In May 2016, Lebanon held its first municipal elections since the beginning of the Syrian civil war and the domestic trash crisis. For the first time in the city’s recent history, an independent nonsectarian volunteer-based campaign called Beirut Madinati presented the city’s voters with an alternative to sectarian political parties and their candidates. While the group did not win, it did succeed in winning about 40% of the vote. In the upcoming 2018 parliamentary elections, an unofficial offshoot of the group, LiBaladi, plans to present a similar nonsectarian grassroots alternative at the national level. This paper examines the rise of these two movements. In a moment when regional politics have polarized the Middle East along sectarian lines, and in a place where sect is the institutionalized currency of the political system, how did movements of cross-sectarian unity and resistance to the status quo emerge? To answer this question, this study traces the development of both interrelated campaigns. The article compares election to previous ones that took place in 2010 (municipal) and 2009 (parliamentary) in order to gain insight into how changes in key structural and organizational variables opened a window of opportunity for new political parties. Data are drawn from election results as well as structured in-depth interviews with key players in the movements, including founding members, candidates, volunteer coordinators, and legal advisers.

This paper examines the codification of personal status laws—which pertain to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and custody— in Lebanon between 1948 and 1962. In accordance with the 1936 law passed during the French mandate guaranteeing each religious sect the right to determine its own code, a number of personal status laws were submitted to parliament beginning in the late 1940s; alongside this process of codification grew significant activism by various groups including women’s and lawyers’ associations demanding a range of reforms from a universal civil code to universal laws such as on inheritance and divorce that would guarantee gender equal rights for all Lebanese. Recent scholarship on personal status law in Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Arab world, has focused on the role of the secular state in co-opting religious law and sectarian politics to regulate family law to understand why reform efforts such as those started in Lebanon in the 1950s have stalled or failed. Is gender inequality in personal status perpetuated by the secular state through regulating these laws and either manipulating them according to a specific understanding of Islamic law, or by handing power to the specific set of religious or sectarian leaders that did so? Or, can the root of inequality be blamed on the ongoing control of sectarian communities over these laws due to the incomplete secularization of the state? What is the role of religious law, the elite religious establishments, and the secular state in producing gender unequal personal status regimes? This paper considers these questions, and attempts to nuance this debate in the case of Lebanon by drawing on a range of sources including Lebanese government records, legal documents, newspapers, and periodicals to explore the role of and relationships between the state, sects, and social movements in shaping the codification process.

The “Arab Spring” in Syria has swiftly turned into a multilayered and total war involving global, regional and local actors, some in an official (inter-)governmental capacity but many in other capacities obeying to logics that challenge common understandings of border and identity. This paper aims at studying one such instance: the involvement of Lebanese non-state actors in Syria. Considering the extent of their respective involvement in the Syrian conflict in spite of the Lebanese governmental “policy of dissociation”, two non-state actors have been studied: pro-Assad Hezbollah and informal Sunni movements that have embraced the fight of jihadi groups. Beyond the assessment of who these actors are and how they involve in the conflict, the research devotes special attention to what our fieldwork shows to be a key mobilizing factor: the reconstruction of identities across borders. Based on more than 50 semi-directive interviews conducted in Lebanon with a variety of actors and observers, this matured version of a four-year joint research shows differentiated patterns of identity mobilization. On one side, Hezbollah’s operatives are bound to a powerful top-down organization with an agenda underpinned by geo-strategic calculations and identity politics; for this group, “assabiya” has proven to be paramount. On the other side, the involvement of Sunnis takes place on an individual basis within networks of jihadists built almost exclusively on the activation of religious identities and enmities; for these mostly atomized actors, social anomy has been found essential. Interestingly, the research has shown that both these obviously opposite social experiences (excess and lack of belonging) converge in making identity so prone to activation that individuals opt for a path leading to a likely if not a certain death in a cross-border conflict that is not theirs at first sight. Our research ambitions to understand these dynamics while relating them to broader factors and notably: the failure of the Lebanese state and society to build a cohesive national project, and the power games of regional and international actors. Both these factors have led to excessive polarization and ensuing narratives of victimization, hence sustaining the cultivation of transnational primary identities at the expenses of national belonging.