How Do Semi-Authoritarian Regimes Defeat Uprisings? Lebanon’s 2019 Uprising and the Dramaturgical Performances that the Post-Civil War Regime Plays

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How do semi-authoritarian regimes manage dissent and how does their protest management repertoire deter and spark contention? This paper looks at Lebanon’s post-war system as an instance of authoritarian rule that relies on various techniques of power, including political performances, to manage contention. Building on a dramaturgical approach, I focus on three performances that government players have deployed to govern dissent during the 2019 uprising: Enacting unresponsiveness, staging ‘spectral dangers’, and scripting alternative crises. Research on how these performances shape contention is crucial to exploring how the regime re-engineers its resilience while activists wrestle with the politics of sectarian power-sharing.