Beirut Times: Living in the World's Near Future
I was born in the city of Saida in 1991, right at the hopeful end of a civil war and the start of a neoliberalisation project spearheaded by Rafiq Hariri, the Saudi-backed prime minister at the time. Since then, I have witnessed the failure of global humanitarian systems and the suffering that materialised instead of the promises of a better life. From the false promises of the Oslo accords and the consequent wars in Gaza to several Israeli wars in Lebanon, the American invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the Syrian revolution, it seems that over three decades, we have only lost ground. For too many of us, we have lost our lives. Spurred on by notions of justice, equality and freedom, our rights have been slowly chipped away until nothing remains but a shell, merely existing, always expecting the worst.
As a PhD student working on future narratives and imaginaries in Lebanon, I obsessively think of how perceptions of the future inform people’s worldview, and consequently their political and social decisions. As the global grounding narratives of justice and accountability are falling apart, the rest of the world is becoming increasingly uncertain and people’s perceptions of the future are becoming more blurred. The post–World War II order appears to be collapsing. As Pax Americana wanes, we seem to be entering not a moment of reform or equitable multipolarity, but an age of belligerence. Power is being asserted openly, aggressively, and with diminishing concern for international norms. From Sudan and Tanzania to Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, Gaza, Syria, and beyond, states and non-state actors alike behave as though this is a permissive moment to impose new realities.
In Lebanon, the protests of the October 2019 uprising marked a rare moment of collective hope. Alongside many grassroots organisations and collectives, I could envision an achievable future grounded in accountability, dignity, and human rights. A few months later, when the Beirut port explosion occurred, it felt impossible that one of the largest non‑nuclear explosions in history, on a casual Tuesday in the middle of a city, could pass without consequence. Surely this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and it would finally compel meaningful accountability. Yet the years that followed were defined instead by obstruction, delay, and opacity. Five years later, no meaningful accountability has materialised, despite the involvement of international investigators, including the FBI and French authorities, and the presumed attention of multiple intelligence agencies. Lebanon is often portrayed as exceptionally corrupt or vulnerable, but it operates within the same global media, financial, and political systems. What unfolds here may not be an exception, but an early and more visible expression of dynamics now emerging elsewhere.
To move from the personal and local experience to its broader theoretical implications, it becomes necessary to consider the global institutional landscape. International institutions look increasingly hollow, not just in the Levant. Universal frameworks of human rights appear less like binding commitments and more like selectively invoked language. The ideals that once animated global discourse (democracy, freedom, liberalism) now appear not only difficult to realise, but historically contingent, capable of legitimising violence as easily as restraining it. What once sounded aspirational now risks reading as naïve, or even as cover for predation.
Alongside this breakdown of the progressive, human‑centric ideological project comes a collapse in our ability to discern truth itself. We are drowning in information, yet starved of clarity. Propaganda saturates every conflict from every side, but what makes the present moment distinct is not simply its volume. The tools of fabrication have become extraordinarily sophisticated. Consider the maps Israel circulated during the current Gaza war, purportedly showing "evacuation zones" that shifted constantly, rendering the idea of safe passage meaningless while maintaining the appearance of humanitarian concern. Fact-checking remains possible in principle, yet in practice it demands time, expertise, and trust in intermediaries that are themselves under strain. The result is not total ignorance, but a pervasive epistemic fatigue. This leads to a growing difficulty in distinguishing error from manipulation, narrative framing from empirical reporting and an inability to make a decision until it is too late.
Living in Lebanon, I often found it impossible to verify events occurring fifty kilometers from my own home, whether in Syria or southern Lebanon. Even when speaking to people who claimed to have witnessed events, certainty remained elusive. Old videos, sometimes from previous years or entirely different places, circulated as if they were immediate evidence, and judgments were formed almost instantly. By the time a clip was contextualised or fact‑checked, the media cycle had already moved on. I am not referring to differences in interpretation or emotion; I mean that people describing the same incident often asserted categorically opposed facts, each convinced of their accuracy. If proximity offers no certainty, how can a video on a screen provide insight? How are political judgments to be formed under such conditions? How do we distinguish fact from narrative, description from justification, when each is mobilised strategically? In the past, professional journalism at least aspired to arbitrate such questions, investing time and editorial standards in the slow work of verification. That mediating function has weakened considerably.
This epistemic instability continues to unsettle my political identity. I once aligned instinctively with advocates of emancipatory transformation, positioning myself against conservatism and the guardians of the status quo. But what happens when that distinction loses coherence? What remains of critique when the moral grammar that once organised political commitments no longer functions reliably? What happens when the powers that sponsor projects of emancipatory transformation drop the mask and are revealed not as guarantors of freedom, but as exploitative and destructive actors in their own right?
How, under these conditions, should one think about political transformation? Especially for those who have long rejected false dichotomies and remained committed to the possibility of a just and equal world? In such a predatory global climate, is it still possible to assume that interventionary change serves the people who must endure it? Or do repeated cycles of instability instead erode the very social foundations that any future justice would require?
Many of us who once believed in a non-imperial, egalitarian global order now face an uncomfortable question: what if the world we believe in cannot be realised under present conditions? More troubling still, what if opposition to the status quo is now routinely instrumentalised to facilitate an even more violent imperial restructuring? The slogan "regime change" was once the language of the left, after all, until it became the justification for some of the most destructive interventions of the past twenty years.
This produces a painful tension between belief and possibility. The insistence on a third option, an Option C, remains intellectually and morally compelling. Yet in practice, does its invocation sometimes accelerate collapse rather than transformation? When does refusing the existing order open space for emancipation, and when does it instead clear the ground for a harsher reordering imposed from above? Is the defence of the status quo always reactionary, or can it, under certain conditions, become a reluctant form of damage limitation, a way of holding ground until something better becomes possible?
For historians and academics, perhaps the task is less to prescribe immediate political positions than to hold open a critical horizon. As Derrida suggests in Spectres of Marx, the difficulty of imagining an attainable alternative is itself a historical and political condition, one produced by the systematic foreclosure of futures. In other words, the boundaries of what counts as realistic politics are actively enforced, pushing structural alternatives out of view before they can even be seriously pursued. We seem to inhabit a post-liberal moment marked not by ideological consensus, but by a stagnation of possibilities. Critique is abundant, yet viable emancipatory projects appear absent.
What, then, is the responsibility of knowledge production, including scholarship, art, and journalism? On the one hand, it may lie in continuing to articulate principles of justice, anti-imperialism, and solidarity, especially in the face of ongoing colonial violence, without surrendering them to cynicism. On the other hand, as participants in public discourse, we are also embedded in material constraints and asymmetries of power, which means critical imagination cannot remain purely speculative but must be paired with efforts to articulate coherent, achievable political positions within the present balance of forces.
In an era of renewed imperial reshuffling, how do we prevent our own critical languages from being weaponised against the very populations they aim to defend? What would it mean to think politically in a defensive rather than transformative register, not as an abandonment of emancipation, but as an attempt to preserve the conditions under which it might again become imaginable? A defensive posture, then, becomes a condition for future agency. By slowing, blocking, and exhausting the current imperial advance, we may preserve the possibility, however deferred, of reshuffling the world on our own terms, rather than inhabiting one imposed through force.
March 2026