| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Celebrants of neo-liberal globalisation and their critics ascribe to the rationality of finance capital enormous power. It opens new territories, produces new cultural forms and creates a hierarchy of cities and the spaces within them. How might this image change when viewed from spaces allegedly excluded from capitalist globalisation? For many, Lebanon during its 1975-1990 civil war was such a place. The international financial institutions and their Lebanese allies presented neo-liberal reform as the necessary prerequisite for post-conflict re-integration with rational processes of capitalist globalisation. Through a multi-sited political economy of one financial network operant in wartime Lebanon, I show that the "militia economy" was never outside larger processes of financial globalisation. I argue that it was integrated into a global realm consisting not of financial corporations operating according to a universal capitalist rationality, but rather one of similarly constituted networks of capitalists, companies and other institutions working within and alongside a variety of states in pursuit of politico-economic power.
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