Lebanon Unsettled

A research archive and public website tracing two centuries of Lebanese popular revolt, built around the October 2019 uprising — SPIN Unit developed the online platform and did the sensemaking of the project's data.

The October 2019 Lebanese uprising was a genuinely nationwide, non-sectarian protest movement — but understanding it meant more than documenting three months of events. LSE and USEK researchers wanted to place 2019 in the context of nearly 200 years of Lebanese popular revolt, and to capture the uprising's own spatial and personal dimensions — how protesters physically reclaimed highways, plazas, and public space, and what the experience meant to the people who lived through it — before that material was lost.

The project was led by Dr. Deen Sharp (Visiting LSE Fellow, Geography & Environment) and Dr. May Farhat (then USEK, now LAU), under LSE Middle East Centre's Academic Collaboration with Arab Universities Programme, funded by the Emirates Foundation. It centred on a week-long workshop at USEK's Kaslik campus (25–29 July 2022) bringing together graduate students, activists, and scholars, and drew on the Beirut-based UMAM Documentation and Research archive. The public website launched in July 2023 via a series of talks and workshops in Lebanon, and the project has since been covered across three LSE Middle East Centre blog posts and published as an academic paper.