Terrorism and Everyday Life in Beirut 2005

Abstract

Although the psychological stress created by terror has been extensively researched, little has been written about the subjective experience of living with terror. How do people perceive risk and how do they adjust their daily lives? The Lebanese capital Beirut suffered from a wave of bomb attacks following the assassination of Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February 2005. In order to examine people's reactions and ways of coping with these events, 14 focus group interviews ( n = 77) were conducted in targeted areas. The findings suggest that Beirutis could no longer rely on the taken-for-granted routines of daily life. By changing their routes to school or work and avoiding public places, they restricted their daily activities. However, the data also suggest that targeted people attempted to normalize their everyday lives. Two strategies were employed. The first can be described as bracketing in time and space, which means that people tried to benefit from periods they perceived as moments of reprieve, and that they defined business and private space as safe havens. Bracketing can also be described as re-normalization, i.e. as an attempt to return to the previous state of `normality'. The other strategy can be described as crisis normalization and means that the new evaluations of the risks and new patterns of action adopted, which originally deviated from people's established routines, themselves became routinized.