MESA Banner
Lebanon 2021: On the Path to State Failure or Not?
Abstract by Anton Minkov On Session I-20  (Statecraft and State Survival)

On Monday, November 29 at 2:00 pm

2021 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Lebanon has been in economic, social and political turmoil in the last few years. Since October 2019, the country has been rocked by large protests. While COVID-19 initially stemmed the protests, the latter have been reinvigorated by the August 4th explosion in the port of Beirut. In January 2021, smaller, but more violent protests have broken out as a result of the implementation of COVID-19 lockdown measures without sufficient governmental assistance. The political elite has refused so far to implement much needed anti-corruption and institutional reforms, despite being under domestic and international pressure to do so. The situation is of significant concern because it has the potential to rapidly escalate beyond the security forces’ ability to manage and lead Lebanon on the path of state failure. One way of estimating Lebanon’s prospects in the short term is by using a methodology developed previously to explain the socio-economic roots of the Arab uprisings in 2011. It assigns three levels of Collective Political Violence (CPV) – high, medium and low – based on the intensity of the protests, the reaction of the regimes, and the number of deaths during the upheavals. Using the maximum likelihood estimation and a trinomial probability analysis, five metrics are identified as indicators of CPV – namely, GDP per capita, at purchase power parity, level of democracy, the years of ruler or political establishment in power (a proxy for political corruption), ethnic-sectarian tensions, and a hybrid indicator, called the Youth Grievance Factor. Based on 2020 data, the paper estimates Lebanon 2021’s CPV level to be between 70 and 80 percent probability of being at level 2 (medium) and close to 20 percent at level 3 (high). These values are comparable to those of Jordan, Bahrain, and Algeria in 2011, when these countries experienced some form of civil unrest, but the regimes survived, without going through a civil war and ultimately becoming failed states such as Syria, Libya and Yemen. The methodology could also be applied in the assessment of other countries in the region, such as Iraq, which is still reeling from the war with Daesh and where the NATO mission has grown back to its full operational capacity.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Modern