Hamra's Coffee Shops: Brewing Unity in Post-Conflict Beirut ☕🌍
Hamra's Coffee Shops: Brewing Unity in Post-Conflict Beirut ☕🌍
Deep Dive with Sienna 💬
In this article Sienna discusses the post conflict region of Lebanon. She is a student journalist with us on a placement organised by the Oxford University Career Services. This article was edited using Lex.page.
🎧 listen to Sienna’s backstory here - she discusses her motivation & research as well.
Common Ground: Rebuilding Communal Identity through the Shared Space of Coffee Shops
Hamra is a melting pot, a multicultural hub in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. Here, Lebanon’s religious sects - Sunni, Shia, Maronites, and Druze - coexist. Hamra is known for its coffee shops and has a historical significance as Beirut's intellectual heart. It is a commercial neighborhood. It's hard to believe that just thirty years ago, Hamra was a battlefield, bustling at its busiest and unassuming at its quieter times.
The Lebanese civil war lasted fifteen years, from 1975 to 1990. It was a factional conflict fought on ethnoreligious lines, exposing fault lines in Lebanese society. Although tensions remain, people live in peace. How can we rebuild communities after ethnic conflicts? We learn a crucial part of the answer from Hamra: sharing space.
Some argue that ethnic violence is sharing space. Groups compete for land, resources and political power, leading to violence along identity lines. This is true, but sharing space inherently builds communities. The terms of sharing space shape inter-community relations. Sharing scarce space can cause tension but is necessary for community building.
Shared, third spaces are essential hubs for rebuilding community from the ground up, especially in a post-conflict society. They recognize the essential commonality of ‘the other’ through sharing food, language, and routine. This is the first step in repairing damaged trust through increasing familiarity. Barthes said that cafes are where ‘we meet with the other’. Interacting in third spaces puts you face-to-face with the minutiae of their lives. People perform mirrored daily rhythms side by side by going to work, getting coffee, and ending the day in a lively bar - and notice each other doing it. In sharing space, people confront their essential commonality. The act of sharing space with the other can do a lot for familiarisation, but the space itself matters for rebuilding a communal identity.
Simply returning to the pre-conflict state isn't enough as tensions may resurface. Healing from ethnic violence requires transformation, not just reconstruction. To heal a community after ethnic violence, resilience and newness are needed. In this transformative function of rebuilding community, shared spaces shine.
The environments, public and private, shape our self-identity and how we interact with others. People rushing to meeting or staying and working, or doing something else, build solidarity tied to a place and its people, creating communities. Living in a community means sharing space and culture, and understanding this cannot be built without understanding that it is constructed in locational terms, through the repeated sharing of space and the terms on which people access such spaces. The value of third spaces such as coffee shops and bars in particular lies in their combining daily rituals of life, namely, sharing meals and drinks. The ability of food to act as a vessel for cultural change and community building is well-documented; in opening up new avenues for cooperation and signaling trust, sites of hostility can thaw into recognition. To break bread with someone is to do so much more than share a meal.
The groundwork has been laid for the construction of a new, reconfigured communal identity. And community is constructed. Both individual and communal identities have to be reconfigured after fracturing, and a truly shared space - one which individuals can enter, move through and spend time in as equals, is vital. Individuals have to construct an identity for themselves as a member of a community. Public, third spaces hence provide the location for the construction of a communal identity. Through allowing individuals a place to gather, discuss, and share, third spaces provide the location that allows community to be built.
And in the wake of conflict, a shared communal identity. Following a fifteen-year civil war, Mozambique was faced with a decision of how to rebuild. They chose not to avoid reckoning with their past, but to face it in a way that emphasised the common tragedy of war rather than to highlight exactly which communities had been hurt by which others, and in which specific ways. It is communities that emphasise common loss, rather than keeping itineraries of hurt, that are able to reforge themselves stronger after ethnic conflict. In this sense, coffee shops and tearooms remain vital - as spaces set up for exchange and discussion, they remain one of the few available and accessible places for daily interaction with the ‘others’.
Communal spaces such as Hamra’s vibrant coffee shops are not a silver bullet. Reconstruction of shared identity after ties have been frayed by violence is never easy. It takes enormous amounts of trust for spaces like these to work to their fullest potential. Nor are Hamra’s coffee shops able to function in a vacuum. In recent years, economic crisis in Lebanon has rendered the price of a coffee higher than the daily minimum wage. For many, visiting such communal spaces has become an unaffordable luxury. Economic stability, and hence stable government, is needed if third spaces are to be able to do the work of building community. This is, of course, not so simple. Calling for stable government so that ethnic tensions can be resolved risks putting the chicken before the egg, as ethnic tensions come to a head in government. Regardless, it must be remembered that the mere existence of third spaces alone is not enough. They must be made accessible, and indeed be accessed, by diverse communities.
Any conflict, particularly one fought on the basis of something as integral to people’s sense of self as identity, will take significant healing from. Hamra is itself in need of reconstruction, even as it acts as a vehicle of rebuilding community. Despite a partial resurgence, it has not fully re-reached the heights of the cultural pre-eminence it enjoyed in the 1970s as a meeting place for poets, philosophers and writers. Some facades of buildings still bear damage from bullets and bombs, and though still bustling, Hamra is scarred by the war. Clearly, it would be too much to expect third spaces to wholly repair communities after ethnic violence. They represent a powerful tool for community-building, but are themselves spaces in need of maintenance and protection.
The fact remains that shared spaces are crucial for building a sense of identity with these caveats. Informal, shared spaces such as coffee shops can be particularly crucial in terms of rebuilding a communal identity, especially in cases of frayed inter-ethnic relations. Regular, repeated interaction with others, the sharing of food, language and culture - all are vital in building a resilient and diverse sense of community, and it is here that cafes and coffee shops shine. In particular, it is in these granular, bottom-up approaches that much of the daily work of healing is done, and the profound power in these grassroots relations is often overlooked. Alone, shared spaces are not the solution. But they remain deeply powerful methods for finding, and rebuilding, common ground.
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