Toward building a more inclusive and resilient ecosystem

ENAR

It is a time when Lebanon is constricted in boundaries like perhaps never before. Its physical land boundaries have long been—as once again recently demonstrated—marked by the contradiction of being repressively impermeable and permanently under threats, and at the same time too permeable and uncertain to offer the full protection of a territorial demarcation. Long before the political convulsions of the past 75 years, it was mainly, and sometimes only, the sea boundaries that promised the prospects that came to sustain the country—trade and migration. But the real case for the existential constrictions on Lebanon today is raised by the country’s recently and haphazardly imposed financial and banking boundaries. They seem to be inescapable necessities but at the same time are choking and distorting the regulated cross-border circulation of goods and services. This is as total a disruption as there can be for a country that has functioned for the