Abstract
To what extent is power-sharing theory, used as one of the key conceptual frameworks for Lebanon’s political system, still relevant for charting a way forward amid the country’s cumulative crises? This article heeds the call to position research on Lebanon’s power-sharing in a pluralist research agenda that speaks to a wider knowledge base and to a broader set of everyday policy problems. This agenda articulates itself around three axes: first, building on interdisciplinary research perspectives; second, looking at post-war Lebanon through multi-level and relational perspectives beyond the focus on power-sharing theory and “deeply divided societies” as focal paradigms for exploring conflict mitigation; and third, feeding into critical policy perspectives that probe people’s everyday struggles.
Lebanon is no stranger to research on power-sharing, which itself is considered a key institutional design for managing conflicts and building post-war societies in general and in Lebanon in particular.1 Nevertheless, at a critical juncture of Lebanon’s history, how can research on power-sharing contribute to rethinking the country’s policy future and prospects for conflict transformation? To what extent is power-sharing theory, used as one of the key conceptual frameworks for Lebanon’s political system,2 still relevant for charting a way forward amid the country’s overlapping political, financial, economic, and humanitarian crises? And how can research on Lebanon’s power-sharing model cut across theoretical and epistemological silos to benefit from an eclectic set of research perspectives?
This collection of papers, based on a workshop convened in June 2022 at Sciences Po in Paris,3 heeds the call to position research on Lebanon’s power-sharing in a pluralist research agenda that speaks to a wider knowledge base and to a broader set of everyday policy problems. We draw on Paul Stern and Daniel Druckman’s general call to adopt “an epistemological strategy of triangulation”4 in conflict-related research. This strategy entails the integration of various perspectives and methods of analysis and calls for the consolidation of dialogue between theory, policy, and practice. Specifically, in the Lebanese case, we call for consolidating the dialogue between power-sharing studies on Lebanon with the wealth of research and critical policy streams that have more broadly shaped Lebanese studies. The central idea is to encourage what Bassel Salloukh frames as “the search for theoretical and practical solutions” for power-sharing in Lebanon.5 We define a pluralist agenda in accordance with three suggested criteria: (1) this agenda draws on interdisciplinary research perspectives borrowed from political economy, peacebuilding, social movements, queer theory, and gender studies, etc. to enrich the debate on policy and governance in Lebanon, (2) it looks at Lebanon’s political system through multi-level and relational perspectives beyond the focus on power-sharing theory and deeply divided societies as focal paradigms for understanding the country’s politics of sectarianism, and (3) it feeds into critical policy perspectives6 by probing the various struggles that ordinary people encounter, from wrestling with electricity blackouts to obsolete legal frameworks. This perspective facilitates a more nuanced understanding of the various policy problems that Lebanon’s power-sharing system entrenches, how they come about and accumulate, and how they differently affect various groups and communities.7
Lebanon’s political system, which divides power between select confessional groups, has been stuck in an impasse for more than a century. The latest concurrent crises exemplify the political regime’s incapacity to “overcome its inherent gridlock.”8 Despite the contestation of the political order expressed in the 2019 October uprising, or Thawra, the political class has deliberately sidelined people’s demands. The financial collapse and the 2020 Beirut port explosion (known as the Infijar) represent the latest morbid symptoms of a decaying politics of sectarianism. Through its machinery of corruption and patronage, this form of politics has entrenched impunity and cannibalized state institutions.9 As some writers have lamented, it turned Lebanon into a site for disasters and necropolitics.10
The call to re-envision politics in Lebanon has stemmed from grassroot, civic, and academic circles.11 In the context of Lebanon’s 2019 episode of contention and its aftermath, popular collectives, emergent political parties, and civil society activists have debated various questions that have inspired this issue: how to extricate Lebanon’s public and private institutions from the grip of what Eugene Rogan calls the “sectarian system of politics”?12 How does this system shape citizens’ everyday needs, such as access to the internet, electricity, and water?13 How are women, the youth, refugees, and migrants differentially impacted by its politics of sectarianism?14 And finally, how can the future of research on Lebanon’s power-sharing model feed into responses to the perceived problems of political sectarianism?
Taking Stock and Looking Forward
Power-sharing has long been seen as the primary response to conflict in plural societies and post-conflict states.15 Broadly put, McEvoy and O’Leary define it as “any set of arrangements that prevent one agent, or organized collective agency, from being the “winner who holds all critical power,” whether temporarily or permanently.”16 Hartzell and Hoddie distinguish different power bases that are amenable to power-sharing arrangements, including political power (e.g. rules for political representation), economic power (e.g. redistribution of economic resources), territorial power (e.g. territorial autonomy), and military power (e.g. integration of security forces, rules for military appointments).17
While power-sharing is a broad term that foresees a variety of methods to regulate conflicts and enhance cooperation, this special issue is specifically concerned with consociationalism as a specific type of power-sharing. Consociational power-sharing is understood as “the practice of sharing and dividing power”18 among groups or segments of society that are defined by certain criteria, such as ethnicity, language, or religious denomination.19 It is generally based on the protection and accommodation of group rights through segmented parties, a division of the positions in government between different groups, proportionate voting, and minority veto.20 Consociations vary in their political design. Corporate consociations such as Lebanon’s predetermine criteria for political participation, thereby institutionalizing group representation. In contrast, liberal consociations such as Northern Ireland’s allow for flexible arrangements in which elections shape who participates in power-sharing cycles.21 Though consociational power-sharing remains an important strategy for preventing conflict recurrence, the model has faced criticism for its mixed record of delivering peace, for its elite-centric focus, and for sidelining ordinary citizens’ political views, daily plights, and aspirations.22
Lebanon’s political power-sharing formula sets out quotas in legislative and executive positions for the country’s eighteen recognized communities, and requires the President to be Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister to be Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of Parliament to be Shi’i Muslim. First informally institutionalized in the 1943 National Pact after independence from the French Mandate, the power-sharing system was reiterated and reformed to bring an end to the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). Nevertheless, Lebanon’s power-sharing formula has a particularly difficult relationship with sustainable peace and governance as it delegates power mostly to ruling incumbents and relegates grassroot and civil society’s role to the political sidelines.23 Such concerns have cast a pall on the prescriptive value of power-sharing as a viable institutional design for post-conflict societies in general and in Lebanon specifically.24
Against this background, literature has explored the potential of multi-level research avenues at the interface of sectarianism and power-sharing in Lebanon.25 Recent academic work aspires to think more broadly of questions at the heart of conflict transformation, peacebuilding, economic development, as well as people’s daily struggles, stimulating a dialogue across research perspectives and illuminating some blind spots in Lebanese studies.26 These debates, however, have developed along manifold thematic streams, and, except for some notable exceptions,27 they do not necessarily engage with political studies that take power-sharing theory as their point of departure.
Indeed, classical political studies on Lebanon have borrowed much from power-sharing theory to analyze Lebanon’s model of sectarian politics.28 Given that Lebanon is one of the key cases grounding Arend Lijphart’s theory on consociationalism, it is understandable that the small polity has received considerable attention in the literature on consociational power-sharing governance.29 This focus has arguably positioned Lebanese studies in a narrow research niche within the broader field of political studies and International Relations (ir) scholarship. Furthermore, it has cast power-sharing studies on Lebanon into a narrow sub-field in mena political science. Moreover, it is important to consider the various ways in which some of the academic literature has constructed Lebanon as an exceptional research site. Notably, some have looked at Lebanon’s sectarian system, which has enshrined some degree of political pluralism amid surrounding autocracies, in a somewhat exceptionalist perspective.30 For instance, Daniel Brumberg treats it as one of the examples of “dissonant politics” in the Middle East.31 While Samuel Huntington describes it as “the only Arab country to sustain a form of democracy […] for a significant period of time.”32 Romanticized depictions of Lebanon as a more liberal and progressive “Switzerland of the Middle East” in Euro-American accounts have further impacted the way we produce knowledge on Lebanon as an exceptional research site in the Middle East.33
Studying Lebanon through the “the prism of sect”34 and through the dominant lens of power-sharing theory has arguably deprived Lebanese studies from the broader multi-level perspectives that ir scholarship has encouraged,35 and from cross-comparative research in a variety of fields from political economy to social movements. It has arguably also prevented it from benefiting from the value of a broader comparative area studies approach that would place Lebanon in conversation with a wider set of polities. Indeed, classifying Lebanon as “a deeply divided society” in which, as Lijphart suggests, policy prognosis can be best understood through the lens of consociational theory, entrenches various deadlocks in research and policy. As Rima Majed asks, what is so deeply divided about divided societies such as Lebanon that justifies their “exceptionality”?36 And how does the focus on Lebanon through “the prism of sect” influence the choice of research methods and case study designs on the Lebanese polity?37
Beyond these remarks, Lebanon by now has significantly departed from the consociational criteria upon which Lijphart grounded his theory.38 Nagle, for example, characterizes Lebanon’s power-sharing system as a form of ossified and dysfunctional “zombie power-sharing.”39 Geha frames the post-war model through the lens of “the politics of exclusion” that consolidates its rule through mechanisms such as informality, impunity and corruption.40 Here, the question arises whether power-sharing theory still holds prescriptive power for Lebanon’s manifold crises.41 Adding to this, some scholars argue that power-sharing studies on Lebanon have focused too much on the role of elites, glossing over the bottom-up, economic, cultural and transnational discourses and practices that shape sectarianism from above and from below.42 However, the call for an epistemological triangulation in power-sharing studies on Lebanon goes beyond these remarks. We aim to place the literature on sectarian power-sharing in conversation with a series of research perspectives and a wider set of interpretive frameworks.
A Vibrant Research Landscape at the Interface between Sectarianism and Power-sharing
In the last decade, research on conflict transformation and politicized identities in the Middle East, and Lebanon in particular, has used an eclectic and multi-level set of interpretive frameworks. What, then, can we learn from this literature and its conceptual and empirical implications for re-situating the specific field of power-sharing studies in Lebanon?
A wealth of scholarship has engaged critically with the ways we think about politics in general and sectarian politics specifically,43 with the latter often being conflated with power-sharing in the context of Lebanon.44 Ghosn and Parkinson argue that the uncritical focus on sect and sectarianism “as the primary explanatory factor in Levantine politics”45 and in Lebanon has neglected consideration of other forms of identification such as geographic origins, class, and party affiliation. Research on the politics of sectarianism has debunked both primordialist accounts that posit sectarian divisions as age-old drivers of conflict as well as purely instrumental narratives.46 Instead, it has underscored various ways in which sectarian identity and politics are historically, socially, and psychologically performed.47 Scholars have shifted the gaze to the concept of “sectarianization” as a constructed process, reflecting the agency of actors in producing and politicizing sectarian divisions.48 Others have called for intersectional analyses of sectarian and gendered power, highlighting the production of mutually constitutive sectarian and sexual difference.49 Moreover, recent scholarship has focused on the territoriality of sectarianism and its spatial reproduction and contestation.50
A critical strand of literature has engaged with the concepts of sectarianism and “deeply divided societies,” considered as key nomenclatures for understanding power-sharing in Lebanon. Authors like Morten Valbjørn ask “what (if anything) is ‘so sectarian about sectarian politics’?”51 While some have called for the abandonment of the concept of sectarianism given its politicized connotation and lack of conceptual clarity,52 others recognize that the concept remains relevant to understand how it articulates itself through top-down, political, and institutionalized forms as well as in the lived experiences of people’s social realities.53
To understand its forms and implications, recent research has proposed new entry points to studying the politics of sectarianism. Deeb, Nalbantian, and Sbaiti propose understanding “sectarianism as simultaneously constructed and experienced, as imagined yet materially impactful.”54 They view sectarianism “as a set of practices”55 that are lived and mobilized on an everyday basis. As a result, sectarian identity is at times performed as “the primary and acceptable polarizing form of difference,”56 often standing in for other forms of social difference, such as perceptions of social status and hierarchy.
Moreover, recent scholarship has juxtaposed Lebanon’s sectarian power-sharing model with a variety of perspectives that propose a rereading of how Lebanon’s politics of sectarian power-sharing is reproduced, and how it interacts with a wider set of phenomena. Majed highlights the role of neoliberal capitalism in creating sectarianized divisions in society and in upholding a system that maintains the interests of an oligarchic sectarian elite through clientelist networks.57 Mazzucotelli analyzes the political economy of sectarianism and the reproduction of sectarian clientelism in the context of Lebanon’s economic meltdown.58 Baumann argues that Lebanon’s post-2019 financial meltdown cannot be understood without reference to Lebanon’s role in the regional and global economy, particularly its dependence on rent creation.59 On the other hand, Salloukh takes a historical and postcolonial perspective to understand how sectarian power-sharing is the result of critical junctures in Lebanon’s state formation rather than an inevitable outcome of its plural society.60 Halawi looks specifically at how consociationalism inhibits the emergence of revolutionary class politics.61 Moussawi, Nagle, and Fakhoury account for how queer social movements shape and contest power-sharing as political forces in their own right.62
Finally, new research has emerged in response to Lebanon’s most recent cycle of political and economic crises. Once framed as impermeable to the so-called Arab Spring, the 2019 Thawra sparked a wealth of research on the nexus between sectarian power-sharing and contentious politics. Recent work has focused on the Thawra as a research site for understanding the plight of various social groups and movements such as women, the lgbtq+ and disabled communities, labor and student movements, refugees, and migrant workers.63 Scholars have placed the Thawra in the context of earlier episodes of contentious politics in Lebanon and in the context of wider regional “revolutionary moments”64 since 2011.
What implications do these streams of research have for power-sharing studies on Lebanon? First, such approaches forge valuable interdisciplinary encounters with the debate on power-sharing theory and its applicability to Lebanon. Second, recent works that chart the historical trajectory of sectarianism and its contemporary manifestations reflect a growing consensus that sectarian power-sharing is neither unchanging nor inevitable. Such findings cast a shadow on the conflation of sectarianism and power-sharing often taken for granted when we consider Lebanon’s future political options. They also enable a more nuanced understanding of how sectarianism and power-sharing interact dynamically with phenomena ranging from world capitalism, the political economy of precarity, to everyday grassroot struggles. As such, these streams resonate with broader scholarship that sees power-sharing as transformative, capable of embracing new forms and designs.65
Finally, by placing Lebanon’s power-sharing system in conversation with a variety of research perspectives, these approaches move Lebanese studies beyond specific disciplinary and epistemological silos, prompting us to engage in new ways of thinking about Lebanon’s power-sharing system.
Nuancing and Pluralizing the Study of Sectarian Power-sharing
Building on this wealth of research streams, five contributions seek to nuance and pluralize research on Lebanon’s politics of power-sharing. Setting the theoretical groundwork, Allison McCulloch explores how consociationalism’s causal logic has undergone a full reversal in Lebanon, entrenching a vicious cycle of immobilism, intransigence, and institutional collapse. She reflects on what power-sharing theory can learn from Lebanon’s consociational legacy and argues that “if consociationalism is to remain a form of political prescription,” it must learn from “local scholarship” and empirical insights “from beyond the theory.” In her contribution, Clothilde Facon juxtaposes Lebanon’s politics of sectarianism with a broader reading of its political economy of aid. She looks at the role of sectarian elites and foreign aid in perpetuating sectarian power-sharing both as an economic and a political order. Building on the case of the 2020 Beirut port explosion, Alessandra Thomsen makes a case for understanding Lebanon’s power-sharing system through a complex set of recurrent policy pitfalls ranging from impunity to unaccountable governance, and political elites’ disconnection from ordinary citizens’ demands. In his contribution, John Nagle places consociational power-sharing in conversation with the literature on contentious politics, social movements, and participatory citizenship. Bringing the Lebanese Thawra into dialogue with Bosnia’s Plenum movement (2014) and Iraq’s Tishreen mobilization (2019), he illustrates how protestors crafted injustice frames and bottom-up democratic performances that positioned the uprisings as sites for contesting power-sharing systems. In so doing, the article calls for consolidating a research agenda on protest and power-sharing that allows for cross-comparison and for a deeper understanding of how different power-sharing systems produce varying political opportunity structures that shape protest movements’ outcomes. Finally, Miriam Aitken stretches the analytical boundaries of Lebanon’s power-sharing system beyond the lens of the nation-state. She examines Lebanon’s diasporic involvement in the 2019 Thawra, placing power-sharing in dialogue with transnational citizenship studies. In so doing, she shows how diaspora-related forms of contentious politics expand the concept of politics and citizenship beyond and outside the boundaries of the Lebanese sectarian and territorial state.
Building on these various perspectives, this collection of papers makes several contributions. Methodologically, it seeks to de-exceptionalize research on Lebanon by strengthening the dialogue between research on its power-sharing model with various interpretive frameworks and levels of analysis. Contributions look at Lebanon’s power-sharing through complementary conceptual and analytical lenses, including research on policymaking and governance (Thomsen), contentious politics (Nagle), political economy (Facon), and Critical citizenship studies (Aitken). Articles further highlight how insights from Lebanon’s power-sharing can inform regional and international contexts from various perspectives such as understanding power-sharing’s tradeoffs between democracy and conflict mitigation (Thomsen), understanding variations and similarities in social mobilization against power-sharing systems (Nagle), and reflecting on policy interactions between identity-based power-sharing and foreign aid (Facon). Empirically, the issue comes at a crucial juncture of Lebanon’s history, providing a nuanced understanding of the country’s concurrent crises and their impact on peoples’ everyday lives (Facon, Thomsen, and Aitken). Conceptually, most contributions stress how Lebanon’s experience of power-sharing, though shaped by a unique set of circumstances, offers important lessons, and produces critical questions for the theory of power-sharing. Articles stress the need for a stronger dialogue between empirical cases and consociational theory (McCulloch, Thomsen, and Nagle). They also echo broader literature that cautions against power-sharing as political prescription (McCulloch).66 At the same time, this collection of articles explores alternative conceptual lenses through which to analyze power-sharing. Transnational migration politics (Aitken), disaster governance (Thomsen), political opportunity structures in social movement theory (Nagle), and the political economy of donor aid (Facon) are some of the prisms we can use to place power-sharing theory in a conversation with broader perspectives in comparative politics, peace, and conflict studies.
To sum up, these contributions do not discount power-sharing as a valuable framework for understanding policy and conflict transformation in Lebanon. Rather they seek to foster conversations across research perspectives. By engaging Lebanon’s power-sharing system with interpretive frameworks on policy and governance, the politics of foreign aid, social movements, and participatory citizenship beyond the confines of the nation-state, they contribute to de-exceptionalizing Lebanese studies as a site of enquiry for “deeply divided societies.” In so doing, they build on the wider call to understand power-sharing beyond conflict mitigation, placing it in conversation with key themes at the heart of post-conflict peacebuilding: dilemmas of democratization, inclusive governance, social mobilization, and everyday politics.67
Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Nils A. Butenschon, “Conflict Management in Plural Societies: The Consociational Democracy Formula,” Scandinavian Political Studies 8 (1985): 85–103; Hans Daalder, “The Consociational Democracy Theme,” World Politics 26 (1974): 604–621.
Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies; Michael Hudson, “The Lebanese Crisis: The Limits of Consociational Democracy,” Journal of Palestine Studies 5 (1976): 109–122; Brenda Seaver, “The Regional Sources of Power-Sharing Failure: The Case of Lebanon,” Political Science Quarterly 115 (2000): 247–271; Joseph Jabbra and Nancy Jabbra, “Consociational Democracy in Lebanon: A Flawed System of Governance,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2001): 71–89.
The work for this collection and its call for a multi-level research agenda in power-sharing builds on Tamirace Fakhoury’s research project as the visiting Kuwait Chair at Sciences Po in Paris (2020–2022). Miriam Aitken has contributed with the literature review on power-sharing and the state of the art in Lebanese studies and with co-organizing the workshop. See Sciences Po Kuwait Program, “Revisiting the Politics of Sectarianism Amidst Lebanon’s Concomitant Crises,” kfas All-day Roundtable Event, June 30th, 2022, https://www.sciencespo.fr/kuwait-program/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/kfas-lebanon-roundtable-roundtable-summary-booklet-june-2022.pdf. Acknowledgements go to Sciences Po for funding the workshop and the workshop’s participants for their input.
Paul C. Stern and Daniel Druckman, “Evaluating Interventions in History: The Case of International Conflict Resolution,” International Studies Review 2, no.1 (2002): 63.
Bassel F. Salloukh, “The State of Consociationalism in Lebanon,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 30, no.1 (2024): 8–27; Claudia Ditel, “Beyond Lebanon’s Power-Sharing,” Contemporary Arab Affairs 15, no.1 (2022): 6–18.
Olena Hankivsky et al., “An Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis Framework: Critical Reflections on Methodology for Advancing Equity,” International Journal for Equity in Health 13, no.119 (2014): 1–16.
Ghassan Moussawi, Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020).
The Editorial Board, “Opinion: Could the Beirut Explosion Be a Turning Point for Lebanon?” The New York Times, August 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/opinion/lebanon-corruption-beirut-explosion.html.
Jamil Mouawad, “Lebanon the Weak, Cannibalized State Whose Citizens still Hope,” Professors at Work, May 1, 2022, https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/professors-at-work/id1555137368.
Francisco S. Barroso Cortés and Joseph A. Kéchichian, “Authoritarianism and Necropolitics in Lebanon: How Corrupt Elites Destroyed Their Treasured Democracy,” Middle East Institute (2020); Zahra Hankir, “Exodus,” Guernica, March 31, 2021, https://www.guernicamag.com/exodus/.
Jeffrey G. Karam and Rima Majed, eds., The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2023); Hani Adada, “The Space Between State Violence and Revolutionary Violence,” The Public Source, February 18, 2020, https://thepublicsource.org/state-violence-revolutionary-violence.
Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 456.
Eric Verdeil, “Infrastructure Crises in Beirut and the Struggle to (Not) Reform the Lebanese State,” Arab Studies Journal 16, no.1 (2018): 84–113.
Ghassan Moussawi, Disruptive Situations.
Allison McCulloch and Joanne McEvoy, “Understanding Power-Sharing Performance: A Lifecycle Approach,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 2 (2020): 109.
Joanne McEvoy and Brendan O’Leary (eds.), Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
Caroline A. Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie, Crafting Peace: Power-Sharing Institutions and the Negotiated Settlement of Civil Wars (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2015).
Tamirace Fakhoury, “Debating Lebanon’s Power-Sharing Model: An Opportunity of an Impasse for Democratization Studies in the Middle East?” Arab Studies Journal 22, no.1 (2014): 230–255.
Krzysztof Trzciński, “Consociationalism Meets Centripetalism: Hybrid Power-Sharing,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 28, no. 3 (2022): 313–331.
It is worth noting that scholars have explored other types of power-sharing such as centripetalism, which promotes the integration of group interests through inter-segmental parties or territorial vote-distribution requirements, etc. See Trzciński, “Consociationalism Meets Centripetalism.”
John Nagle and Tamirace Fakhoury, “Between Co-Option and Radical Opposition: A Comparative Analysis of Power-Sharing on Gender Equality and lgbtq rights in Northern Ireland and Lebanon,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 24, no.1 (2018): 82–99.
Salloukh, “Consociational Power-Sharing in the Arab World,” 100–108.
Amal Khoury and Faten Ghosn, “Bridging Elite and Grassroots Initiatives: The Road to Sustainable Peace in Syria,” in Post-Conflict Power-Sharing Agreements, eds. I. Salamey et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Conway Henderson, “Comment: Consociational Democracy and the Case of Switzerland,” Journal of Politics 43 (1981): 1232–1235; Salloukh, “Consociational Power-Sharing in the Arab World.”
Salloukh, “Consociational Power-Sharing in the Arab World”; Tamirace Fakhoury, “Debating Lebanon’s Power-Sharing Model: An Opportunity of an Impasse for Democratization Studies in the Middle East?” Arab Studies Journal 22, no.1 (2014): 230–255; Faten Ghosn and Sarah E. Parkinson, “‘Finding’ Sectarianism and Strife in Lebanon,” ps: Political Science and Politics 52, no. 3 (2019): 494.
Ditel, “Beyond Lebanon’s Power-Sharing,”6–18; Lara W. Khattab, “The genealogy of social and political mobilization in Lebanon under a neoliberal sectarian regime (2009–2019),” Globalizations (2022): 1–18; Anne Kirstine Rønn, “The Development and Negotiation of Frames During Non-sectarian Mobilizations in Lebanon,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 18, no.1 (2020): 87–96.
Salloukh, “The State of Consociationalism in Lebanon.”
R.H. Dekmejian, “Consociational Democracy in Crisis: The Case of Lebanon,” Comparative Politics 10, no.2 (1978): 251–265; Hudson, “The Lebanese Crisis”; Jabbra and Jabbra, “Consociational Democracy in Lebanon.”
Seaver, “The Regional Sources of Power-Sharing Failure.”
Iliya Harik, “Pluralism in the Arab World,” Journal of Democracy 5 (1994): 51; Samuel Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,” Journal of Democracy 2 (1991): 28.
Daniel Brumberg, “Democratization in the Arab World? The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 4 (2002): 56–68.
Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,” 28.
Moussawi, Disruptive Situations.
Ghosn and Parkinson, “‘Finding’ Sectarianism and Strife in Lebanon,” 494.
Amrita Narlikar, “‘Because They Matter’: Recognise Diversity – Globalise Research,” giga Focus Global 1 (2016): https://www.giga-hamburg.de/assets/pure/24348529/gf_global_1601_en.pdf.
Rima Majed, “What is So Deep About ‘Deeply Divided Societies’?” Centre for Lebanese Studies (2019), https://www.lebanesestudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/What-is-So-Deep-About-%E2%80%98Deeply-Divided-Societies%E2%80%99.pdf.
On case study designs and how the choice of case study selection influences research, see Jack Levy, “Case Studies: Types, Designs, and Logics of Inference,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 25, no.1 (2008).
Fakhoury, “Debating Lebanon’s Power-Sharing Model”; Stephan Rosiny, “A Quarter Century of ‘Transitory Power-Sharing’. Lebanon’s Unfulfilled Ta’if Agreement of 1989 Revisited,” Civil Wars 17, no. 4 (2015): 485–50.
John Nagle, “Consociationalism is Dead! Long Live Zombie Power-Sharing!” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 2 (2020): 137.
Carmen Geha, “From Revolt to Community-driven Resistance: Beirut’s Year of Hell,” Istituto Affari Interanzionali (2021): 1–22, https://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/revolt-community-driven-resistance-beiruts-year-hell.
See Fakhoury, “Debating Lebanon’s Power-Sharing Model,” and McCulloch in this collection.
Hannes Baumann, “Bringing the State and Political Economy Back in: Consociationalism and Crisis in Lebanon,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 30, no. 1 (2024): 85–102.
Morten Valbjørn, “Observing (ehe Debate on) Sectarianism: On Conceptualizing, Grasping and Explaining Sectarian Politics in a New Middle East,” Mediterranean Politics 16, no.5 (2021): 612–634.
Tamirace Fakhoury, “Debating Lebanon’s Power-Sharing Model.”
Ghosn and Parkinson, “‘Finding’ Sectarianism and Strife in Lebanon.”
May Darwich and Tamirace Fakhoury, “Casting the Other as an Existential Threat: The Securitisation of Sectarianism in the International Relations of the Syria Crisis,” Global Discourse 6, no.4 (2016): 712–732.
Valbjørn, “Observing (the Debate on) Sectarianism.”
Rima Majed, “In Defense of Intra-Sectarian Divide: Street Mobilization, Coalition Formation, and Rapid Realignment of Sectarian Boundaries in Lebanon,” Social Forces 99, no. 4 (2021): 1772–1798.
Maya Mikdashi, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022).
Mona Harb et al., “Mapping Covid-19 Governance in Lebanon: Territories of Sectarianism and Solidarity,” Middle East Law and Governance 14, no. 1 (2022): 81–100.
Valbjørn, “Observing the debate on sectarianism,” 617.
Fanar Haddad, “‘Sectarianism’ and its Discontents in the Study of the Middle East,” Middle East Journal 71, no. 3 (2017): 365–382.
See, for example, Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, and Nadya Sbaiti (eds.), Practicing Sectarianism: Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023); Lara Deeb, “Beyond Sectarianism: Intermarriage and Social Difference in Lebanon,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52 (2020): 215–228.
Deeb, Nalbantian, and Sbaiti, Practicing Sectarianism, 3.
Ibid, 2.
Deeb, “Beyond Sectarianism,” 227.
Rima Majed, “‘Sectarian Neoliberalism’ and the 2019 Uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq,” in The Lebanon Uprising of 2019, eds. Jeffrey G. Karam and Rima Majed (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 76–88.
Francesco Mazzucotelli, “Fragments of Lebanon: Sectarianism and the Financial Crisis,” Il Politico 1 (2020): 24–42.
Hannes Baumann, “The Causes, Nature, and Effect of the Current Crisis of Lebanese Capitalism,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no.1 (2019): 61.
Salloukh, “The State of Consociationalism in Lebanon.”
Ibrahim Halawi, “Consociational Power-Sharing in the Arab World as Counter-Revolution,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 2 (2020): 128.
See, for example, Moussawi, Disruptive Situations; John Nagle and Tamirace Fakhoury, Resisting Sectarianism: Queer Activism in Postwar Lebanon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021).
See various contributions in Karam and Majed (eds.), The Lebanon Uprising of 2019.
Karam and Majed, The Lebanon Uprising of 2019, 3. See also Khattab, “The Genealogy of Social and Political Mobilization”; Rima Majed, “Understanding the October Uprisings in Iraq and Lebanon,” Global Dialogue, June 26th, 2020, https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/articles/understanding-the-october-uprisings-in-iraq-and-lebanon; Ibrahim Halawi and Bassel F. Salloukh, “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will after the 17 October Protests in Lebanon,” Middle East Law and Governance 12, no. 3 (2020): 322–334.
Christine Bell, “Political Power-Sharing and Inclusion: Peace and Transition Processes,” pa-X Report: Power-Sharing Series (2018).
Matthjis Bogaards, “The Uneasy Relationship between Empirical and Normative Types in Consociational Democracy,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 12 (2000): 395–423; Sue M. Halpern, “The Disorderly Universe of Consociational Democracy,” West European Politics 9 (1986): 181–197.
Arnim Langer, Graham K. Brown, and Hanne Albers, “Introduction: Timing and Sequencing of Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Peacebuilding,” in Building Sustainable Peace: Timing and Sequencing of Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Peacebuilding, eds. Arnim Langer and Graham K. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Anne K. Jarstand and Timothy D. Sisk (eds.), From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of Peacebuilding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 108–9; John Nagle, “Beyond ethnic entrenchment and amelioration: an analysis of non-sectarian social movements and Lebanon’s consociationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no.7 (2018): 1370–1389; Dylan O’Driscoll and Irene Constantini, “Conflict Mitigation versus Governance: The Case of Consociation in Iraq,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 30, no. 1 (2024): 65–84.