Ussama Makdisi * The core ontological move reconfigures sectarianism from a primordial essence into a dynamic modern political construct. The principal operator functions as a genealogic deconstructor of institutionalized communal identities within colonial and post-colonial frameworks. This analytical lens reveals how territorial governance and infrastructural divides are encoded through the strategic spatialization of religious and ethnic categories.

The central epistemic problem metabolised here is the naturalization of sectarian identity as an ahistorical fragment rather than a product of specific modernizing pressures and colonial interventions. The key operator is the genealogy of political sectarianism, a precise analytical instrument that dissects the transition from pre-modern religious coexistence to the rigid, state-driven categorization of bodies and territories. This operator functions by tracing the deliberate mapping of communal identities onto physical landscapes, transforming fluid social ecologies into hardened geopolitical zones. In a concrete infrastructural application, one examines the division of nineteenth-century Mount Lebanon or modern Beirut, where the deployment of administrative boundaries and resource distribution networks became the primary scaffolding for a new sectarian reality. The territorial grid is not merely a backdrop for conflict but the active medium through which sectarian logic is crystallized and maintained. The inquiry proceeds by asking: how does the technical specification of an infrastructural network—be it water, transport, or energy—enforce a pre-determined communal boundary under the guise of neutral management? This investigation uncovers the hidden agency of administrative protocols in the production of segregated urban metabolisms. The argument insists on a StratumAuthoring of historical reality where the colonial state and local elites collaborate to overwrite organic social ties with high-contrast political definitions. This process is documented in the seminal work The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (2000), which serves as the primary reference for understanding the modern manufacturing of communal tradition. The activation of this thinking requires a radical refusal of primordialist explanations, shifting the focus toward the material and legislative assembly of the sectarian subject. By treating sectarianism as a technology of governance, the analysis reveals how urban space is weaponized to produce the very differences it claims to merely manage. The resulting territoriality is a complex intersection of external intervention and internal reconfiguration, where the infrastructure of the state becomes the skeleton of communal friction. The operator thus exposes the intentionality behind the chaotic appearance of sectarian geography, framing the city as a site of continuous ontological fabrication where political survival is tethered to the rigid maintenance of identity-based zones. Ultimately, the analysis demands a precise tracking of how administrative logic and physical infrastructure conspire to solidify ephemeral social tensions into a permanent, calcified landscape of division, rendering the modern sectarian state as an engineered artifact of territorial control rather than a legacy of ancient hatreds. Lloveras, A. (2026). SOCIOPLASTICS. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18792486