Reimagining an alternative Lebanon

ENAR

The unthinkable has finally happened. A stubborn sectarian system, undergirded by a peculiar postwar political economy, and sustained by institutional and disciplinary practices geared toward reproducing sectarian modes of identification and mobilization, has finally given way. This is a story that can be traced back to the mid-19th century, when the dislocations created by overlapping socioeconomic transformations, Ottoman reforms, and colonial penetration exploded in the kind of violence that helped institutionalize a new sectarian order in Mount Lebanon. Previously a fluid social terrain, where religious identities coexisted and cross-cut with an array of alternative socioeconomic, kin, and local identities began to solidify around mainly sectarian identities. The post-1861 Mount Lebanon order structured political incentives along mostly sectarian lines. It was later reproduced in independent Lebanon, and then consolidated in postwar Lebanon. The latter’s recycled corporate consociational power-sharing arrangement redistributed political offices within an expanded but predetermined sectarian quota, further entrenching