New article in Middle East and Islamic Studies
Tamirace Fakhoury & Miriam Aitken, Rethinking Power-Sharing in Post-War Lebanon: The Case for a Pluralist and Multi-Level Research Agenda, in Vol. 16, Issue 2 (Brill 2024)

Insights from our collection on “Rethinking Power-Sharing in Post-War Lebanon”

By Tamirace Fakhoury

Lebanon has been at a historical impasse, mired in a series of ongoing crises. In January 2025, after a two-year hiatus, the election of a new president and the appointment of a new prime minister have sparked a new chapter of hope. However, many remain skeptical, fearing that the cycle of sectarian politics, which has wreaked havoc on Lebanon’s economic stability and social peace, is unending. Is Lebanon destined for a never ending spiral of conflicts and crises? What are the prospects for political change, especially in the wake of the fall of the Syrian regime that kept Lebanon under its influence for many years?

In our collection “Rethinking Power-Sharing in Post-War Lebanon: The Case for a Pluralist and Multi-Level Research Agenda”, we offer some conceptual and analytical tools to rethink political change in Lebanon. The aim is to view Lebanon as more than just a laboratory or case study for “deeply divided societies”. Instead, we advocate for a pluralist research approach to its political system, engaging with a wider set of questions from political economy to everyday politics.

Setting the context

Lebanon has been a focal point for the study of power-sharing or consociationalism, which is a leading mode for conflict management in post-war societies. Yet, power-sharing studies have hardly interacted with the broader interdisciplinary literature on Lebanon in sociology, anthropology, political economy or social movement studies etc. As a result, we see important gaps between the scholarship on political power-sharing and the literature that grapples with everyday sectarian practices and social peace.

Additionally, there is an increasing gap between consociational theory and Lebanon’s post-war model which by now resembles a ‘spaghetti bowl’ of messy and fuzzy practices. The collection of papers responds to these concerns, and advocates for a nuanced and interdisciplinary approach to research on Lebanon’s political system.

A pluralist research agenda for Lebanon

We propose a pluralist research agenda that extends beyond consociational theory and that revolves around three interrelated features: Theoretical pluralism, cross-disciplinary dialogue and a global approach that views Lebanon as more than a case of a conflict-ridden and deeply divided society.

First, we suggest that integrating theoretical perspectives from political economy, social movements, citizenship studies, and beyond can provide a more comprehensive understanding of Lebanon’s power-sharing dynamics and people’s everyday struggles. This perspective would decenter power-sharing as elite-led policymaking. The aim here is to shift the gaze to people’s perceptions, conceptions and experiences in ‘everyday power-sharing’.

Second, we suggest that power-sharing theory could learn a lot from the broader historical, anthropological and sociological literature on conflict, peace, and everyday sectarianism in Lebanon.

Third, we suggest placing research on Lebanon within a broader global and cross-comparative perspective. The aim is for students, scholars and policy practitioners to debate Lebanon’s policy and social processes with new lenses and through the prism of comparative cases and approaches. For example, during a visit to Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy in 2023, I engaged with graduate students who debated the benefits of comparing Lebanon’s economic crisis to those in countries such as Jamaica, Venezuela, and Greece. While contextual circumstances differ, the goal is to discern how broader patterns of precarity at the heart of international political economy (IPE) shape national economies.

Contributions of the collection

Based on a workshop held in June 2022 at Sciences Po in Paris, the collection of articles includes contributions from various scholars who apply an eclectic set of frameworks to the study of Lebanon’s power-sharing system. Allison McCulloch reflects on what power-sharing theory can learn from Lebanon’s consociational legacy and argues that “if consociationalism is to remain a form of political prescription,” it must learn from “local scholarship” and empirical insights “from beyond the theory”. Clothilde Facon looks at the connections between Lebanon’s politics of sectarianism and the political economy of aid. Building on the case of the 2020 Beirut port explosion, Alessandra Thomsen goes beyond power-sharing theory to explore patterns of impunity and unaccountable governance as well as political elites’ detachment from citizens’ demands. In his contribution, John Nagle places power-sharing in conversation with the literature on contentious politics, social movements, and participatory citizenship. He brings the 2019 Lebanese uprising into dialogue with Bosnia’s Plenum movement (2014) and Iraq’s Tishreen mobilization (2019). Finally, Miriam Aitken examines Lebanon’s diasporic involvement in the 2019 Thawra. In doing so, she places sectarian power-sharing in conversation with transnational citizenship studies. She also explores the concept of politics and citizenship beyond the boundaries of the Lebanese sectarian and territorial state.

We hope that this collection of articles inspires conceptual innovations as well as transfers across disciplines on Lebanon’s political system.

Reference: Fakhoury, Tamirace & Miriam Aitken (2024). Rethinking Power-Sharing in Post-War Lebanon: The Case for a Pluralist and Multi-Level Research Agenda. Middle East Law and Governance, 16, 216-229.