Following the wires: sensing socio-material practices of everyday electricity supply in post-conflict Greater Beirut.

The research explores the consequences of conflicts on electricity infrastructures in Beirut. The impacts on electricity services of the violence and unrest that have affected the city since the beginning of the civil war in 1975 have forced families and individuals to invent new strategies to bring energy to their homes and shops. Informal systems and networks of electricity provision have profoundly altered the urban environment: electricity cables, generators and fuse boxes are now an ubiquitous element of the cityscape. The need to gain access to electricity and to secure stable supply have become part of everyday life and led to new practices and ways of living. Through the evocative power of video this research project follows the wires that crosscut the skyline and buildings of Beirut's neighbourhoods.
In visually doing so, the project will ground the electricity cables along the lives of the persons and families it connects. By telling the story of the electricity infrastructure and the everyday responses to its failures the project aims to make sense of the lived and material legacy of the conflict. Emphasising the importance of basic infrastructures, the project uses the synthetic power of video, together with ethnographic and sociological accounts, to show through the voices and buildings of Beirut how conflicts shape cities and change how people live and make decisions. As such, research involves formal and informal interviews with residents and other stakeholders in Beirut, biographic accounts and participant observation to capture the everyday experiences of living with power outages in the city and the different strategies adopted to maintain electricity services in homes.

In the early 1960s, a programme for the universalisation of services and infrastructure - including electricity - began in Lebanon, spearheaded by the then president Fouad Chehab, culminating in the creation of Électricité du Liban in 1964. Since then, violence and political unrest in Lebanon have upset that effort and reversed the trend, resulting in the debilitation of services and the prevalence of power outages and elongated blackouts. Since the civil war (1975) infrastructure provision has been used as a political weapon, resulting in significant disruptions and changing the nature of provision of electricity. The following years of reconstruction and rehabilitation policies (new infrastructural work) and the management of networks policies (fees collections, theft repression) have added new layers of spatial and social differentiation. Military attacks on power plants and the resulting damage of the electricity grid during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict have further diminished the capacity of power production, leading to an increase of the shortage at the national and urban scale. The aggravation of the already tensed conditions of supply makes it compulsory for households to rely on alternative means of provision.

By focusing on electricity supplies the research project aims to show how the disruption of services is not only the result of technical vulnerability but reveals social, political and sectarian fragmentation caused by conflicts over the years.

The project will enable knowledge transfer between academic & non-academic constituencies. In particular academics will be offered a detailed account of how communities respond to energy disruptions in post-conflict contexts. Non-academic constituencies (local communities, governmental and non-governmental organizations) will be able to use the analytical insights to organize responses and devise new policies.
The primary beneficiaries will be the research participants since the project will document the concerns and responses of people affected by energy scarcity, by creating a platform that expresses of the everyday lived experiences of power cuts. In doing so, we expect that this will contribute to articulating their demands for improvements to their services. Additional beneficiaries include the public and private sectors in Lebanon as well as national and international organizations interested in identifying and devising solutions to mitigate the medium and long-term effects of conflicts on everyday lives.

The documentary film provides an opportunity to under-represented people to share their stories, contributing to the conversation on the impact of electricity services on communities in Greater Beirut. Therefore the documentary aims to solicit new forms of grassroots organizations among communities affected by electricity services. In addition the film will provide international organizations with a deeper understanding of the everyday problems that people face in post-conflict situations and a platform to engage with energy infrastructure in post-conflict situations.
The research findings will also be communicated through two jointly authored academic papers. These will provide a summary of the project's methods and a timely evidence-based analysis of the impact of electrical power outages on the urban form in Lebanon to academics, architects and urban planners worldwide and governmental institutions in Lebanon.
The exhibition will provide a further opportunity for the local community to elicit experiences of living with power cuts and will aim in particular to recognize positive examples of community empowerment in post-conflict contexts.
The interactive application allows for a broader presentation of content; the coexistence of multiple meanings and modes of presentation; the alternative selection of content; the reorganization of presentation's hierarchy. This output will benefit academics in the Arts & Humanities, documentary practitioners, students and the general audience.

Key stakeholders and beneficiaries:
1. Affected Communities The research will allow affected populations living in Greater Beirut to communicate their concerns and expectations to policymakers, civil society groups and corporations.
2. Governmental institutions and the private sector in Lebanon Research findings should be ideally placed to influence political debates, and to make specific policy recommendations to the government and the private sector on how local concerns can be integrated into the planning and realisation of new energy infrastructures.
3. Civil society and non-governmental organisation in Lebanon The qualitative data generated by this project will complement existing research by non-governmental organisations and action groups and will help them to lobby the government on how to protect the needs of the affected communities and to avoid adverse effects of energy scarcity.
4. International organisations and corporations These beneficiaries will be able to use the project's findings when planning investments on energy infrastructures in Lebanon, when designing programmes to alleviate the effects of conflicts on everyday lives, when consulting with policymakers.