Inside Karantina: Labour, Inequality and Resistance in 1960s Beirut

Dr Diala Lteif presented the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies Easter Term lecture on 5 May 2026, with a talk based on her research on the subject of, "Slaughterhouse Struggle: Space, Time, and Ideology in Beirut’s class conflicts of the 1960s.”

 

Dr Lteif focused her lecture on the labour struggle of the Beirut slaughterhouse workers in the 1960s, a key period from her manuscript One hundred years of refuge: Displacement and the making of Karantina, Beirut (1920-2020). Her lecture was illustrated by vivid photos and maps, helping to situate the locality, people and period that her archival work and interviews have captured.

 

Karantina is a community situated in the port area of Beirut, its name derived from being the city's quarantine area. The community changed over time, particularly in the early 20th century, with the local population joined by refugees and later the arrival of migrant workers. It has always been a marginalised community, cut off from the rest of the city by a highway, and seen as an insalubrious part of town. 

 

The slaughterhouse was built in Karantina during the late Ottoman era and operated through the French Mandate and until the 1960s. The slaughterhouse was a key institution for the local economy and that of the capital and its food infrastructure. In 1966, when the municipality built a new modern facility, the Butcher’s union staged a boycott of the facility to protest new working and hiring conditions. Their labour struggle, despite yielding great victories for the butchers, remains entirely absent from local and regional labour histories. Dr Lteif addresses this important gap in the literature and highlights the importance of spatial and class analysis in the study of Lebanon. 

 

 

Dr Diala Lteif is a Margaret Anstee Research Fellow at Newnham College. She is a planner and urban historian of the modern Middle-East and her research explores the role of subaltern populations in the production of space and cities. You can read more about this work in this area in her Antipode article, "The Conditions of the Working Class in 1960s Beirut: Fire and Everyday Struggles in Karantina."