As explained in my introductory post, the Implementing Projects Under Fire series emerged from my ethnographic research and interviews with Lebanese project partners in the context of the Erasmus+ STRIPES project. Through these posts, I want to share our project experiences, give visibility to the challenges and dilemmas the Lebanese project partners face, and explore what it really means to implement EU-funded projects when war crisis becomes part of everyday life.

In this second post, I explore one of the key findings from my ethnographic research: how continuous repeated exposure to different crises shapes organisational routines, professional practices, and ways of planning and responding to uncertainty – a phenomenon I refer to as crisis habitus, drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 1998).  

When one crisis follows another

For many people in Lebanon, the current war is not an isolated event that would only interrupt an otherwise stable everyday life. It is part of a much longer history of overlapping crises: political instability, the refugee crisis, economic collapse, the Beirut port explosion, the COVID-19 pandemic, fuel shortages, environmental problems, brain drain, and repeated armed conflicts. “People had barely had time to recover from one crisis before another began,” one person explained: “There had not been enough time to rebuild homes, restore livelihoods or put things back in place.” In her own words, Lebanese people did not even have time to breathe.

This accumulation is particularly important for understanding how organisations and project professionals operate. In conventional project management, a crisis is generally understood as an exceptional event requiring additional planning, mitigation measures, or changes to the original work plan. But what happens when these exceptional circumstances become recurrent? When organisations and people have experienced so many disruptions that responding to them becomes part of their everyday (professional) knowledge?

Developing a practical sense of crisis

Here, I find the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 1998) particularly useful. He developed the concept of habitus to describe the dispositions, perceptions, and practical ways of acting that people acquire and internalize through their social experiences. Put simply, our past experiences shape how we interpret situations, what we consider possible and how we respond, often without consciously reflecting on every decision. Habitus is a practical sense of how to act in a particular situation or social world.

Drawing on this concept, I use the term crisis habitus to describe the accumulated practical knowledge, organisational routines, and dispositions that develop through repeated exposure to instability. One Lebanese project professional offered an observation when comparing two wars she had experienced. This second war had been, in some respects, “a bit easier,” not because the circumstances were less distressing, but partly because she and her colleagues had already learned how to respond. “We gained experience,” she explained. Project activities were assessed according to location and security conditions. Trainings continued in areas considered safe, moved online where possible, or were postponed when physical attendance became too dangerous. Crisis management had become a form of embodied organisational knowledge.

Importantly, this does not mean that war has become acceptable or emotionally easier to endure. Rather, people have developed practical ways of navigating conditions over which they have very limited control. “If it happens again, everything will go all over again: people will take their laptops, sit in chaotic homes and work. Nothing will change; work still has to be submitted,” added the person I spoke with.

Planning for an uncertain future

Another important dimension of crisis habitus concerns how people imagine and prepare for the future. War enters everyday project work not only through bombardment, displacement, and disruptions to infrastructure, but also through the persistent uncertainty of what might happen next. As explained by a Lebanese project partner, even when work continues, it continues under the shadow of what may happen in the next hour, the next road journey, or during the next project meeting.

This affects the planning and preparation of future project proposals. Throughout the research, I encountered something which could be defined as provisional normality: when uncertainty is acknowledged, but operational planning still needs to proceed. As one project manager explained: “We plan things as if nothing is going to happen […] And if anything happens, then we come up with a contingency plan.” She acknowledged that the possibility of disruption was always in the back of their minds, but insisted that they could not allow it to dictate every decision. Otherwise, no project activities could ever be planned or implemented. “And when you have Lebanon in play, it is always about crisis. Therefore, it is always this same risk & mitigation table, which you need to fill out sooner or later,” she concluded with a slight smile, although her tone remained serious.

And, as my research demonstrates, there is something paradoxical about this. Project proposals promise positive futures; however, some of the very people responsible for implementing these promises are simultaneously planning their personal futures around the possibility of renewed destruction and displacement.

For the Lebanese project professionals, the anticipation of crisis has become part of the ordinary bureaucratic work of imagining and planning new projects. And this illustrates another aspect of the crisis habitus: the ability to plan for normality while simultaneously preparing for its possible collapse.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

This series draws on ongoing ethnographic research supported by the EU Erasmus+ Strengthening T-VET to foster Relevant and inclusive Internship Programmes and Employability Skills (STRIPES, Project 101129181), and Research program P2-0266 of the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS). The research received ethical approval from the IRI UL Research Ethics Committee (KER-IRIUL-001-2023).