Yasemin İpek’s book, composed of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, offers a detailed and layered analysis of Lebanon’s activist scene across class, gender, and racial lines. What binds together the actors portrayed is a shared intention to “do something” and to name themselves as activists, even as their practices and imaginaries diverge significantly. The concept of “crisiswork” serves as the analytical backbone of the book, capturing these diverse responses to Lebanon’s political and social structures. Although “crisis” is often criticized in humanitarian and political literature for obscuring structural injustice, here it is reclaimed to refer to multiple dimensions of life in Lebanon, from family relations to infrastructure and conflict. In this sense, crisis is not only an embodied experience and an idea used to disguise the underlying politics; it also is conceived as a transformative and political tool. As İpek defines it, crisiswork is an “open-ended, contradictory process of multiscalar struggles against crises that generates diverse imaginations of change” (p. 4), producing what she calls “competing activist lifeworlds.”

Through the lens of “ethical citizenship,” the book challenges the naturalized divide between political action and everyday practice. Activism is not confined to formal arenas but embedded in daily life, ethical choices, and affective dispositions. At the same time, İpek does not romanticize these practices. She shows how certain segments of the activist scene remain unwilling to change their lifestyles or redistribute resources, and how they often fail to acknowledge the structural contributions of migrants and refugees. In doing so, the concept of crisiswork reveals both the generative and the limiting dimensions of activism in Lebanon.

A central thread running through the book is a critical interrogation of “civil society.” Rather than treating it as a neutral or inclusive space, İpek demonstrates how it is deeply shaped by class. Civil society in this context is often defined against nonactivists, who are seen as requiring political education, and against sectarian actors, associated with entrenched elites. In the process, İpek argues, local activists positively stigmatize civil society through notions of localness and organicity, while excluding the international component of Lebanese society. Middle-class–ness emerges as the hegemonic political subjectivity, structuring dominant visions of activism. Yet activism is not presented as a monolithic entity; the book carefully integrates the experiences of lower-income activists. Moreover, thanks to the author’s intellectual honesty, the diversity of actors and their backgrounds that gives rise to a multifaceted reality of activism in Lebanon is reflected in a writing style attentive to the genealogies and etymologies of key terms, such as “activism” itself.

In the first chapters, the discussion moves quickly into how “crisis narratives” are produced and circulated as tools of ethical citizenship. In Lebanon’s vibrant public space, narrating crisis becomes a way of remembering, forgetting, imagining, and anticipating. These narratives are rooted in different historical etiologies of nationhood, shaped by colonial legacies that enable or constrain particular forms of knowledge. Activists position themselves in relation to other groups and to the imagined nation, revealing a landscape in which people are constantly theorizing their own roles. At the same time, middle-class activism often aspires to a civic culture modeled on Western societies, one that does not carry the burden of crisis. As a result, civic narratives that do not vest the West with moral authority tend to go unheeded, highlighting the limits of this dominant activist imaginary.

Generational dynamics further complicate this picture, as İpek observes, with youth framed as embodying a transformative potential. Change is often imagined through a positive a priori fetishization of civil society, particularly in the aftermath of the 2006 July War, when technocratic expertise and professionalism were configured as neutral and publicly accountable alternatives to sectarian politics. Practices such as yoga, while not inherently political, are shown to contribute to making life more dignified and to coping with chronic fear and anxiety. Through this kind of example, İpek challenges the dichotomy between depoliticization and political engagement. At the same time, the ideal of “wasta-free” professionalism is championed as an “alternative modality of citizenship” (p. 107), one that promises meritocratic success. Yet this political fantasy “naturalises individual success” (p. 113), masking the continued reliance on family and kinship networks that underpin middle-class privilege. Although the author carefully reconstructs the local genealogy of “professionalism,” the analysis of wasṭa - social connections and mediation - would have benefited from a deeper engagement with existing debates on charity, humanitarianism, and development in Lebanon and beyond.

Another analytical theme in the book concerns the entrepreneurial approach to activism, which reframes political engagement through innovation, self-making, and growth. This mode of activism echoes, at times, a quasi-Calvinist ethos, turning the negative fetishization of politics into a field of positive change, as seen in experiences like Beirut Madinati (Beirut My City): a grassroots political movement that emerged in response to the 2016 waste crisis. Through a sociolinguistic analysis of “entrepreneurialism” in Arabic, İpek opens important avenues for thinking about its postsectarian potential. The ethical citizen emerges here as self-made, often rooted in a Phoenician imaginary—which emerges as not limited to Christian communities—associated with prosperity and development. Yet this model is contested by feminist and leftist activists, who point to its entanglement with capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. The implicit figure of the ideal activist, frequently described as charismatic and strong, recalls masculinity and reproduces conservative gender normativities within the activist field.

Hope emerges as a crucial element in sustaining crisiswork and countering passivity. Hope underpins the imagination of a political future in which sectarian divisions disappear, while also drawing on memories of an inspiring past of coexistence. It would have been interesting to explore how an anticipated future, one engaged by hope, would connect with the “anticipation of violence” in Lebanon.Footnote ¹ Cultural references such as The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012 documentary film) illustrate how hope is not only future-oriented but also grounded in a reimagined past. As a reader, I was left with the idea that hope, in the Lebanese context, becomes a politics of memory that sustains nationhood and political agency. At the same time, the relative absence of openly expressed disappointment about the unfolding of everyday politics in Lebanon - an absence that İpek observed among local activists - raises questions about whether disillusionment is instead articulated in more subtle ways, namely, in an under-spoken language of critique.

The marginalization of migrants and refugees is one of the most significant aspects of the activist landscape described in the book. These groups are often framed as hindrances to a postcrisis future, and their contributions are systematically under-acknowledged. The hegemonic figure of the victim is implicitly Lebanese and antisectarian, which contributes to the ungrievability of others, particularly Syrian refugees. Institutional racism compels migrants, including Palestinians and Syrians, to perform Lebanese identity markers to secure an ephemeral sense of moral safety. At the same time, the book attentively scrutinizes the idea of “indigenous” activism, exposing how it is shaped by colonial legacies and inevitably affected by moral taxonomies produced through international intervention. These hierarchies continue to define which forms of activism are seen as more legitimate or accountable, often based on their proximity to Western models, ultimately hindering the possibility of solidarities across social groups and classes.

The conclusion leaves the reader wanting a deeper exploration of the translocal encounters that activism can generate. Although the book focuses primarily on the local, it opens the door to further research into how international dynamics complicate the multifaceted indigeneity of activism, to which diasporas substantially contribute. It also points to the recent radicalization of liberal civic activism in response to ongoing violence in the region, an observation that future scholarship will hopefully take up.

Overall, the book provides dense and carefully situated ethnographic accounts that locate interlocutors within their class, generational, and gendered positionalities. Its main strength lies in a lucid analysis of the politics of knowing in activism: who defines its orthodoxy, and who has the power to discipline its implementation. By bringing class and race back into focus—alongside, but not limited to, sectarianism—it challenges dominant narratives of Lebanese civil society. At the same time, an engagement with the blurred lines between crisis and normalcy could have been more compelling through dialogue with a broader range of scholarship, beyond the North American.

Overall, İpek’s work offers an excellent account of how activism in Lebanon is shaped by colonial legacies, geopolitical conditions, and moral hierarchies. Written in clear and accessible language, the book will be of interest not only to scholars but also to activists, policymakers, and practitioners seeking a nuanced moral, political, cultural, and sociolinguistic map of activism in Lebanon.