My qualifying paper, which culminated into a second Master’s in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2025), examines the contention surrounding the World Bank- funded Bisri Dam project in Lebanon, an emblematic case of a high-modernist project that has foundered on a mix of hydrogeological recalcitrance, popular opposition and compounding crises. this article offers a socio-ecological material lens on post-colonial state building and the political economy of infrastructural failure. Avoiding the analytical impasse of crisis epistemes and heuristics of failure within the long tradition of development studies on the Global South in general, and Lebanon in particular, I pose a number of questions. How are ‘crises’ and ‘failures’ constitutive of capitalist development, and for whom are they generative? How can the ubiquitous failures of the promises of infrastructure become an opportunity for the re-animation, re-appropriation and re-politicization of hydrogeologies and political imaginaries? Rather than perceiving them as aberrations, I argue that failures are constitutive of high-modernist infrastructural development, its liberal prescriptive techno-political models, and the speculative logics of endless ruination. Yet, failures can also become generative, instigating new political imaginaries and historical subjectivities. This research was published in the Journal Development and Change (2024) and awarded the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Graduate Student Paper Prize (2022). I benefited from the rich intellectual engagement and feedback received from presenting this work at esteemed conferences, including the Arab Council for Social Sciences (Beirut, 2023), the Social Science History Association (Chicago, 2022), the American Sociological Association (Los Angeles, 2022), the International Sociological Association (virtual, 2022), and the Middle East Studies Association (virtual, 2021).