architecture
of the home undergoes a radical shift. As an occupant, the understanding
of its materiality changes as it becomes the site where a series of small-
scale actions are undertaken in anticipation of an exterior threat. Exam-
ples include the taping of windows to prevent glass from shattering or the
reinforcing of exterior walls. Beyond their pragmatic functions, these acts
provide visual demarcations of the turbulent times and contexts within
which the homes in question are situated. In anticipation of risk, these
actions together design an environment in which the fear of the future
is continually being rehearsed. This relationship between temporality
(the future yet-to-come) and the space in which this future may yet occur
serves as a daily reminder of the potential sinister risks that lie-in-wait.20
The psychological fear of living with this potentiality therefore alters the
material components that constitute the domestic space. Within these
changed material conditions, what are the natural and political forces that
shape what can be made available as the shelter of the home?
201
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Figure 6: Sea View Residence situated on the ocean front Corniche in Beirut, 2014. This is
an image of one of the architectural visualisations that wraps the construction site. Image
202 courtesy of the author.
(De)constructing Risk
Figure 8: Sold as A true gateway to Modern Life, this project on Bliss Street in Beirut is an
image of the future as projected by A&H Construction & Development. The image, taken in
2014, shows the signage and architectural visualisations which wrap the construction site.
204 Image courtesy of the author.
(De)constructing Risk
The real estate market in Lebanon has consistently been regarded as its
most dynamic and reliable area of investment. Even in the current geopo-
litical climate, the market experiences growth, largely as a result of entic-
ing foreign investment.21 This has encouraged a proliferation of luxury re-
development projects to populate Beiruts urban landscape.22 Through an
assumed process of modernisation, the city creates demographic enclaves
that intend to accommodate this investment from a global economy.23
205
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Today the house remains the same, and where the residential project was
to take place, now exists a valet car park connected to a local restaurant.
To the untrained eye this building could easily be perceived as a ruin left
bearing the effects of the civil war.
However, the level of risk that was perceived in Lebanon in August 2013
when the National Strategy for Disaster Risk Management was announced
could not have foreseen the events that would unfold the day the scheme
was launched. On the same day, accounts came flooding out of Syria con-
cerning chemicals attacks affecting thousands of Syrian civilians. The use
of chemical weapons had already been established as a threshold, a red
line that once violated would evoke international intervention into the
Syrian conflict. As a result, the event would throw the whole region into
206
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CONCLUSION
In concluding I wish to return to the two images of the domestic space that
depict the future in Lebanon: one an image of destroyed homes from a
risk assessment report predicting the next war between Israel and Hez-
bollah, and the other, a life-size architectural visualisation masking the
construction site of a still to be built luxury apartment block in Beirut.
These images are not autonomous, but are connected on a semiotic axis,
and contribute to a disruption of the present through the possible realisa-
tion of their future vision.
207
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ENDNOTES
1. Sheila Jasanoff, The political science of risk perception, Reliability Engineering and System
Safety, 59 (1998), 91-99.
2. Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, The Time/Space of Preparedness: Anticipating the
Next Terrorist Attack, Space and Culture, 15.2 (2012), 98-109.
3. Nicols Wey Gmez, The Tropics of Empire. Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cam-
bridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008).
6. Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
8. Franois Ewald, Insurance and Risk, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed.
by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (London: Harvester and Wheatsheaf,
1991), pp. 197-210.
9. Ulrich Beck also poses that insurance is a way of feign[ing] control over risk, but he ar-
gues that it will be the end of neoliberalism, as financial markets will not be able to deal
with the fallout of the incalculable risk. Ulrich Beck, The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Soci-
ety Revisited, Theory, Culture & Society, 19.4 (2002), 39-55 (41). See also Claudia Aradau
and Rens van Munster, Taming the Future: The Dispositif of Risk in the War on Terror, in
208
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Risk and the War on Terror, ed. by Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede (London: Routledge,
2008), pp. 23-40.
11. Fawwaz Traboulsi, History of Modern Lebanon (London: Pluto Press, 2007), p. 6. Traboulsi
argues that the city became the base for maritime and insurance companies, the latter
numbered twenty by the end of the twentieth century.
12. Elie Ayache, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Ltd.,
2010).
13. Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, The Time/Space of Preparedness.
14. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Report on tensions between Hezbollah and Israel by Lebanese English-language daily, The
Daily Star, February 2015.
20. Alexander Garca Dttmann. The Worst, or the Lesser of Two Evils, World Picture, 7 (2010).
21. Thank You Expats, Cedar Wings Magazine for Middle Eastern Airlines (November 2013).
The article outlines the necessity of expat investment into Beiruts real estate market.
23. Reference to a car bombing that took place in central Beirut in 2013, assassinating Mo-
hammad Shatah, an adviser to former Prime Minister Saad Hariri. This attack took place
in the heart of the Solidere redevelopment and is significance to this research. Rami G.
Khouri, The meaning of the Shatah assassination, The Daily Star, 28 December 2013
<http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Columnist/2013/Dec-28/242494-the-meaning-of-
the-shatah-assassination.ashx#axzz2otKKUfnx> [accessed 1 February 2015].
24. There has been recent evidence that important archeological sites are being uncovered
by the construction projects. However, a lack of protection for these historic sites means
ancient remains are being removed and discarded, resulting in diminished evidence of the
historical relevance of the sites. This could complicate the progression of the construc-
tion projects; activists are encouraging people living in Beirut who have visual access to
the sites from flats surrounding to document the developments. See, for example, Ruins
discovered under Saifi 477, Beirut Report, 30 July 2014 <http://www.beirutreport.com/
category/culture-heritage/archeology-culture-heritage>.
25. Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007).
209
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26. Hashem Osseiran, Homeowner returns to demolished bedroom, The Daily Star, 15 June
2014 <www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2014/Jun-15/260163-homeowner-
returns-to-demolished-bedroom.ashx#axzz3AlqNI0ay> [accessed 1 February 2015].
27. Ibid.
28. Andy McElroy, Lebanon embarks on regional first with disaster risk plan (Geneva: The
United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 21 August 2013) <http://www.unisdr.
org/archive/34432> [accessed 1 February 2015].
29. Ibid.
30. First Arab Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, Aqaba, Jordan, 19-21 March 2013
<http://www.preventionweb.net/english/hyogo/regional/platform/arabstates/2013/>
[accessed 1 February 2015].
31. Second Arab Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, 14-16
September 2014 <http://www.preventionweb.net/english/hyogo/regional/platform/ac-
drr/2014/> [accessed 1 February 2015].
32. In a statement made in July 2013, US President Barack Obama stated that the use of
chemical warfare would be crossing a threshold. Syria to allow UN to inspect chemical
weapons site, BBC News, 25 August 2013 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-
east-23833912> [accessed 1 February 2015].
33. I would question whether it is possible to criminalise the act of wrongful speculation, if
the speculation itself comes to have a damaging effect on the subject or territory it is
referring to. An example of this is the seismic risk assessors that did not assess the full
magnitude of the earthquake in the Italian town, LAquila. They were tried and convicted
for the wrongful speculation in 2012. Tom Kington, Italian scientist convicted over LAquila
earthquake condemns medieval court, The Guardian, 23 October 2012 <http://www.
theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/23/italian-scientist-earthquake-condemns-court> [ac-
cessed 1 February 2015].
34. These ideas are rooted in the work of Judith Butler. In Frames of War, she writes about a
grievable life as a life of value, and the precarity of a life less valued. See Judith Butler,
Frames of War (London: Verso, 2009).
35. Andy McElroy, Lebanon embarks on regional first with disaster risk plan.
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