In December 2005, when the government of Lebanon requested assistance from the United Nations in the investigation and trial of those responsible for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the public response, both domestically and abroad, was highly positive. The creation of the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) was seen as an important, transparent step towards securing justice for the Hariri murder while fostering a process of national reconciliation. However, five years later, as both external relations and internal stability appear shaken by the Tribunal's investigations and findings, Lebanon and the international community are left wondering whether it will be possible to strike a balance between the need for justice and the need for peace and internal stability. In this sense, the ongoing internal conflict over the role of the STL raises questions over the broader mandate and purpose served by the international tribunal. The research explores the case study of the STL, analyzing its structure, mandate, and operations, and looking specifically at how it has dealt with the challenge of building domestic legitimacy and popularity. In doing so the study will assess the tribunal's achievements and shortcomings, while seeking to draw broader lessons on how to accommodate international justice and domestic stability

The year 2005 has been a turning point in the history of Lebanon. The assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in a car bomb on February 14th, 2005 triggered the largest demonstrations in the history of the country. Hundreds of thousands went to the streets to either denounce the Syrian regime and accuse it of being behind the assassination, or to flag out their alliance with it and accuse the US and Israel of killing Hariri. In the following research I study how the political protests that followed the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri turned into sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites. More precisely, I look at the fast shift in the political salience and the re-modelling of political, confessional as well as national identities. I analyze protest data (from newspaper archives and official data from Minitry of Interior) in order to depict the shift in political, as well as sectarian alliances. The empirical results show that the Hariri assassination was a “political earthquake” that shifted the attention of the Lebanese society from mainly pan-Arab concerns, to internal concerns and anti-Syrian activism. The analysis of our findings suggest that a change in political relations leads to sectarian tension when the majority of the sect follows one leader and when the two opposing communities are equal in size and in power.

Over the past 60 years, discussions among Lebanese political figures about Palestinian rights in Lebanon have been fruitless. Despite superficial legislative changes, Palestinians remain deprived of many basic economic and social rights. Lebanese objections to grant Palestinians complete rights arise from a peculiar consensus proscribing that any advances may lead to the naturalization of this group of refugees, thereby disrupting the sectarian balance and undermining the Palestinian right of return. While these views reflect those of the political elite, the views of the Lebanese public remain unexplored, particularly the views of young Lebanese who did not live through the Lebanese Civil War, but grew up with a package of war narratives of the Palestinian involvement in the vicious war. We conducted five focus group discussions between May and June 2010 with Lebanese university students representing diverse social, political, and religious strata of society to gauge the participants’ diverse attitudes and opinions towards granting Palestinians rights, and the arguments they present to legitimize their stands. Analysis of the qualitative data showed that participants’ attitudes towards granting Palestinian rights were shaped by perceived implications of such a change on the conditions of Lebanese citizens living in an already economically and politically fragile state. Such implications were reflected by two different rationales: that such a change would (1) have severe economic consequences, inducing higher unemployment, out-migration, and competition; and (2) trigger a chain of events that would lead to political instability, caused by demographic changes affecting the balance of sectarian powers, and the possible return of the Lebanese Civil-War era instability. In the paper, we will present a more comprehensive analysis of this data and synthesize the findings with the international literature on the influence of national identity formation, in-group identification, and intergroup competitiveness on attitudes and perceptions of citizens towards immigrants and minority groups. Analyzing Lebanese views on Palestinian rights contributes to an understanding of the Lebanese case and will inform the work of advocacy groups in the future.

In Summer 2007, amidst popular support, the Lebanese army destroyed Nahr al Bared Palestinian refugee camp (in Northern Lebanon). This paper attempts to understand how this was possible. Against the writings of Nezvat Soguk and Giorgio Agamben, this paper traces this campaign to a history that deploys the “state of exception” as a mechanism to govern Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. This history casts the Palestinian refugee in Lebanon outside the law, and therefore out of both accountability and protection; making the Palestinian a clear case of Giorgio Agamben’s “Homo Sacer.” It also traces the campaign to a Lebanese public discourse that fixes normality within the nation state, and therefore fixes human rights within citizenship, making it possible to suspend the right of the non-citizen, cast as an aberration in this discourse. The paper also tries to map the Lebanese discourse surrounding the campaign, which made it possible to celebrate the destruction of civilian space as a nationalist victory. This paper also makes use of Sari Hanafi, who used the writings of Agamben to explain the situation in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, but also attempts to fill in a number of theoretical and empirical gaps left by Hanafi’s work. To fill in some of those gaps, this paper includes a survey of a number of articles and speeches that construe a discourse that casts Palestinian refugee camps as “security foci” and spaces of aberrance and lawlessness.

Sectarian Politics in Lebanon: An Obstacle or an Encouraging Factor for Inter-Community cooperation The ongoing crises in Lebanon occasionally raise the demand by various elements to abolish political sectarianism. The assumption of those who supported abolition is that such a move might blur inter-communal rivalries. This paper examines some basic principles of the Lebanese sectarian political system and its development, and reaches a different conclusion – that actually, the sectarian political system encourages inter-communal cooperation as well as pluralism within each religious sect. The sectarian political system, sometimes called confessionalism, makes the struggle for parliamentary seats allocated to each religious sect to be conducted within each sect between different candidates. Many candidates seek to adopt different positions than their political rivals and strengthen their power with the support of politicians from other religious communities. This is why the most important implication of the Lebanese sectarian political system is an intra-sectarian. The intra-sectarian struggles, which have always involved personal feuds with political stands, caused a kind of a "duality" within many of the religious sects regarding national and regional issues. There is no "one Maronite point of view" or a "Sunnite policy", nor a "Shi‘ite position". As we witnessed in Lebanese history, the split on political, national, or regional matters was not based on sectarian division. This point will be demonstrated in the paper by looking at the experience of the Shi‘ite community, perhaps the largest in Lebanon today, since the struggle for the formation of Lebanon in 1920 till Today. In historical perspective, one cannot generalizing the Shi‘ites in favor or against a certain idea or matter: Some Shi‘ites wanted the establishment of a separate Lebanese state, some supported the unification of Lebanese land with Syria; Some Shi‘ites opposed the French mandate, some supported it; Some supported Nasserism in the 1950s-1960s, some objected it; some supported the centralistic policy of President Fouad Chehab, some distinctly were anti Chehabists; Some supported the Palestinian presence in Lebanon, some opposed it; Some were pro-Syrians, some were pro–Iranians during the civil war, when these two countries' proxies struggled over controlling the Shi‘ite areas; some Shi‘ites have a secular view of life, some are tended to religion; Some prefer activism, while other prefer passivism. This duality makes the cooperation between factors from different religious sects possible.

On May 24, 2000, when Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon after twenty-two years of occupation, Hezbollah positioned itself in the Lebanese political arena as the primary, if not only, actor in the liberation of the South. At the time, many analysts questioned the future and the evolution of the party. Despite its Shia background and the influence that the Khomeini revolution in Iran had on it, Hizbullah always stated that its priorities and goals were the armed resistance as the only way to liberate the country from the presence of the occupier. The movement gained its popularity because of this resistance. In the eleven years since the liberation of the South, the party became a major player on the local and regional scene. It has not only maintained its power and legitimacy within the Shiite community in Lebanon, but it has gradually strengthened, especially after the “divine victory” in 2006. In December 2009, the party revealed a new political manifesto that replaced the famous open letter of 1985, which constitutes the founding charter of the party. The idea of a revolution and an Islamic regime was renounced while the resistance rhetoric reminded. The musta'dafin, or the marginalized and the deprived, which the party addressed in its open letter in 1985, have now become a new middle class that does not lack resources to impose themselves in the domestic political arena. Taking a societal approach of the party, this paper analyses the « resistance society » through the accounts of the followers in their everyday life to give a new perspective to a party that has so often been described through its institutions and ideology. We will see how the party constructs its solidarity networks and the spread of specific norms and values that give life to a symbolic community that it embodies. The paper is based on primary sources research collected in the southern suburbs (Dahyye) of Beirut since 2005.