Description
This paper explores how Christian individuals in Lebanon live with, and make sense of, ongoing violence through the entanglements of memory, affect, and spatial practice. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and vignettes, I argue that violence is experienced as a continuous presence that shapes everyday life, emotions, and relationships. I examine how ordinary violence is navigated through emotions such as fear, nostalgia, and hatred, which circulate to reinforce communal identity and are made tangible through everyday spatial practices and informal border-making. I also reveal how emerging war technologies disrupt these ways of navigating violence, as shifting demographics intensify mistrust and unsettle familiar patterns of movement, safety, and belonging. Ultimately, this paper shows that navigating ordinary violence is continuously woven into an embodied handbook of survival, accumulated through memory, emotions, and space. While new forms of violence bring new uncertainty, I ask whether these shared uncertainties might also open space for alternative forms of solidarity and relationality.