Community-Led Recovery and Everyday Agency in Times of Collapse: Opportunities and Limits in Post-Crisis Lebanon

Since 2019, Lebanon has experienced an unprecedented economic and political collapse, followed by the 4 August 2020 Beirut port explosion. Much of the literature has focused on state failure, humanitarian relief, or protest movements. This paper shifts attention to community-led initiatives that operate outside formal political mobilization and examines how they enact forms of everyday agency under conditions of prolonged crisis. Drawing on Asef Bayat’s concept of “social nonmovements” (Bayat 2010), the paper analyzes two cases: Khaddit Beirut, a grassroots initiative that promotes a community-driven and rights-based model of recovery; and local self-reliance efforts in municipalities such as Zahle and Anjar, where actors have pursued infrastructural and economic autonomy amid state paralysis. The analysis is based on public statements, digital communications, and qualitative interviews with participants. The paper explores how these initiatives attempt to reshape relationships between citizens, the state, and political elites. In a context where sectarian welfare and clientelist networks have historically structured access to services (Cammett 2014), these initiatives seek to reduce dependence on political intermediaries by organizing resources at the community level. In doing so, they create spaces of relative autonomy and promote practices of accountability, participation, and collective responsibility. At the same time, the paper critically examines the limitations of such initiatives. Despite their local impact, they operate within enduring structural constraints, including financial precarity, legal restrictions, fragmented political authority, and the persistent influence of sectarian networks. Their capacity to scale up, sustain autonomy, or produce broader systemic transformation remains uncertain. By analyzing both the opportunities and limits of community-led recovery, the paper argues that everyday practices of service provision can acquire political significance in contexts of collapse, even when not framed as protest. However, their transformative potential depends on how they navigate and negotiate existing power structures. The Lebanese case thus contributes to sociological debates on agency, governance, and civil society by showing how grassroots initiatives both challenge and remain embedded within broader systems of domination.