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Improving Lebanon’s sovereignty through the army: shifting political discourse and civil-military relations in the wake of the Syrian crisis.
Abstract
After the undertaking of the security sector’s reform in the wake of the Tai’f agreement purpose of de-confessionalizing the political space, Lebanon’s army has undergone a deep transformation. Although the expectations have not completely come into fruition, given the permanence of Syrian custodianship and Damascus’ influence on Lebanese political and military elites, Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) have progressively enhanced their legitimacy in the national dimension as protector of state security. This paper contends that in the post-Tai’f period, LAF have been successful in accomplishing an endogenous process of de-confessionalization, which currently makes the army the only veritable super partes institution of the state. These dynamics have been pushed through after the outbreak of Syria’s crisis in 2011, for LAF have played a major role in defending Lebanon’s sovereignty against Syrian interferences. However the army’s role is compressed between external and domestic forces. In the pursuit of external threats’ proliferation, an interest-based reorientation of all of the Lebanese confessional parties has been bringing about a transformation of Lebanese civil-military relations, with the army acting in its capacity as a vehicle of carrying forwards an improvement of Lebanese sovereignty. In the same time, enduring political fragmentation is refraining this phenomenon, resorting the traditional Lebanese doctrine of “keeping the army weak and small”. Exploring the evolution of Lebanon’s civil-military relations, this paper investigates to what extent the convergence between the constitutional hybrid sovereignty and the need for an enhanced national sovereignty has been occurring
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Security Studies