The Government and Politics of Lebanon

The Government and Politics of Lebanon
Author: Imad Salamey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135011338

Aiming to contribute to the reader’s greater understanding of Lebanese government and politics, this book provides a comprehensive examination of the origin, development, and institutionalization of sectarian consociationalism in Lebanon. A recurrent proposition advanced in this book is that Lebanese sectarian consociationalism has been both a cure and a curse in the formulation of political settlements and institution building. On the one hand, and in contrast to many surrounding Arab regimes, consociational arrangements have provided the country with a relative democratic political life. A limited government with a strong confessional division of power and a built-in checks and balance mechanism prevented the emergence of dictatorship or monarchy. On the other hand, a chronic weak state has complicated efforts for nation building in favour of sectarian fragmentation, external interventions, and strong polarization that periodically brought the country to the verge of total collapse and civil war. While examining Lebanese sectarian politics of conflict and concession during different historic junctures many revelations are made that underlie the role of domestic and international forces shaping the country’s future. Presenting an implicit description of the power and functions of the various branches of government within the context of sectarian consociationalism, this book is an important introductory text for students of Lebanese Politics and Middle Eastern politics more broadly.

Lebanese Political Parties

Lebanese Political Parties
Author: Christian Thuselt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2021-05-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000390209

This book examines Lebanese political parties and their encounters with modernity. Taking three, mainly Christian parties as an example, the book refutes the idea of Middle Eastern parties being backwards or antiquated. By combining historical and anthropological perspectives, it is shown that these parties stand for normativities of modernity. Lebanese, as well as Middle Eastern parties in general, have a rather poor reputation: they are considered family-based, ideologically meaningless, tailored solely to their leadership, and non-modern. Contrastingly, this book claims that the concept of the "real party" corresponds to an encounter with modernity and that these parties, although dysfunctional in parts, are better than their reputation. Most importantly, Lebanese parties are taking the nation-state as their central reference point, as they recognise it as the legitimate form of societal organization. The volume claims that important constituents of modernity, such as the individual, the nation, secularity, progress, and representing the people (demos), serve for the parties in question as resources of utopian elements informing much of these parties’ identities. Bringing Lebanese political parties into a global debate on modernity, the book tackles the notion of parties of the Middle East being non-modern. It will be of interest to scholars researching political science, political history and the Middle East.

Lebanon

Lebanon
Author: Adel Beshara
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136006141

Lebanon examines the ideological, political and social underpinnings of the attempted coup against General Chihab's government in Lebanon in 1961. The author analyzes the role of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, the history of the army in Lebanon and it role in Lebanese politics and the impact of the coup on Lebanese political life. This book provides an extraordinary insight into the mechanisms of military coups in the Arab world and will be of interest to students and researchers of the history and politics of the Middle East.

Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty

Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty
Author: Nora Stel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2020-06-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 042978581X

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide and is central to European policies of outsourcing migration management. Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty is the first book to critically and comprehensively explore the parallels between the country’s engagement with the recent Syrian refugee influx and the more protracted Palestinian presence. Drawing on fieldwork, qualitative case-studies, and critical policy analysis, it questions the dominant idea that the haphazardness, inconsistency, and fragmentation of refugee governance are only the result of forced displacement or host state fragility and the related capacity problems. It demonstrates that the endemic ambiguity that determines refugee governance also results from a lack of political will to create coherent and comprehensive rules of engagement to address refugee ‘crises.’ Building on emerging literatures in the fields of critical refugee studies, hybrid governance, and ignorance studies, it proposes an innovative conceptual framework to capture the spatial, temporal, and procedural dimensions of the uncertainty that refugees face and to tease out the strategic components of the reproduction and extension of such informality, liminality, and exceptionalism. In developing the notion of a ‘politics of uncertainty,’ ambiguity is explored as a component of a governmentality that enables the control, exploitation, and expulsion of refugees. Introduction Chapter of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Religion, National Identity, and Confessional Politics in Lebanon

Religion, National Identity, and Confessional Politics in Lebanon
Author: R. Rabil
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2011-09-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230339255

Against a background of weak and contested national identity and capricious interaction between religious affiliation and confessional politics, this book illustrates in detailed analysis this "comprehensive" project of Islamism according to its ideological and practical evolutionary change.

Spoils of Truce

Spoils of Truce
Author: Reinoud Leenders
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0801465435

In Spoils of Truce, Reinoud Leenders documents the extensive corruption that accompanied the reconstruction of Lebanon after the end of a decade and a half of civil war. With the signing of the Ta’if peace accord in 1989, the rebuilding of the country’s shattered physical infrastructure and the establishment of a functioning state apparatus became critical demands. Despite the urgent needs of its citizens, however, graft was rampant. Leenders describes the extent and nature of this corruption in key sectors of the Lebanese economy and government, including transportation, health care, energy, natural resources, construction, and social assistance programs. Exploring in detail how corruption implicated senior policymakers and high-ranking public servants, Leenders offers a clear-eyed perspective on state institutions in the developing world. He also addresses the overriding role of the Syrian leadership’s interests in Lebanon and in particular its manipulation of the country’s internal differences. His qualitative and disaggregated approach to dissecting the politics of creating and reshaping state institutions complements the more typical quantitative methods used in the study of corruption. More broadly, Spoils of Truce will be uncomfortable reading for those who insist that power-sharing strategies in conflict management and resolution provide some sort of panacea for divided societies hoping to recover from armed conflict.

Pax Syriana

Pax Syriana
Author: Rola El-Husseini
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2012-12-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815651945

Pax Syriana provides readers with a broad picture of what has changed, and what has failed to change, in the Lebanese political system after the end of the civil war.

Lebanon

Lebanon
Author: Michael Kerr
Publisher: Hurst & Company
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2012
Genre: Lebanon
ISBN: 9781849042499

This volume examines the changes that recent events have brought to Lebanon, whether lasting or ephemeral, and the challenges they represent for a state, which despite the resilience of its power-sharing system of government remains hotly contested and unconsolidated.

Lebanon

Lebanon
Author: Mark Farha
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-08-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108471455

Chronicles secularism in Lebanon up to the present day, presenting possible causes for its decline in the face of sectarianism.

Shia Islam and Politics

Shia Islam and Politics
Author: Jon Armajani
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2020-05-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1793621365

This book argues that ever since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, which established a Shia Islamic government in Iran, that country’s religious and political leaders have used Shia Islam as a crucial way of expanding Iran’s objectives in the Middle East and beyond. Since 1979, Iran’s religious and political leaders have been concerned about Iran’s security in the face of the hostility and expansionism of the United States and other western countries, and the threats from powerful neighboring Sunni leaders and countries. While Iran’s government has attempted to align itself with Shia Muslims in various countries, such as Iraq and Lebanon, against American and Sunni expansionism, the Iranian government has attempted to religiously nourish and politically mobilize those Shias as a matter of principle, not only because of the Iranian government’s desires to protect Iran from external threats. The book analyzes Shia Islam and politics in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon which have among the largest proportional Shia populations in the Middle East and are vibrant centers of Shia intellectual life. The book's clear and jargon-free approach make it especially accessible for students and general readers who would like an introduction to the book's topics.