Vitality in Lebanon explores how the simultaneous experience of radical uncertainty and return to old certainties has produced new forms of agency for addressing emergent challenges through political activism, research and local community action. The collection brings together a transdisciplinary group of experts, including economists, policymakers, academics from various disciplines (anthropology, politics, and philosophy among others) and a member of parliament, to analyse Lebanon’s ongoing crises and discuss the practices and projects that have emerged in response. The book argues that, in a context where uncertainty has become an integral part of governance, solutions for today’s most pressing challenges are driven by diverse actors with different expertise, resources and networks aiming to improve quality of life and catalyse new hopes for the future.

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The Glades of Embobut challenges these narratives by situating Embobut as a landscape in constant transformation, shaped through ongoing efforts by communities and policymakers to rework ecological, economic and political relationships in pursuit of regional prosperity. It demonstrates how existing forms of socioecological wellbeing emerge primarily from local knowledge and everyday practice rather than externally conceived development models, and how these processes unfold without fixed end points. Any imagining of forest futures must therefore accommodate the open-ended nature of daily life, where new social and ecological relationships emerge in ways that diverge from the idealised forest environments envisioned by both conservationist and activist thinking.

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Taking stock of the enduring power of negative narratives about pastoralism, the volume considers counter-narratives from multiple corners, tracing their alternative visions of both the past and the future. It explores everyday aspirations and practices to make sense of sweeping socio-economic, political and environmental change. In doing so, Pastoral Prosperities gestures towards new cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral conversations that might inform more grounded approaches to investment, governance and support in the years ahead.

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Drawing on scholarship across sociology, anthropology, political science, and cultural and legal history, the volume examines how narratives of masculine restoration, revolutionary spirit and cultural belonging drive and reinvent political formations across Turkey, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, India and China. Refusing positivist and Eurocentric templates, the contributors co-theorise from within their own contexts, attending to the specific temporalities through which Islamic movements claim the past, inhabit the present and project futures.

The result is a volume whose theoretical force comes from the very geographies it studies: a contribution, not a conclusion, to the decolonial rethinking of political imagination and its entanglement with nationalism, masculine desire and the unfinished business of revolution.

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Departing from general propositions about post-growth to delineate pathways to prosperity, the volume emphasises that visions of the good life are diverse and require empirical work co-designed with local communities and stakeholders to drive change. It is essential reading for policymakers who are stuck, local government officers who need new tools, activists who wonder what is next, academics in need of refreshment, and students and people of all ages who want a way forward.

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By profiling existing action by credit unions and community organisations, alongside bold proposals for the future, with contributions from artists, activists and academics, the book shows how we can rethink the validity and inevitability of many contemporary forms of debt through organising debt audits, promoting debt cancellation and expanding member-owned co-operatives. The authors set out legal and political methods for changing the rules of the system to provide debt relief and reshape economies for more inclusive and sustainable flourishing. The book also profiles community-based actions that are changing the role of debt in economic, social and political life – among them, participatory art projects, radical advice networks and ways of financing feminist green transitions.

While much of the research and activism documented here has taken place in London, the contributors show how different initiatives draw from and generate inspiration elsewhere, from debt audits across the global south, creative interventions around the UK and grassroots movements in North America. Financing Prosperity by Dealing with Debt moves beyond critique to present a wealth of concrete ways to tackle debt and forge the prosperous communities we want for the future.

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