Nour Hachem is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, San Diego. She holds a BA in Sociology-Anthropology and History from the American University of Beirut. In addition to her research, Nour is interested in critical digital humanities. In particular, she aims to create gamified experiences to foster immersive and accessible learning, and rethink the ways in which academic history narrates the past.
 

Dissertation research

Buds and Borders: Cannabis, Prohibition, and Identity Formation in Lebanon

In April 2020, the Lebanese parliament passed a law legalizing the cultivation, production, and exportation of cannabis for medicinal and industrial purposes in a bid to save the country’s ailing economy. This came 94 years after the French Mandate authorities heralded cannabis prohibition in Greater Lebanon, a policy that the post-independence government continued. Politicians who supported legalization in 2020 advertised it as a significant developmental achievement. In reality, the law is conservative in nature: it enshrines and exacerbates an unjust status-quo which, most notably, leaves out the historically marginalized cannabis-cultivating communities as well as local cannabis consumers. In my dissertation, I trace a history of this status quo. I investigate the history of cannabis production, consumption, trade, and prohibition in Lebanon, and use it as a lens to understand broader patterns of social, economic, political, and spatial identification, differentiation, and marginalization in Lebanon since the 1920s. I focus on the Bekaa and Baalbek-Hermel regions where cannabis cultivation and the making of hashish (cannabis resin) have a long history in spite of being illegal. These regions where cannabis is cultivated and the people who inhabit them have been historically marginalized in and through governmental practice and public discourse, as well as in historical writing on Lebanon and on drugs.