Lebanon is one of the most unstable countries in the Middle East, regularly wracked by violence, foreign invasion, civil strife, and political instability. Why does Lebanon experience recurring conflict and violence across generations?
In this book, Samer Abboud argues that Lebanon exists within a conflict system that produces war, parliamentary paralysis, economic stagnation, and displacement and migration, as seasonal, structural features of its contemporary politics. Four overlapping features of Lebanon's post-1860 history feed into this structural system of violence: sectarianism as a structuring principle of political difference; the politics of consensus that the sectarian distribution of political power is dependent on; regional and international intervention that is often supported by some domestic actors; and the historical injustice of Palestinian displacement, the nakba (catastrophe), and Israeli expansion. Abboud shows how recent events, ranging from the recent Israeli occupation to tragedies such as the Beirut port blast, are all products of the conflict system Lebanon is embedded in.
No-one who wants to understand the complex politics of one of the most structurally important hotspots of strife in the Middle East can afford to miss this brilliantly well-informed analysis.
