This paper argues that consociational power-sharing in the Arab world is intrinsically counter-revolutionary. The academic debate on consociational power-sharing has largely overlooked this because 1) it presupposes class inequalities and overemphasizes state stability; and 2) it is limited by a broader misunderstanding of counter-revolution, in which the concept is reduced to momentary reactions to revolution. By critiquing class and state assumptions in the consociational power-sharing literature and presenting a nuanced conceptualization of counter-revolution, this paper seeks to bring the debate closer to the concurrent revolutionary episodes against the consociational arrangements of Lebanon and Iraq, and to inspire more inclusionary state-(re)building arrangements in the Arab world. * Ibrahim Halawi is a Teaching Fellow in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research focuses on theorizing the concept of counter-revolution and examining its manifestation in the contemporary Middle East. His doctoral thesis lays out a history of counter-revolution and revolution in Egypt not as separable, televised events, but as processes that are continuous, evolving, and interrelated. During the pursuit of his PhD, Ibrahim worked as an Opinion Editor for The New Arab and published several op-eds and book reviews with E-IR, OpenDemocracy, and Middle East Eye, among others. Prior to that, he co-founded a pluralistic student movement in Beirut. He also founded a student-led non-sectarian newspaper aimed at de-hegemonizing sectarian news.

This field note reflects on a persistent Gramscian dilemma that has haunted non- and anti-sectarian postwar protests in Lebanon on the road to 17 October 2019: how can genuine political transformation be brought about absent its meaningful, context-sensitive, and creative organizational forms and preconditions? We situate the 17 October protests in a long line of anti-sectarian protests that have overlooked the necessity of political organization in the pursuit of political change. In so doing, however, they have missed yet another strategic opportunity to sabotage the range of clientelist, institutional, and discursive practices reproducing sectarian modes of mobilization and identification in postwar Lebanon. We then magnify this omission by presenting the experience of Mouwatinoun wa Mouwatinat Fi Dawla (Citizens in a State): a political party that explicitly departs from the civil society handbook by politicizing opposition to the sectarian system.

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