Radical but Not Revolutionary: Bank Raids in Lebanon as a ‘Restorative’ Repertoire

This article traces the emergence of a distinctive repertoire of contention in Lebanon after the October 2019 uprising – individual bank raids – amidst one of the most acute financial crises in the country since the mid-18th century. Drawing on an original event catalogue and qualitative content analysis of media coverage, and engaging theories of financialized accumulation and accumulation by dispossession, the article argues that Lebanon’s crisis generated a form of ‘restorative resistance’. Within the country’s sectarian-neoliberal order, individual bank raids targeted sites of financial accumulation (banks) to retrieve frozen personal deposits, expressing a desire to restore a lost normality rather than to imagine a different future. By 2022-23, 83 raids by depositors dramatized the crisis while signalling a turn toward radical individualism: morally charged, atomized attempts to enforce access to one’s savings, animated by what Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’ – an attachment to an increasingly unattainable ‘good life’. The article argues that, while the bank raid tactic is radical in form, its individualized logic constrains collective mobilization and forecloses revolutionary rupture. In this sense, bank raids constitute a ‘restorative repertoire’: a striking, disruptive practice that ultimately reproduces the temporal horizon of restoration rather than opening the political horizon of revolution.