ABSTRACT
Throughout the months of April and May 2011, a surge of illegal constructions occupied the limelight of Lebanese politics, and news coverage reported daily confrontations between police forces, sometimes backed by the national army, and self-help builders. In multiple instances, violence was uncontrolled on both ends: police cars were torched and several civilians were severely wounded, others killed. A common thread in the public responses of policymakers and the news coverage was the criminalization of those who had built in violation of property, building and/or urban regulations. Most official responses stemmed from the Ministry of Interior and adopted the security discourse of law enforcement and curtailing illegality. These materialized in actual military strategies, such as the deployment of army tanks to bulldoze recently built structures.
