“The birds we do not shoot”: Lebanon’s absent state and sport hunters’ code of practice

Abstract

ABSTRACT Some research on sport hunting addresses how hunters oppose or negotiate state regulations. Yet little is known about self-imposed regulations among hunters where the state is ineffective. In the following article, I fill in this gap by looking at hunting in Lebanon where the state failed to enforce its own hunting moratorium, and hunters continued their practice. I found that since the end of the civil war (1990), and in the continued absence of state regulation, hunters have developed a code of conduct. This code of conduct centered on forbidding hunters from taking Lebanon’s nonmigratory birds. Hunters described these birds with specific attributes: having a homeland in…, ours/from among us, resident, and threatened with extinction. This code, which pushed hunters to migratory birds and away from nonmigratory birds, signaled hunters’ ethical practice of care for Lebanon’s environment in the absence of a state that bestows legitimacy.