Between individual and collective resistance: Lebanon’s bank raids phenomenon as dispersed and glaring resistance against the economic crisis.

In 2022, Lebanon witnessed a string of armed bank ‘robberies’, otherwise known as bank raids. Depositors stormed banks, holding hostages and threatening arson, to retrieve their deposits, which have been withheld by the ruling class in an ongoing liquidity crisis. We conducted two qualitative studies against this backdrop. In Study 1, we examined how the Lebanese public legitimised this individual act of dispersed, glaring resistance through a Reflexive Thematic Analysis of tweets (N=593) supporting the first two popular raids. We show how the public framed this individual act as moral collective resistance against an unjust system. In Study 2, we interviewed eight depositors (bank raiders) to investigate the social psychological and socio-structural conditions underlying the emergence of this resistance strategy within Lebanon’s context, as well as the motivations of the raiders for engaging in this act. We find that resistance actors were less concerned with the collective struggle to retrieve deposits, instead viewing the act as an individual survival or coping strategy. These studies contribute to interdisciplinary discussions on the fluid boundaries between individual and collective resistance, also questioning whose perception matters in defining an act as resistance. This research heeds recent calls to integrate individual-level and social psychological examinations of different resistance forms (Vollhardt et al., 2020), here dispersed resistance (Lilja et al., 2018), particularly as the field of Psychology has heavily been missing from analyses and conceptualisations of resistance across Resistance Studies.