Fluid sovereignty: state-nature relations in the Hasbani Basin, southern Lebanon

The concept of fluid sovereignty denotes configurations of state authority in which flows of living and non-living things, within and across borders, render insecure claims of unconditional territorial control. Loss of monopoly control of the means of violence within a territory conventionally signals weak political sovereignty. Bordering Israel (including the occupied Golan Heights) and Syria, the Hasbani Basin, southern Lebanon, seems to exemplify such sovereign failings: over decades, rival security providers have provoked political instability and conflict in the region. However, fluid sovereignty brings to the fore state-nature relations neglected in scholarship on “fragile” or “failing” states. Informed by geographical work on hybrid sovereignties and vital materialism, we show how sovereign claims over the Hasbani Basin extend to (sub)terranean water sources and rainfall-dependent agricultural lands, both of which are deeply securitized. Incomplete centralization and territorialization by Lebanon of the Hasbani Basin evinces fractured state nature—the inability of the state to realize volumetric control of, and authority over, basin waters. This state nature is coproduced by the fluid materiality of the waters themselves, whose hydro-climatic circulation and contingencies are at odds with territorial designs for volumetric control. For rural communities in the Hasbani Basin economically dependent on access to agricultural water, field research reveals a practical experience of fluid sovereignty, both in adapting to water variability and also navigating use of agricultural borderlands subject to conflict-related dangers. Recent conflict spillovers from the Syrian war have reinforced, for the majority Druze population, the low legitimacy of Lebanese state nature

Global Positioning System measurements of strain accumulation and slip transfer through the restraining bend along the Dead Sea fault system in Lebanon

Approximately 4 yr of campaign and continuous Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements across the Dead Sea fault system (DSFS) in Lebanon provide direct measurements of interseismic strain accumulation along a 200-km-long restraining bend in this continental transform fault. Late Cenozoic transpression within this restraining bend has maintained more than 3000 m of topography in the Mount Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges. The GPS velocity field indicates 4-5 mm yr-1 of relative plate motion is transferred through the restraining bend to the northern continuation of the DSFS in northwestern Syria. Near-field GPS velocities are generally parallel to the major, left-lateral strike-slip faults, suggesting that much of the expected convergence across the restraining bend is likely accommodated by different structures beyond the aperture of the GPS network (e.g. offshore Lebanon and, possibly, the Palmyride fold belt in SW Syria). Hence, these geodetic results suggest a partitioning of crustal deformation involving strike-slip displacements in the interior of the restraining bend, and crustal shortening in the outer part of the restraining bend. Within the uncertainties, the GPS-based rates of fault slip compare well with Holocene-averaged estimates of slip along the two principal strike-slip faults: the Yammouneh and Serghaya faults. Of these two faults, more slip occurs on the Yammouneh fault, which constitutes the primary plate boundary structure between the Arabia and Sinai plates. Hence, the Yammouneh fault is the structural linkage that transfers slip to the northern part of the transform in northwestern Syria. From the perspective of the regional earthquake hazard, the Yammouneh fault is presently locked and accumulating interseismic strain

Microfacies and Geochemistry of the Brereton Limestone (Middle Pennsylvanian) of Southwestern Illinois

110 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1975.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD