Dollar Games: Crisis, Middle-Class Life, and the Reproduction of Financial Power in Lebanon

• In Event: Personal Finance and Inequality

Abstract

This talk examines Lebanon’s post-2019 financial collapse through the metaphor of “dollar games”: system-orchestrated financial maneuvers through which the crisis was governed, normalized, and contained—even as it devastated livelihoods and reshaped social life. I focus on the state’s strategic hands-off posture, an apparent absence of policy that nevertheless enabled and channeled a proliferating set of everyday “games” through which people navigated monetary breakdown.

Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut, including 78 semi-structured interviews with middle-class professionals, activists, economists, and financial insiders, I show how the crisis generated a dense ecology of games—each with its own rules, language, and winners and losers—often described by interlocutors as the state’s “shadow plan.” These practices unfolded in the space created by official inaction yet were indirectly sanctioned, tolerated, and stabilized by the financial system and its institutional allies.

Using the metaphor of “the game,” I build on Michael Burawoy to argue that the production of dollar games elicited active participation and, with it, a form of implicit consent to the rules of crisis management. I trace how micro-financial practices—cashing discounted checks, arbitraging exchange rates, and repaying loans in devalued dollars (so-called “lollars”)—offered short-term relief or even gains for some, while diffusing collective anger, redirecting blame away from the financial system, and muting class antagonism.

In the absence of an official state strategy, individual solutions proliferated into society-wide creative adaptations. I argue that these maneuvers functioned as an informal, market-led adjustment regime—one that helped stave off unrest and disorder by distributing survival through competitive participation rather than collective contestation.

Author

• Mona Khneisser, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign