The beginning of the year can symbolize many things. In general, this date signifies a social ritual of togetherness and hope for improvement. It may indicate belief in the fortuitous course of one’s nation but also convey a more diffuse sentiment of broad optimism in the future of the world, something which the date “January 1” has begun to represent in the global tradition of the common era.
In the context of a law-based polity, a specific date also may denote the validity of a contractual agreement or the moment when a trusted economic promise is either validated or becomes disproven and meaningless. It may stand for a celebration of life or mark a gravestone.
In the language of post-Christian, and perennially fleeting, globalized-populist culture a la Americaine, “dates” even have taken on a divergent meaning as conjoined hallmarks of sex and sports. In contemporary Hollywood-infused imagery, these “dates” are narratives of “reaching the first, second, and third bases” of courtship and intercourse. In the best case, dates with this cultural insinuation embody ritualistic-romantic targets; commonly they are less-than-skin-deep markers in a vacuous cultural environment of cinematic and online-streamed imaginary.
As a less superficial and longer-term valid social construct, however, a “historic date” of collective or individual record commonly either stands as a positive identity totem emblematic of its sovereign’s will and purpose, or, to the sharp opposite, as a symbol of infamy and reminder of devastating violation. Neutrally defined, a historic date is a memorable inflection point loaded with high, negative or positive, emotive value.
On the level of this nation and its sovereignty, the nine or ten most recent January 1 inflection points have been imbued with downcast sentiments and as annual starting dates were increasingly challenging for Lebanon. Inversely, and seeking to make the best out of the national situation by representing the perspective of hope for improving the nation’s fortunes, the Executive covers of the years 2018 to 2023 carried bold and urgent messages of rebuilding, rebooting, and defiance of previously missed opportunities of sovereignty and nationhood.
This year, the cover message is taking a step beyond the previous years’ context of “last hope”. Our first-ever cover constructed with use of an AI machine agent approaches the outlook at the turn of 2025 from a perception of momentary respite and calm – but with an implicit expectation of several more years of challenge, unpredictability, and risk accumulation. This perspective of resilient but bounded determination and hope is informed by our 2024 coverage focuses of the country’s two defining problems of the past year that, not by coincidence, also count among the top global challenges of the decade: war and migration.
Historic context
In the national and regional arena, Executive magazine’s assessment of the coming period, spanning an unknown number of months and years but hopefully not lasting deep into the 2030s, is to be seen in a historic context of the post-(1992)-conflict decades. This multi-year perspective is reflective of complex and conflicted development phases that started with the region’s balance-altering turbulences of the early 2000s.
This particular phase of Middle Eastern troubles was marked by the American adventures of trying to achieve regional democratization under their imperial and hegemonic agenda as well as by fake local pledges of political reform and economic democracy, which were both inherently disingenuous and badly disrupted by the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
The unachieved ambitions and promises of the 2000s subsequently morphed into regional power competitions, arms races, and diplomatic conflicts, along with emergent social attitudes and new mentalities that nurtured the Arab winds of change of the 2010s.
Thenceforth, the region witnessed state ambitions of seeking regional hegemony (in which the paralyzed Lebanese state plays no part) and societal movements (in which Lebanese civil society played a late and very noteworthy, peaceful role) of accumulating but unsated hunger for change.
After the pandemic and corona panic disruptions of 2020/21, the unmet change impulses of the three previous decades, to put things in a very simplistic summation, have coalesced into a regional vortex of power shifts and uncertainty that affects every country in the MENA region, from the richest to the poorest.
Expecting this Middle Eastern vortex to calm this year or next into a peaceful and prosperous new status quo is like expecting the most ambitious global climate goals to be met and climate risk mitigation in small island nations to be financed by the incoming US administration.
Multiplicity of old and new factors that feed the whirlwinds
Dedicated stakeholders in Lebanese recovery, who are invested mentally and practically into the future of this region, have to be cognizant of the old historic blunders, colonial sins, ideological entanglements, and the entire fateful 20th century trajectory of the Middle East’s troubles that have no single originator and guilty party behind them – which by the way requires disregarding how most of the region’s narratives in books and entire libraries are imbued with biases. Additionally, forward looking stakeholders have to be even more highly aware that the region is witnessing a likely to be short episode of calm in a calamitous period.
Drivers of intense challenges over the coming decade or more include the real and divergent perceptions of the region’s arrested economic development; of its social inequity and upheavals; of identity seeking and religious searching; of tribal and quasi-feudal conflicts; of political and militia-driven confrontations on national and subnational levels; and, decisively, of hegemonic interests of firstly the US and Israel but also including ambitions of regional overlord dynasties and Asia’s rising geopolitical powers.
As Lebanon suffered the inhumanity of war in a new installment during 2024, the past year indisputably carries an overburden of days of infamy. Recording their timeline from an unbiased and impartial but impassioned national perspective was one of the duties that this magazine felt honor-bound to fulfill in our turn-of-the-year issue. By Executive’s reckoning (see timeline of open war page xxx), this regional arc of conflict-boosting dates spans from October 7 and 8, 2023 over April 1 and 13-14, July 30 and 31, September 17-18, 23, and 27, October 1 and October 26 to the date of a partial ceasefire under a – from the perspective of sovereignty and genuine peace, fake and disingenuous – coercive agreement on November 26, 2024.
Given this most recent and so far worst-in-century episode of the country’s victimization, all stakeholders in the Lebanese economy, including this magazine, have to be excused for wishing the turn of the year 2025, and if not now then every year thereafter, to become the best-ever inflection point towards constructive peace (see our special report covering the positions of members in the Lebanese Private Sector Network and the policy asks of LPSN).
Wish one can. Hope one must.
However, an expectation of seeing world powers or the international community or some undefined law of history solve all of the structural and imported problems of Lebanon’s economy plus achieve a radical and lasting departure from regional war to non-war, would just shoot another annual star into a growing firmament of aspirations for a better Lebanon that has already been wished upon with unfulfilled hopes.
The real power behind a wish
Historians may debate whether the unrequited currents of change of the Arab Spring or the terrorist revolt of a faction among the Palestinian people against their slow suffocation actually were the key headwaters feeding new whirlpools of regional conflict. What has been revealed in the course of the past six months, however, is that immense human energy and destructive ingenuity has been poured into preparations of mercilessly attacking and killing Israel’s declared and presumed enemies over the course of the past 20 years.
What then is the chance of stopping the violence of regional warmongers, or the maiming by foreign bombs, or the mental health trauma inflicted by dehumanizing enemy propaganda? Wouldn’t it be a perilous dream to believe that an endless litany of reiterative declarations by international institutions and individual global figures, that has in the past 15 months been unable to stop genocide in Gaza, could suddenly work on regional level ?
If you spectate into 2025 from any capital in the region between Tunis and Tehran, migration is a peril and war is a risk you face. Genocide is a reality, not a useful word in civil society campaigns seeking for new UN declarations with high appeal to the intellectual elites of governance globalizers and cultural colonizers. The recurrence of war and all the inhumanity that goes with it, is counterfactual to the idea of a linear progression towards an enlightened liberal market economy as the ultima ratio of history. It is Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, more than Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.
Through the peculiar Lebanese lens, the image of rebirth from fire and ashes is not an empty myth for this small country with its unloving neighbors but a potent allegory for what a few good people constructively working together in a polity, can do. The raging storms of human fear and aggression and stupidity will not magically cease thanks to a Parousia of paradisaical, top-down, global governance. This reality is only a signal for Lebanon’s determined stakeholders to undertake all the more investments into local networks and solidarity, education, coexistence, political reason, and autochthon economic development and formalization.
Hope and revelry, aspects of humanity that time and again irrepressibly emerge from our depths, are the heralds of every new start. But if one hopes for peace to triumph in the Arab Middle East, one must also consider the myriad forces working against that peace; resolving to face reality with courage might be a more achievable aspiration.
