Abstract
Abstract
This article draws upon original research including a series of interviews, extensive desk research, and a canon of political economy scholarship hailing from Lebanon and elsewhere to explore the political dynamics underpinning Lebanon's emerging tech “ecosystem.” It focuses on a seemingly peripheral actor within this ecosystem, the coding school, both as a window into the ecosystem's political machinery and as a surprisingly important site through which its wider interests are mediated. This focus explores how the coding school generates so-called empowerment conceived largely in terms of training and preparing Lebanon's “underprivileged youth” for global tech markets, through a strategic alignment with the ecosystem. Thus, empowerment becomes a political currency of sorts, helping to reify and repackage an enclave of Lebanon's economy. The article suggests that the political work to engineer this new economic landscape reflects how state-business interests come together to repackage so-called development and enforce new regimes of accumulation at a time of deepening crisis.