Orbiting Octobers: From a Lifestyle Movement to Intersectional Veganism in Post-2019 Lebanon
This paper seeks to explore how a global movement is disrupted and re-organized locally through major sociopolitical shifts. As veganism gained momentum as a new lifestyle movement (Gheihman 2021) in Lebanon in 2018-2019 shortly before the October 2019 uprising, vegan advocates found themselves moving from a focus on individual consumption to a more collective and intersectional political action (e.g. the founding of the political party Al-Nahda).These activists have since then been continuously pushed to become political shape shifters adapting to every turn of events, be it the Beirut port blast of August 2020 and the exacerbating economic crisis, the Israeli war on Gaza since October 2023, or the current intensification of the Israeli war on Lebanon in October 2024. Data collected via semi-structured interviews demonstrates that vegan activists in Lebanon constantly grapple with the challenge of legitimizing a cause that is perceived as dispensable amid war and crisis, and the complication of uniting vegan activists under one banner amid tensions brought forth by divergent local political leanings. Turning to recent work on negativity and negative binding in geography (Bissell et al 2021), I argue that it is “events of rupture, exhaustion, interruption, hesitancy, and loss” (Maddrell 2021, 119) which play a key role in shaping Lebanon’s intersectional vegan movement rather than a hopeful and optimistic vision of Lebanon’s future. This argument dialogues with the discussion of futurelessness in global activism amid the “exhaustion of utopian imaginaries of the future” (Tutton 2023, 447). The paper does not only pursue a chronological tracing of the vegan movement in Lebanon over the last six years, but to especially advance a study of movements via a focus on the individual embodied and affective experiences of local (and global) sociopolitical change.