Beyond Sectarianism: Class and Struggle in Lebanese Society

Abstract

Lebanon’s protracted experience with civil strife has created a distinct sentiment amongst students, academics and laypersons alike, that the country is doomed; its fate sealed by the atavistic, communal ties of kinship and loyalty between its ethnic communities. A society in which deep-seated sectarian hatreds would override broader attempts to secularize and modernize. Inevitably, sectarianism has become the scapegoat tactic and the most readily available framework used to explain Lebanon’s problems: from poverty, under-development and petty corruption to the Civil War. A consequential sense of helplessness thus arises when confronted with the Lebanese case, where conflicts are dismissed as an inevitable outgrowth of ‘tribal’ hatreds and the hopes of a unified, national collective seem distant and unattainable. In the final analysis, Lebanon appears to be the microcosm of the ethno-religious tragedies that have befallen the Arab world in our own times. It is out of this essentialist understanding of societal divisions that Lebanon’s governing logic is maintained. A political palliative formerly instituted under French tutelage in 1926, and later under the Ta’if Accord in 1989, this system was seen as the only way to ensure ta’ayush (coexistence) in a society where sectarian cleavages are ‘deep’, and where conflict is only naturally, an extension of primordial antagonisms between ‘unthinking’ subjects. This thesis joins a growing body of work in rejecting the essentialist ascriptions of ethnic identities, arguing against the view that holds sects as Lebanon’s super-cleavage and as a deterministic feature of multi-confessional societies. Through historical, quantitative and qualitative analyses, this thesis argues that the consociational measure that is instituted as Lebanon’s ‘remedy’ is premised on a theory of societal divisions that is largely blind to social class. In failing to analyze the sectarian phenomenon through an intersectional lens, the consociational measure cannot holistically capture the underlying societal divisions that continue to plague the nation today. Without accounting for class, the consociational conflict-resolution model dangerously misunderstands the diagnosis of the Lebanese problem, and has since, been unable to mediate tensions and mend the hearts of the Lebanese citizens.