Abstract
This article places the Thawra within recent waves of protest politics in so-called divided societies, particularly the Plenum (Bosnia 2014) and Tishreen (Iraq 2019) protests. It examines the thematic connections between protest waves in relation to contesting consociational power-sharing governance, which has been deployed in Lebanon, Iraq, and Bosnia in the aftermath of civil war or political violence. While protests have addressed a range of issues – corruption, weak and failing public services, and rising unemployment levels – these various strands have been successfully distilled into powerful critiques of the ethnosectarian elites who perpetuate polarization and of the system itself. Towards this, I identify three significant frames developed by protestors in relation to power-sharing: The “People” versus the “Elites”, Trans-sectarian Belonging, and Participatory Citizenship.
Introduction
In October 2019, Lebanon’s Thawra brought millions to the streets of Lebanon in the space of a few days.1 The Thawra is recognized for its “unprecedented cross-class, cross-region, and cross-sectarian”2 character in Lebanon’s recent history. The protests amplified voices and actors marginalized in political life, including feminists, lgbtq+, communists, anti-sectarian movements, and domestic workers. While the protests were initially triggered in response to regressive taxes implemented by the power-sharing government, demonstrators voiced demands for public services, jobs, and human rights as well as an end to corruption and political violence.
Yet, despite these seemingly discrete set of issues, protest actors have distilled these issues into powerful narratives and practices that attribute blame on the political system and its elites. In particular, protest activists have identified power-sharing and ethnosectarian elites as the main focus for oppositional and transformatory politics. This opposition to power-sharing and its elites could be clearly heard in the chants and slogans deployed by protestors, notably “The people want the downfall of the sectarian regime” and “all of you means all of you,” epitomizing the rejection of the entire sectarian political class.3 Rather than the aspiration of a small group of middle-class radicals, survey evidence illuminates the extent to which Lebanon’s population deeply distrust Lebanon’s sectarian elites and a desire to dismantle the power-sharing system.4
The Thawra’s protest against power-sharing echoes recent waves of contentious politics in other so-called “deeply divided societies,” places where power-sharing has been enforced as an instrument designed to end political violence. Most notably, in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Plenum (2014) and Iraq’s Tishreen (2019-) protests, millions of citizens took to the streets and called for jobs, human rights, and public goods. Yet, similar to the Thawra, these calls were couched in broader claims to challenge and even transform existing power-sharing structures. In Iraq, protestors chanted “No to political sectarianism,” a reference to the consociational system, while Bosnia’s protest represented a “public denial of ethno-nationalism.”5
While not dismissing the very specific factors underlying the Thawra, I place it within recent waves of protest against power-sharing. My argument is not that protest actors are connected through networks or engage in disseminating master frameworks between activists; my purpose is to show that power-sharing has increasingly been subject to democracy from below through contentious politics, which has generated common themes and practices in relation to protest in Lebanon, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Iraq. Thus, situating the Thawra within the context of protests against power-sharing provides us with a broader lens for analysis, opening up scope to view it as part of a trend of dissatisfaction with power-sharing and distrust of power-sharing elites. This article thus contributes to this Special Issue’s call for new analytical lenses that allow us to understand politicized sectarian identities in Lebanon, including the role that protest movements contribute to fostering forms of contestation from below and in articulating new modes of political agency.
Power-Sharing on the March
Lebanon’s Ta’if (1989), Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Dayton agreement (1995), and Iraq’s Constitution (2005) form part of a trend of peace pacts and constitutions designed to implement power-sharing governance. Scholars have identified these power-sharing forms as specifically consociational. For advocates, “consociational institutions offer a viable strategy to build peace, states, and democracy.”6 For this reason, there is “a growing trend among constitutional designers – national and international – to support consociational settlements.”7 Broadly, in consociational systems, “political parties are based foremost on ethnic interests; that ethnic quotas determine the allocation of key posts, and that state institutions, especially in education and the security sector, are segmented by ethnic group.”8
Although power-sharing arrangements in Lebanon, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Iraq are not identical, they are notably beset by several shared problems: growing sectarian polarization, dysfunctional institutions and weak public services, corruption and clientelism, and poor human rights in relation to gender equality and lgbtq+ populations.9 These states are also marked by increasing democratic backsliding and a move towards semi-authoritarianism in recent years. Lebanon, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Iraq continue to have low female representation in parliament, exclude lgbtq+ populations,10 and, in the case Bosnia and Herzegovina, prohibit citizens who do not identify as members of the country’s Bosniak, Serb, or Croat “constitutive peoples” from the presidency and membership in the House of Peoples, despite rulings by the European Court of Human Rights that the exclusion of members of other ethnic groups violated the European Convention on Human Rights.11 Survey data from Bosnia, Iraq, and Lebanon further illuminate growing levels of citizen disaffection, distrust, and anger with their respective ethnic elites and the political system.
Dissent has been expressed and has built momentum through waves of citizen protest in the three countries. The early waves of protest in Lebanon, notably, have mostly focused on poor quality public services as a consequence of dysfunctional and corrupt governance. In 2015, a protest called “You Stink” brought an estimated 100,000 people to the streets of Beirut after hundreds of thousands of tons of decaying garbage collected on the streets. The protests began as a consequence of Lebanon’s power-sharing government, stuck in a deadlock, failing to renew the contract to a private company – itself connected to a sectarian party – responsible for trash collection.12 The title of the protest movement – “You Stink” – expressed outrage at a “stinking” system and leadership that needed to be cleaned up. In Iraq, scattered protests occurred across a number of cities in 2011 and 2015 in response to government failures to deliver electricity and water. During these demonstrations, protesters expressed “frustrations with systemic failures based on ethno-sectarian power-sharing.”13 In Bosnia, the Dosta movement and the 2013 “Baby revolution” witnessed a series of demonstrations against corruption and declining public services.14
These precursor waves set the stage for the anti-systemic protests on which I focus. These protests are respectively known as the Plenum (Bosnia and Herzegovina 2014), Tishreen (Iraq 2019-), and Thawra (2019-). These protests began over specific issues and quickly developed into major demonstrations against the power-sharing governments. In Bosnia, protests started in the city of Tuzla in 2014 as workers demonstrated against the privatization of local industry.15 The Thawra protests began in October 2019 after the Lebanese government proposed new taxes during an economic collapse ranked by the World Bank as among the three most severe seen anywhere since the mid-19th century and which left over 50% of the population below the poverty line.16 Iraq’s 2019 Tishreen protests were initiated in response to heavy handed tactics used by the security forces against university graduates engaging in a sit-down demonstration near to the Prime Minister’s office in Baghdad.
The Plenum, Thawra, and Tishreen protests represent the most significant modes of citizen action in states under power-sharing governance, drawing millions to the streets in a short space of time. These protests differed from earlier waves not only in size but in relation to the ensemble of actors that cross-cut sectarian, regional, gender, and generational boundaries on an unprecedented scale. Thus, alongside ordinary citizens, protests featured labor, lgbtq, feminist, and anti-sectarian activist groups. Equally significant is that these waves of protest do not limit their claims to effecting policy reform in terms of public services; they entail a scale shift in framing, from specific policy demands to the meta-issue of democracy.17 These protest movements articulate a desire to transform their respective consociational systems and overthrow the ethnic elites who are perceived as responsible for various crises. The paper now turns to examine shared narratives generated by activists participating in the Thawra, Plenum, and Tishreen protests.
The “People” versus the “Elites”
Power-sharing represents an integrally top-down form of democracy. Elites in consociational systems are accorded the role of representatives and defenders of their respective communities’ interests. While in consociational theory, the respective communal elites are supposed to engage in moderative behavior that sustains peace and stability, since political competition occurs within communal blocs, there is a high risk that elites will deploy rhetoric and symbolic politics to create a polarizing “us” versus “them” sectarian narrative as part of ethnic outbidding strategies in electoral cycles.18 Elites make further claims to act as arbiters for their ethnic constituencies by demanding resources on their behalf. Patronage networks – in which services are provided by communal elites in exchange of votes and loyalty – determine how many citizens gain access to a range of services, from medical care to education, refuse collection, security, and the supply of gas and electricity. In this system, marked by the ongoing retrenchment of the state in terms of distributors of public goods, elites use services as instruments of coercion and treasure, meaning that the most vulnerable members of society are obligated to seek help from leaders.19
Bosnian, Iraqi, and Lebanese protests were notable for foregrounding the voice of the people in contrast to the top-down elitist and ethnicized structure of consociational power-sharing. Protests deliberately targeted ethnic elites as the objects of blame for multiple crises – economic, corruption, ethnic polarization, and weak public services. The specification of blame aids mobilization by identifying “villains,” and such demonization fuels powerful emotions for protest. Protests developed narratives designed to delegitimize the authority of the ethnonational elites. Elites were targeted for overseeing bad governance and for expropriating public resources through corruption.
Protestors in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, and Iraq articulated common themes, labeling elites as “thieves,” “robbers,” and “criminals.” Sectarian elites were compared to cancer, poison, and other toxins, thus providing a metaphor for power-sharing as harmful for the body politic and, indeed, the citizenry’s health. Protestors commonly made a distinction between the civic protestors as a model of peaceful citizenship and the divisive politics of the political leaders now reimagined as warlords: “We are the popular revolution; you are the civil war,” in the case of Lebanon.20 Accordingly, overthrowing the power-sharing elites provided the prognosis. “All of you means all of you” was shouted in Lebanese protests, a call echoed in Bosnia with “Let’s fire all the politicians.” Thus, protests, by focusing anger on ethnic elites, rather than on different ethnic groups, opened up vistas for reframing citizenship as one in which ordinary people do not have to be reliant or beholden on elites who claim to be communal leaders.
Trans-Sectarian Belonging
Underlying the logic of power-sharing is that citizens of a “divided society” primarily belong to ethnic or sect-based groups rather than wider civic or shared national forms. Cross-cutting identities, such as class, gender, and sexuality, or non-sectarian encapsulations are seen as subsidiary to communal group-based allegiances. For Arend Lijphart, the main groups in divided societies are characterized by “a high degree of internal political cohesion.” In this, ‘party and segmental loyalties should coincide’ to ensure that elites provide “adequate articulation of the interests” of their communities.21 The Plenum, Tishreen, and Thawra protests represented both a rejection of homogenously imagined and divisive ethnonationalisms by articulating a cry for trans-sectarian identities and wider civic and national unity. In contrast to the politics of essentialism, ethnic outbidding, and sectarian rhetoric deployed by ethnonationalist parties, protestors emphasized shared forms of belonging and identity. The message of anti-sectarianism was articulated by protestors in the form of the movement itself, which is purposely constructed to be inclusive and non-sectarian.
The Bosnian protests “offered new patterns of civic solidarity beyond the imposed, two decades long pattern of solidarity based on ethnicity.”22 During the Thawra, protestors chanted “we are all in this together” and “they can no longer divide us like they used to.” As Majed and Salman23 note, the sectarian “regime’s politics of division” was “challenged by the uprising’s politics of solidarity.”
Protest movements stressed the possibility of new forms of collective identity – such as class and nation – that transcend particularistic sectarian encapsulations. Class identity, as opposed to ethno-sectarian belonging, as a principle organizing structure of state-society relations was captured in Bosnia with the statement “we are hungry in three languages,” a reference to how austerity and declining living standards effect all citizens regardless of the ethnonational group they belonged to.24 This desire to construct new forms of inclusive political belonging was coherently expressed in Iraq’s protests through the demand for a “civic state where representation is based not on identities but on issues.”25 Tishreen protestors used the slogan “Not Shia, not Sunni, not Christian. We’re all one Iraq” to demonstrate that grievances were collective rather than confined to one ethnonational group. The concept of the nation beyond the confines of sectarian identity was articulated in Iraq with the chants “We want a homeland” and “An Iraqi revolution.”26
Connected to the call for trans-sectarian citizenship in protest is the formation of inclusionary citizenship. Consociational power-sharing rarely provides rights and protections for migrants, women, socialists, and individuals that simply disidentify from ethnic and other forms of sect-based identities.27 Research indicates that consociationalism is particularly associated with gender inequality and the marginalization of lgbtq+ rights. By entrenching conservative ethno-nationalist discourses, power-sharing peace settlements implicitly cement patriarchal values.
The protest waves in Bosnia, Iraq, and Lebanon challenged the exclusionary character of consociational citizenship regimes. Protests were marked by network and alliance building that made connections between several political projects, ranging from gender equality, lgbtq+ rights, disability, labor movements, and demands for protections for domestic workers. Protests thus fostered alliances between groups and issues marginalized and excluded by the power-sharing system. Women played leading roles in organizing protests. Lebanese Thawra protestors stated that the “revolution is a woman” and made connections between toppling sectarianism and patriarchy in their chants.28 In Iraq, where “government institutions are designed to exclude and exploit women and girls,”29 Iraq’s Tishreen foregrounded feminist voices that sought to challenge the “foundation of a corrupt system built on women’s and girls’ exploitation.” Thus, Tishreen was also a “protest against the broader social, political and economic conditions which continue to enable and justify patriarchal violence in the country.”30 The visibility of women in Bosnia’s Plenum was notable in the context of a power-sharing system accused of entrenching patriarchy.
Participatory Citizenship
Protest in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, and Iraq not only advanced critiques of power-sharing; protest actors imagined and performed the democracy that they believed had been denied to them. Consociational pacts are often hammered out by elites under duress, without the pressure of their respective publics. Intergroup bargaining and compromise in the executive branches of government are typically conducted in secret in order to insulate elites from their publics who might be less inclined to support moderation.31
While power-sharing advances a model of democracy that is top down, based on elite level cooperation between ethnonational leaders, Plenum, Thawra, and Tishreen protests made a virtue of bottom-up forms of democratic engagement, which fostered decentralized and leaderless organization, egalitarian and inclusive public spheres, and participatory modes of decision-making. Protest movements are incubators of emerging ideas about democracy in divided societies. Acts of citizenship thus foreground modes of bottom-up democracy and citizen participation and solidarity networks in opposition to a system that marginalizes the political voice of ordinary citizens.
Citizen plenums and protest tents provide models of deliberative democracy and prefigurative politics, where citizens can discuss and even act out citizen futures.32 The Plenum Movement in Bosnia “established self-governed assemblies, and resolved to embed new radically democratic or horizontal forms of governance.”33 Maintaining a nonhierarchical structure, the plenum hosted deliberative debate in which speakers were granted equal time and decisions made on a one-person-one-vote basis. Such displays of direct democracy form prefigurative politics – a political mode of organization in which participants develop new models of “citizenship at odds with the existing one based on the institutionalisation of ethno-national categories.”34 In the plenums, citizens were able to practice the democracy that has been denied to Bosnians by the post-war framework.
Protest movements in Iraq and Lebanon reclaimed key public spaces (Tahir square in Baghdad and Martyr’s square in Beirut), which have given transparency and inclusivity to civic participation. Protest tents in Iraq and Lebanon acted as public spheres where citizens fostered discussion on the “structural problems” of political power. For one Lebanese protestor, the tents allowed for participants to examine “their economic, social and political reality, to understand how their political and sectarian leader is controlling their life.”35 Iraq’s Tishreen protests were purposely leaderless and the protest tents were notable for encouraging inclusion and diversity rather than reproduce hierarchies and exclusionary boundaries. The tents provided a forum to discuss issues related to gender equality and feminism that were effectively blocked in the national parliament. As Al-Hassani noted in the protest tents: “feminist agendas are common, tackling women’s rights issues and challenging the misogynistic status quo.”36
The System Strikes Back
As we have seen, protest waves in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, and Iraq have sought to contest the framework of consociationalism by building new alliances and inclusive identities and by foregrounding alternative modes of democratic citizenship and participation. These protests, by drawing in mass citizen participation, have effected significant reforms and changes, including forcing the resignation of prime ministers (Lebanon and Iraq) and local councils (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and electoral reform (Iraq). Realizing that the long-term transformation of consociational arrangements may require efforts to mobilize within the system, activists in the three states debate the merits of pursuing electoral politics as hybrid protest parties – simultaneously participating in protest campaigns and electoral arenas – especially given the risks of being co-opted. The Plenum protest movement rejected formal electoral politics. For Lebanon’s 2022 national power-sharing election, the Thawra list won 13 seats, comprising more than 10 per cent of representatives in the parliament, while Tishreen activists secured nine of the 329 seats in the Iraqi Council of Representatives in 2021.37
While recognizing these impacts, the complete transformation of consociationalism hoped for by many leading activists did not occur. This situation can be ascribed to two factors: (1) the panoply of coercive devices by elites designed to violently shut down protest, and (2) the organization capacity of protests. On the first point, by securitizing non-sectarian movements as a threat to peace and stability, ethnonational factions routinely used counter-protest violence through state forces and paramilitaries. Iraq’s government forces and militias allied to ethnonational factions were responsible for killing up to 1000 protestors and carrying forced abductions and disappearances of prominent activists.38 Bosnian protestors encountered active intimidation and brutality at the hands of the political parties and authorities.39 The security forces and militia groups attacked peaceful protestors in Beirut. Loyalists connected to a political party set fire to protest tents and, on one occasion, 54 people were injured after security forces used rubber bullets and tear gas during a protest. On the second point, the focus of activism on decentralized and horizontal movement building in the three protests acted to restrict the capacity of protest networks to form coherent political platforms to challenge the dominant ethnonational parties. These issues illuminate the immense structural and agential barriers non-sectarian movements confront when seeking to bring about meaningful change of consociational systems.
Conclusion
Lebanon’s Thawra brought together wide swathes of the population, including lgbtq+, feminists, workers, anti-racist, and anti-sectarian movements. While the protests achieved several significant successes, the coercive apparatus of the sectarian power-sharing system has been utilized by Lebanon’s political elites to repress activism. To understand the causes and dynamics of the Thawra requires an excavation of Lebanon’s post-war power-sharing system and its systematic failures: sectarian polarization, dysfunctional governance, grand corruption, poor public services, and poor human rights.40 Yet, while the local specificities of the Thawra are important, the protests should also be understood as a component of a wave of citizen protest in places where power-sharing is applied. As this article illuminates, citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Plenum (2014) and Iraq’s (2019-) Tishreen protests have engaged in contentious politics that challenge the hegemony of power-sharing politics and its elites. Protest waves in Lebanon, Iraq, and Bosnia and Herzegovina share similar repertoires of contentions, frames, and mobilizing tactics in relation to protesting power-sharing. Protests are also similar in terms of imagining and performing new forms of inclusive citizenship.
Power-sharing, by its nature as a top-down, elite driven form of democracy, has long been wary of the voice of citizens beyond the confines of electoral politics. Direct democracy and mass participation is thus viewed as problematic to consociationalism. As Bogaards summarizes, “popular participation in politics is perceived as a potential threat to the fragile power-sharing arrangements that make democracy possible and guard social peace in an ethno-plural society.”41 Yet, social movement scholars have illuminated the various and significant forms through which protest movements have shaped the inception and organization of democratic innovations, ranging from generating new policies, fomenting new ideas about deliberative democracy and political community, and through building protest parties that operate in the electoral arena.42
However, the three waves of protest illuminate the immense structural and agential obstacles that movements confront when seeking to effect political transformation in consociational systems. On the one hand, ethnonationalist elites in Lebanon, Iraq, and Bosnia and Herzegovina deploy coercive practices, especially counter-protest violence, to whittle down the space for protest to operate. They also rhetorically frame non-sectarian protest movements as threats to peace and survival while elites and power-sharing represent the only bastion of stability. On the other hand, the focus on inclusivity and decentralized movement structures in non-sectarian protest, while representing models of democracy and participation in opposition to power-sharing, make it difficult for agreed strategies and plans to emerge.
This article concludes by deepening a research agenda on protest and power-sharing that allows for cross-comparison. Towards developing this agenda, I argue for the necessity of a fruitful conversation between power-sharing and protest scholarship. Three questions for exploration could facilitate this. First, how do macroinstitutional differences between consociational systems in different places generate varying political opportunity structures that enhance or constrict the potential of movement success? A second question relates to the timing of protest in relation to power-sharing. Are protest waves more likely at certain periods of power-sharing? A third avenue concerns the impact that protest has on power-sharing. Protest scholarship illuminates the manifold consequences that protest has on democratization, including policy change and reform, effecting transformations in public opinion, and even through building hybrid protest parties that participate in the electoral arena and win seats in power-sharing parliaments. What factors explain the success or failure of protest in power-sharing systems?
It’s not possible to acquire official estimates of the size of protests, and different figures were offered in the media. See “Ongoing Post on Protests in Beirut/Lebanon,” Jadaliyya, October 18, 2019, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/40115. Arab Barometer data highlights that nearly three in 10 (29 percent) Lebanese citizens report having attended an in-person protest during the Thawra. See “Lebanon Country Report 2021–2022,” Arab Barometer, 2022, https://www.arabbarometer.org/countries/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): 324.
It should be noted that these chants were recycled from earlier waves of protest, particularly the “You Stink” protests of 2015 that erupted in response to the failure of authorities in relation to garbage collection.
Only one-in-ten Lebanese are recorded as favoring the sectarian power-sharing system. See “Lebanon Country Report 2021–2022,” Arab Barometer, 2022, https://www.arabbarometer.org/countries/lebanon.
James Riding, “A new regional geography of a revolution: Bosnia’s plenum movement,” Territory, Politics, Governance 6, no.1 (2018): 20.
Stefan Wolff, “Post-Conflict State Building: The Debate on Institutional Choice,” Third World Quarterly 32, no.10 (2011): 1796.
Allison McCulloch, “Consociational Settlements in Deeply Divided Societies: The Liberal-Corporate Distinction,” Democratization 21, no. 3 (2014): 501.
Lise Morjé Howard, “The Ethnocracy Trap,” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 4 (2012): 155.
Tamirace Fakhoury, “Power-sharing after the Arab Spring? Insights from Lebanon’s Political Transition,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no.1 (2019): 9–26.
In terms of gender, in Lebanon, despite a record 86 women running for office during the 2018 parliament elections, only 6 of the 128 members elected were women, which ranks Lebanon 139th in the world for women’s participation in government. As Geha states the “intersection of formal and informal institutions of power-sharing can create insurmountable obstacles to women’s political representation.” See Carmen Geha, “The Myth of Women’s Political Empowerment within Lebanon’s Sectarian Power-Sharing System,” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 40, no. 4 (2019): 498–521. See also John Nagle and Tamirace Fakhoury, Resisting Sectarianism: Queer Activism in Postwar Lebanon (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021); Maria-Adriana Deiana, “To Settle for a Gendered Peace? Spaces for Feminist Grassroots Mobilization in Northern Ireland And Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Citizenship Studies 20, no. 1 (2016): 99–114.
“Freedom in the World 2022: Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Freedom House, https://freedomhouse.org/country/bosnia-and-herzegovina/freedom-world/2022.
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; Carmen Geha, “Politics of a Garbage Crisis: Social Networks, Narratives, and Frames of Lebanon’s 2015 Protests and their Aftermath,” Social Movement Studies 18, no. 1 (2019): 78–92.
Erik K. Gustafson, et al. “The Long Game: Iraq’s “Tishreen” Movement and the Struggle for Reform: Enabling Peace in Iraq Center,” Epic, October 2020, https://enablingpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Tishreen_Report_October_2021.pdf.
Cera Murtagh, “Civic Mobilization in Divided Societies and the Perils of Political Engagement: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Protest and Plenum Movement,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 22, no. 2 (2016): 149–171.
Asim Mujkić, “Bosnian Days of Reckoning: Review of the Sequence of Protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina 2013–14, and Future Prospects of Resistance,” Southeastern Europe 40, no. 2 (2016): 217–242.
Rima Majed and Lana Salman, “Lebanon’s Thawra,” Middle East Report 292, no. 3 (Fall/Winter 2019).
Donatella Della Porta, How Social Movements can Save Democracy: Democratic Innovations from Below (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2020).
John Nagle, “Between Entrenchment, Reform and Transformation: Ethnicity and Lebanon’s Consociational Democracy,” Democratization 23, no. 7 (2016): 1144–1161.
Bassel F. Salloukh, “Taif and the Lebanese state: The Political Economy of a Very Sectarian Public Sector,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no. 1 (2019): 43–60.
Donatella Della Porta and Rossana Tufaro, “Mobilizing the Past in Revolutionary Times: Memory, Counter‐Memory, and Nostalgia During the Lebanese Uprising,” Sociological Forum (2022): 11.
Arend Lijphart, “Consociational Theory: Problems and Prospects. A Reply,” Comparative Politics 13, no. 3 (1981): 356.
Mujkić, “Bosnian days of reckoning,” 230.
Majed and Salman, “Lebanon’s Thawra.”
Larisa Kurtović and Azra Hromadžić, “Cannibal States, Empty Bellies: Protest, History and Political Imagination in Post-Dayton Bosnia,” Critique of Anthropology 37, no. 3 (2017): 280.
Faleh A. Jabar, “The Iraqi Protest Movement: From Identity Politics to Issue Politics,” lse Middle East Centre Paper Series 25 (2018): 7.
“Iraq’s Tishreen Uprising: From Barricades to Ballot Box,” International Crisis Group, July 26, 2021, https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/223-iraqs-tishreen-uprising-barricades-ballot-box.
John Nagle, Social Movements in Violently Divided Societies: Constructing Conflict and Peacebuilding (London: Routledge, 2016), 31.
Nagle and Fakhoury, Resisting Sectarianism.
Ruba Al-Hassani, “The Seeds and Blossoming of Iraq’s October Spring,” Zenith Magazine, October 2020.
Hafsa Halawa, “Iraq’s Tishreen Movement: A Decade of Protests and Mobilisation,” Istituto Affari Internazionali 26 (2021): 1–21.
John Nagle and Mary-Alice Clancy, “Power-Sharing after Civil War: Thirty Years since Lebanon’s Taif Agreement,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no. 1 (2019): 1–8.
Chiara Milan, “Reshaping Citizenship through Collective Action: Performative and Prefigurative Practices in the 2013–2014 Cycle of Contention in Bosnia & Hercegovina,” Europe-Asia Studies 69, no. 9 (2017): 1346–1361.
Riding, “A new regional geography,” 19.
Milan, “Reshaping citizenship,” 1346.
“In Protest-Hit Lebanon, Debate Tents Draw in the Street,” Asharq Al-Awsat, December 3, 2019, https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2019136/protest-hit-lebanon-debate-tents-draw-street.
Al-Hassani, “The Seeds and Blossoming.”
“Iraq’s Tishreen Uprising: From Barricades to Ballot Box,” International Crisis Group.
Erik K. Gustafson, et al., “The Long Game.”
Kurtović and Hromadžić, “Cannibal states.”
See Fakhoury and Aitken in this collection.
Matthijs Bogaards, “Democracy and Power-Sharing in Multinational States: Thematic Introduction,” International Journal on Multicultural Societies 8, no. 2 (2006): 120.
Della Porta, How Social Movements can Save Democracy.
