An Ambivalent Alliance of Convenience: The Temporalities and Politics of the Litani River Infrastructure

Abstract This ethnography explores the temporalizing practices of workers at the Litani River powerplant—a key site of national infrastructural development in Lebanon. Departing from dominant narratives of crisis or collapse, it argues that workers inhabit a distinct spatial and temporal mode described as tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi , an ambivalent alliance of convenience with the Litani river, its infrastructure, and the state. Rather than viewing their experience through paradigms of progress or decline, workers cultivate a modular relation to time, and to the seemingly isolated powerplant, marked by endurance. Tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi , the article suggests, is a mode of exercising and reproducing power at the intersection of material structures and embodied experience. Like a Möbius strip, its fraught political relations and dynamics of social reproduction continuously weave the space they constitute. It illustrates power’s reach through time while also revealing workers’ subtle ways of challenging it, beyond binaries of submission or resistance.