Lebanon, a multi-confessional country with an established consociational democracy, is facing the threat of slipping into state failure as it grapples with its soaring political and economic crisis. Scholars of Lebanese politics have amply demonstrated that a plethora of subnational non-state actors and sectarian strongmen and institutions ‘capture’ the State from below while foreign powers meddle freely in the country’s internal affairs. Amongst the most extensively cited non-state actors accused of undermining the State in Lebanon is the Islamic resistance movement and Shi‘i political party, Hizbullah.
This paper interrogates the Hizbullah-led urban intervention following the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, examining the foreign and domestic web of relations mobilized in support of Hizbullah’s largest reconstruction effort to date. I demonstrate how Hizbullah-run municipalities and the party’s reconstruction arm provided the organizational superstructure ensuring synergistic partnership between private sector real estate developers, faith-based organizations (FBOs) and elite factions of civil society, and global aid-economy actors. More specifically, I examine the role of non-state providers (NSPs) and their relationship to Hizbullah-run local government agencies, focusing on two foreign and supranational actors (the United National Development Programme and the Kuwait Fund for International Development) as well as faith-based organizations affiliated with Hizbullah operating in the fields of public safety and security and public health. I propose that Hizbullah’s postwar urban intervention should be understood in relation to global neoliberal transformations, maxims of the liberal peace, and precepts of the humanitarian-development-peace nexus championed by Western governments, international financial organizations (IFOs), and intergovernmental organizations. Crucially, I insist that, while these configurations appear to bypass the central government, they are made possible only because of the State’s indispensable neoliberal role as proactive enabler.
International Relations/Affairs
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