UC San Diego

In September 1959, Lebanese president, Fuad Shehab, signed an agreement with Father Louis-Joseph Lebret. Lebret was the founder of the IRFED, a Paris-based institution set up to provide technical expertise to developing nations. During its mission, IRFED conducted a series of studies that formed the basis for comprehensive development projects in Lebanon. I investigate French and Lebanese collaboration on state development and social welfare projects in rural Lebanon from 1958 to 1970. During his presidency Shehab sought to implement development projects to bridge socioeconomic disparities between the developed urban coast and the poorer rural interior. Shehab and his entourage believed that economic inequality and lack of state outreach inflamed sectarian and class tensions between citizens, leading to the Civil War of 1958. I look at how the state designed and implemented projects; how communities at the site of development perceived them; and how these plans and the reactions they engendered influenced global discourses of development and planning. My work contributes to three key research lines. The first is in Lebanese historical accounts of postcolonial Lebanon.The current historiography of Lebanon focuses on its pre-nation state Ottoman roots, or its period of French colonial rule (1920-1943). By researching recently uncovered Lebanese documents from the ministries of Planning, Industry, and Agriculture, my research looks at Lebanon after its independence, during the years of heightened nation building, while focusing on planning at Lebanon's peripheries. The second, is in larger development histories. By highlighting the role of on-the-ground politics and the actions of state and non-state actors in Lebanon, I show that development is made, not by experts sitting in tall buildings of international organizations, but in the specifics of every city, region, and country. Third, I argue that the Catholic social thought at the root of IRFED and Lebanese state planning ideology, reflected the parochial attachments Lebanese and French planners had towards a pastoral vision of the countryside. Ironically, state planning rooted in this romanticized idea of rural life failed to empower rural citizens and set up extractive mono-crop agricultural industries, impoverishing the rural Lebanon and dispossessing its occupants. This rural ideal showcases the way that rapid urbanization proceeded apace with seemingly contradictory ideological agendas: on one hand, to preserve an undeveloped pastoral rural ideal, and on the other, to develop a robust agricultural sector and deter rural flight.