Politics and the labor market

ENAR

I first came to Lebanon in the late 1990s to lead a development organization’s mission on labor and social protection. Since then, a lot has happened: in 2000, Israel pulled back from southern Lebanon to the international borderline; in 2005, prime minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated, and many others were murdered before and after him; the year after, Israel tried to turn “Lebanon’s clock back 20 years” with the Second Lebanon War, which ended without a defined military victory; then came the 2008 global financial crisis, the IMF remarking that “Lebanon [had] mocked the doomsayers, [as its] ongoing economic resilience bolstered the banking system, with deposit inflows…growing at nearly 20 percent annually”; and from 2011 onwards, the Syrian war that brought over 1.5 million refugees into Lebanon. Most importantly, by 2014, the last pretext of democratic governance since the end of the civil war, came to an end. The masks