The right to the village? Concept and history in a village of South Lebanon

In the village of South Lebanon where we have been working on documenting the long-term relation between land-tenure and land-use, villagers speak proudly of how they claimed their ‘rights’ from landlords. In the case of both house plots and the cultivation of land, they express this in terms of haqq, the equivalent of ‘right’ in the particular and of justice in the abstract. On occasion they speak of such action in the abstract, mutalabat bi-ʾl- haqq, demanding rights/justice through struggle and social movement. In practice, their contestations achieved some of their ends but not all. And so, in line with the theme of this issue, we thought to ask whether their claims to rights could be fruitfully conceived as expressing something broader: a kind of ‘Right to the Village’, in the spirit of Lefebvre’s much-feted slogan, the ‘Right to the City’- although the villagers did not interpret their actions through any such global abstraction.