Terrorism and Everyday Life in Beirut 2005 : Mental Re-Constructions, Precautions and Normalization

• Although the psychological stress created by terror has beenextensively researched, little has been written about the subjectiveexperience of living with terror. How do people perceive riskand how do they adjust their daily lives? The Lebanese capitalBeirut suffered from a wave of bomb attacks following the assassinationof Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February2005. In order to examine people's reactions and ways of copingwith these events, 14 focus group interviews (n = 77) were conductedin targeted areas. The findings suggest that Beirutis couldno longer rely on the taken-for-granted routines of daily life.By changing their routes to school or work and avoiding publicplaces, they restricted their daily activities. However, thedata also suggest that targeted people attempted to normalizetheir everyday lives. Two strategies were employed. The firstcan be described as bracketing in time and space, which meansthat people tried to benefit from periods they perceived asmoments of reprieve, and that they defined business and privatespace as safe havens. Bracketing can also be described as re-normalization,i.e. as an attempt to return to the previous state of `normality'.The other strategy can be described as crisis normalizationand means that the new evaluations of the risks and new patternsof action adopted, which originally deviated from people's establishedroutines, themselves became routinized.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Terror

Everyday life

Risk

Sociology

Sociologi

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