Lebanese State Research Articles

The Hizbullah phenomenon: politics and communication

Hizbullah is not only a leading political actor in Lebanon and a dynamic force in the Middle East, but it is also distinguished by a sophisticated communication strategy. From relatively humble beginnings in the 1980s, Hizbullah's political clout and its public perception have followed an upward trajectory, thanks to a political programme that blends military, social, economic and religious elements and adapts to changes in its environment. Its communication strategy is similarly adaptive, supporting the group's political objectives. Hizbullah's target audience has expanded to a regional and global viewership. Its projected identity, too, shifted from an Islamist resistance party opposed to Israel's presence in Lebanon to a key player within the Lebanese state. At the same time, Hizbullah's image has retained fixed features, including its image as an ally of Iran; its role as a resistance group (to Israel); and its original base as a religious party representative of the Lebanese Shiites. The authors of this book address how Hizbullah uses image, language and its charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to legitimise its political aims and ideology and ap- peal to different target groups.

Between Fitna, Fawda, and Feminism: Implications of Religious Institutions on Lebanon’s Women’s Movement

In Lebanon’s recent years of post-war development, the women’s movement took strides to further the status of women. Such strides have included campaigns to reform women’s personal status laws towards citizenship, nationality, and most contentiously for protection against gender-based violence. Since the end of the civil war and at the zenith of the women’s movement, women’s advocacy groups were seemingly gaining momentum towards attaining reform, until the Lebanese State reached disintegration into its current political deadlock. Where Lebanon has become politically enmeshed within the protracted conflict in the region, among civic society, the women’s movement has endured the brunt of reactionary politics. This paper means to problematize the Sectarian regime in Lebanon as an agent of social control and a body politic of reactive policies towards women in Lebanon, wherein the women’s movement has only received empty concessions that could exacerbate already bleak conditions.

Lebanese–Palestinian Governance Interaction in the Palestinian Gathering of Shabriha, South Lebanon – A Tentative Extension of the ‘Mediated State’ from Africa to the Mediterranean

This article offers a qualitative case study of the interaction between Lebanese state institutions and Palestinian authorities concerning the unofficial Palestinian camp of Shabriha. It particularly highlights the indirect nature of these interactions and the brokering role of Lebanese political parties. Governance in Shabriha is conceptualized as a manifestation of a ‘mediated state’, a notion that has been instrumental in understanding governance in sub-Saharan Africa but has not yet been applied to the Mediterranean. Based on empirical insights from Shabriha, the article offers a tentative reconsideration of the mediated state concept in order to extend it to scholarship on Mediterranean politics and governance.

Religious Conversion and Daʿwa Secularism

This dissertation is an ethnography that focuses on competing discourses and practices of secularity in contemporary Lebanon. It is situated at the intersections of legal anthropology, theories of secularism and religion, and interdisciplinary studies of the state and sexual/gendered citizenship. I focus on two phenomena. One is the Lebanese state’s regulation of religious conversion, a practice the state and its courts consider proof of their secularity. The state actively protects the rights of citizens to change their religions or their sects, often to the consternation of religious leaders and personal status courts. The second phenomenon is a broad youth-led social movement calling for a sixteenth secular personal status law, an addition that would effectively produce a secular sect with political, legal, and sexual rights that are different from other sectarian communities. This social movement considers secularism to have its own “culture,” one that promotes religious and cultural tolerance, women’s rights, economic independence, gay rights, and free speech. The advocates believe that a cultural revolution must take place in Lebanon before political sectarianism as a system of rule is ended, and they strive to saturate the public sphere with expressions of this culture. They seek to shift the moral and cultural landscape of the Lebanese public sphere—and the political and affective sensibilities of their cocitizens—toward secular attachments and ways of life. I conceptualize this as a form of secular daʿwa or proselytizing secularism. Bringing ethnography, court records, and research in personal status and civil courts together, I suggest that both secularism as a political/legal space and secularity as embodied practice are constructed not only through the regulation of religious or sectarian difference but also through sexual difference. In Lebanon this regulation of sexual difference often travels through discourses of pluralism, diversity, and tolerance in ways that mirror discourses on sectarianism and secularism more broadly.

Facilitating Facts on the Ground: The ‘Politics of Uncertainty’ and the Governance of Housing, Land, and Tenure in the Palestinian Gathering of Qasmiye, South Lebanon

Lebanese and Palestinian authorities unyieldingly proclaim that avoiding naturalization (tawteen) and realizing return (‘awda) is their main priority. This places the Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon under a state of exception in which institutional ambiguity characterizes governance, because any form of normalization and formalization is considered a prelude to tawteen and a threat to ‘awda. This uncertainty is particularly poignant in Lebanon’s unofficial camps, or gatherings.” Palestinians living in the gatherings do not fall outside the protection regime of the Lebanese state merely because they lack citizenship. They are also partly excluded from UNRWA’s service mandate because they do not reside in official camps. The consequences of this institutional ambiguity are especially pertinent in the governance of housing, land, and tenure. Institutional ambiguity complicates construction and exposes residents of the gatherings to eviction from their properties. At the same time, it determines the coping mechanisms available to residents to deal with these predicaments. In the absence of formal entitlements related to citizenship or camp-residence, inhabitants of the gatherings rely on informal and politicized strategies geared toward maintaining “facts on the ground.” My case study of the governance of property rights in Qasmiye gathering documents how the state of exception in Lebanon’s Palestinian gatherings is upheld by what can be called a “politics of uncertainty”: both Lebanese and Palestinian authorities deliberately maintain the institutional ambiguity of the gatherings. As such, the paper contributes to understanding the endurance and reproduction of marginalizing governance practices—in the specific context of Lebanon’s Palestinian gatherings, but also with reference to other protracted refugee populations and inhabitants of informal settlements across the Arab world.

Talking to Hezbollah

The two studies under review, by Matthew Levitt and Lina Khatib et al., present very different pictures of Hezbollah, pictures which are not necessarily conflicting and are indeed, in many ways, complementary. Levitt focuses on the group's long record of terrorism dating back more than 30 years to the early 1980s and its violent attacks on US marines and French forces then based in Lebanon. Over that period, of course, as Lina Khatib and her co-authors demonstrate, Hezbollah has grown in stature as a political party. Khatib and her colleagues portray a party that has deliberately sought to keep Lebanon a weak and divided country, despite the efforts of the West and Gulf Arab states to strengthen the Lebanese state. These two studies add immensely to our knowledge of Hezbollah and its extraordinary rise over the past three decades to become one of the major political and military actors in the Middle East.

Acceptability of Civil Marriage in a Multidenominational Society: Results of an Empirical Survey in Lebanon

Family Laws in Lebanon are administered by eighteen religious institutions, while the Lebanese State has abandoned its duty to produce any unified civil marriage contract. Competition between religious institutions provides a large number of marriage contracts for the Lebanese citizens who have the ability of converting from one denomination to the other seeking for their favorite contract. A statistical survey on 603 couples allows us to sketch the portrait of a typical Lebanese who would accept the implementation of a civil marriage regime in Lebanon. Religious Affiliation is essential to understand this willingness.

The Governance of Non-State Armed Actors in Failing States

Using the case of the Lebanese movement Hezbollah, the article deals withthe phenomenon of the governance of non-state armed groups in failingstates and the conditions for its emergence. It argues that one of the keyrequirements for the emergence and long-term preservation of a non-statearmed group’s authority is its fulfillment of functions usually associatedwith the state (such as the provision of security, public goods and servicesand the legitimation of its authority) that the failing state is not able toprovide. The study specifically shows how Hezbollah is able to substitute foror complement the Lebanese state in each of its functions andconsecutively use the wide network of its governance institutions forstrengthening its political authority. As a result of Hezbollah’s practices andstrategies of governance, the forms of political control of the territory arebeing gradually changed and hybridized.

UN Security Council Resolutions as Factors of International Socialization: The Case of Hezbollah

This paper shows how UN Security Council resolutions can facilitate the international socialization of an Islamist political actor. The study undertakes a process-tracing analysis of the negotiations and attempts to implement UNSC Resolutions 1559 and 1701 and then assesses their impact on Hezbollah's agency and political identity. The author argues that UNSC resolutions can inform processes of social influence that directly affect the activity of non-state actors and then cause international socialization. According to the analysis proposed international socialization has produced three main effects on Hezbollah that are: increased accountability; a shift in its legitimacy paradigm; and a mutation of Hezbollah's relation with the Lebanese state.

Patronage, Contextual Flexibility, and Organisational Innovation in Lebanese Protected Areas Management

The Lebanese Shouf Biosphere Reserve (SBR) counts among the most successful Middle Eastern conservation projects today. This article describes the evolution and contemporary management of conservation in Shouf. Using SBR as the empirical foci it argues that mobilisation of customary political hierarchies to secure environmental protection is not bound to impede conservation agendas as suggested by Kingston (2001), but rather provided the SBR with managerial flexibility under a weak state. The case study shows how new environmental agendas articulated with traditional political regimes in building novel, stable institutions. From these emerged contextually flexible solutions for mediating resources and negotiating nature. The Shouf's particular clientelist political structure gave rise to networks simultaneously civic and part of the Lebanese state. Explaining the apparent stability of conservation practice in Shouf requires shifting analytical frames away from polarised debates either for or against the roles of state, civil society, and patronage in conservation.

Pax Syriana: elite politics in postwar Lebanon

The recent political history of Lebanon has been defined by the legacy of war. In addition to repeated external invasions and the ongoing presence of foreign troops of diverse nationalities, the Lebanese people have endured the scars left by a bitterly contested civil war that began in the spring of 1975 and continued unabated for the next fifteen years. While much has been written about the tragedy of the civil war, el-Husseini's Pax Syriana is the first book focused on the evolution of the postwar political scene. In a series of negotiations brokered by Saudi Arabia, under the auspices of the larger international community, the civil war came to an end with the signing of the Ta'if Agreement. This agreement ushered in an era of Syrian control and rule by a disparate group of power elites. El-Husseini provides an in-depth account of how the political elite left an indelible mark on the Lebanese state and society. Through extensive field work and firsthand interviews, el-Husseini offers an intimate portrait of postwar Lebanon and shows how the Syrian influence brought a degree of stability to this fragmented nation and yet simultaneously undermined the development of a full constitutional democracy as Lebanon began to acquire some of the authoritarian character of the Syrian regime.

The origins of the Lebanese national idea, 1840-1920

THE ORIGINS OF THE LEBANESE NATIONAL IDEA, 1840-1920 Carol Hakim Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013 (xi + 364 pages, bibliography, index) $85.00 (cloth)Reviewed by Joan ChakerAgainst teleological accounts that locate origins of national ideas in a distant past and trace their evolution along a linear path into present, Carol Hakim's Origins of Lebanese National Idea cautiously refrains from foreclosing on historical narrative by attending to cleavages and conflicting interests within continuously shifting nationalist alignments. In Hakim's textured account, Lebanon is not simply a Christian state for a Christian population that developed separatist tendencies, nor is it just an entity fabricated and supported by great powers for sake of colonial project.The narrative begins in 1840s, when Maronite clergy first raised idea of Mount Lebanon as a political unit. Hakim highlights role of these clergymen's contacts with French during this period (chapter one), leading up to establishment of a new regime in 1842, which came to be known as Dual Qaimaqamiyya (chapter two). The third chapter continues with sectarian massacres of 1860, French military intervention, and establishment of yet another form of local administration for region-the mutasarrifiyya (chapter four). In late nineteenth century, a new elite defended a secular Lebanism in form of an enlarged autonomous entity within a greater Syria. This project, however, was not a direct descendant of mutasarrifiyya, Hakim argues, but a pushback against control by Maronite clergy and traditional notable families that characterized that regime (chapters five and six). From this perspective, mutasarrifiyya appears as a reestablishment of Ottoman authority over Mount Lebanon, and Hakim resists the temptation to establish a linear link between that administration and Republic of Lebanon proclaimed in 1920 (99).Hakim similarly sheds new light on Lebanese delegation's demand for expanded territory at Versailles peace conference of 1919. The expanded boundaries, she demonstrates, were not conceived organically among Lebanese nationalists, but corresponded to territory suggested by French general Beaufort back in 1860, upon establishment of mutasarrifiyya. Most significantly, Hakim shows that earlier versions of Lebanism were not independentist projects. Turn-of-the-century Lebanism was not expressed as an alternative to Ottomanism, she argues, but as a part of broader reforms taking place in Ottoman Empire. Appeals for an independent Lebanese state not be raised until fall of Ottoman Empire (chapter eight).Where avoidance of a teleological narrative may cause historian to leave a great deal to historical contingency, Hakim repeatedly points to overarching structures that explain crystallization of national or sectarian communities into political identities across global South in nineteenth century. She considers Lebanism in conjunction with other fledgling currents in region, such as Ottomanism, Arabism, and Syrianism, and places them all within broader context of integration into world economy. She discusses economic transformations such as intensification of trade with West, expanded production of raw silk and other cash crops, developments in transport, and emergence of a new social class of merchants, middlemen, and enriched peasants. Hakim's categories of analysis remain identity-based (the Maronites, the French), but she also shows limits of defining historical agents in a manner that does not take into consideration economic dimension. For instance, while on one page, we read that Maronite patriarch's project to restore Bashir II would have constituted a victory for Maronites, on following page, Hakim complicates picture: Several forces in community had divergent projects and ambitions. …

Lebanese Power Struggles and Fashioning “Armenian” Space, 1957-1958

In 1957 and 1958, Lebanese Armenian political parties, through the medium of their newspapers, rearranged the Armenian neighborhoods of Bourj Hamoud and Corniche al-Nahr as Armenian territories, separate from, and often in opposition to, the Lebanese state. These Armenian parties, in vying with one another for authority over this territory, fashioned Armenian enemies of one another. The internal Armenian enemy of the Armenian nation was constructed from within the national space of Lebanon. The power struggle within the Armenian community in Lebanon challenges the placement of Armenians in the historiography of Lebanon, which considers them as refugees and therefore non-Lebanese or temporary residents of Lebanon as well as passive, impossible political actors.

Lebanon: the politics of a penetrated society

Introduction 1. The Formation of the Modern Lebanese State 2. The Civil War: 1975-1990 3. The Post-War Political System 4. Post-War Reconstruction and the Economy 5. Post-War Foreign Policy: Syrian Penetration and Lebanese Interests. Conclusion

Exploring the Paradoxical Consequences of State Collapse: the cases of Somalia 1991–2006 and Lebanon 1975–82

Relative social and economic well-being in the aftermath of a state's collapse is usually explained on the basis of a single case, Somalia, and with reference to the impact of endogenous factors such as the repressive and predatory nature of the state which collapsed and the ability of civil society actors and institutions to fulfil those functions that are normally performed by a state. This article challenges this theoretical view. As can be seen from a study of Lebanon, relative well-being after state collapse is more common than it appears to be at first glance. Moreover, given the limited role that the Lebanese state played in the economic and political spheres before the breakdown of state authority in 1975, the repressive and predatory nature of the collapsed state cannot be the explanatory variable in this case. Exogenous factors, such as remittances from abroad, international loans bestowed upon residual state institutions and ‘political money’ from foreign powers, are the decisive factors generating such paradoxical developments. Study of Somalia and Lebanon also shows the limitations of the conceptualisations of state collapse prevalent in the literature.

Discursive Constructions of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon: From the Israel-Hezbollah War to the Struggle Over Nahr Al-Bared

Focusing on th e particularly volatile period between the Israel-Hezbollah war (July–August 2006) and the prolonged struggle over Nahr al-Bared refugee camp (March–October 2007), this article outlines and historicizes the complex and altering landscape of discursive constructions of the Palestinian refugee presence in Lebanon. Examining some of the more prominent discursive strands that emerge in relation to Palestinian refugee presence in Lebanon, the article argues that although the recent problematization of Hezbollah initially dwarfed the Palestinian “problem,” Palestinian presence in Lebanon was quickly reproblematized in the context of the protracted struggle over Nahr al-Bared and the increasing instability in and around Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp. Yet while past discursive strands have reemerged, a discursive shift is also apparent, tending in the direction of the establishment of a more conciliatory relationship between Palestinian refugees and the Lebanese state and the latter’s interest in a partial regularization of Palestinian refugee presence.

Omar Ghannoum: an irresistible force for change

Omar Ghannoum: an irresistible force for change

Constructing Security Council Resolution 1701 for Lebanon in the Shadow of the ‘War on Terror’

This article argues that the ‘war on terror’ gave global meaning to the 2006 Israel–Lebanon war and to the construction of UN Security Council resolution 1701 that authorized the deployment of robust UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon (UNIFIL). It uses a critical, discursive approach to argue that UN resolutions have embedded in them a particular, powerful discourse, in this case the ‘war on terror’. This discourse grounded a global struggle for and against US domination of the region in a local power dispute in Lebanon between 2004 and 2008. It concludes that Israel's failure to defeat Hizbullah militarily resulted in resolution 1701 comprising two contradictory narratives that represented the battle for and against US domination, and that the subsequent battle for hegemonic articulation of this resolution weakened, rather than strengthened the Lebanese state during 2006–08, plunging Lebanon into internal strife until the signing of a national peace accord in Doha in May 2008.

Archaeology and the Post-war Reconstruction of Beirut

During Lebanon's terrible civil war Beirut was partitioned by the Green Line, which separated West from East and cut through the heart of the historic city centre. The reunification of Beirut and revival of the town centre were urgent priorities in post-war reconstruction, and archaeologists became closely involved the reconstruction process. Divisions and arguments attended every stage of the post-war rebuilding, and heritage issues were hotly contested, driving the archaeologists involved into opposing camps. This paper attempts to explain why this happened, and reviews some of the successes and failures of the post-war rebuilding efforts. The reconstruction programme relied heavily on private sector funding, and the institutions of the Lebanese state were left marginalised and under-resourced. Public debate convinced the developers to make greater use of the historic and archaeological landscape, although questions can be raised about the way in which this exercise was taken forward. The archaeological excavations themselves, and the wider public debate over heritage values in the revived city centre, played an important part in the rehabilitation of Beirut.

Between authenticity and alienation: The Druzes and Lebanon's history

AbstractAlmost ninety years have passed since the establishment of the Lebanese state, but it still lacks a consensual and unifying historical narrative. The Druzes of Lebanon, who claim to be the real founders of the historical Lebanese entity, reject the Lebanese historiography elaborated by Christian historians as ideologically motivated, sectarian and fabricated. Furthermore, they claim that their contribution to Lebanon's history has been systematically minimized. The Druze leader, Kamāl Junblāṭ, was the first to raise public awareness of the importance of rewriting Lebanon's history, and the process of doing so has gained momentum among Druze intellectuals since the 1980s. This article discusses the efforts of the Druze intelligentsia to cultivate a historical narrative that presents an alternative to what they call the “Maronite narrative”; it focuses predominantly on the Emirate's history during the Middle Ages and the reciprocal relations between the Druze political experience within modern Lebanon and the intellectual formulation of their narrative.