Beyond the ‘Weak State’: Hybrid Sovereignties in Beirut

Abstract

Depictions of Lebanon in international politics have historically represented it as a ‘weak state’ whose domestic sovereignty is eroded by nonstate actors viewed as anomalies to extirpate. The War on Terror has been no exception. Since at least 2002 international efforts have aimed at reinforcing Lebanon's ‘weak’ domestic sovereignty against ‘extremist elements’. These approaches adopt a classic understanding of sovereignty as the achievable, exclusive, and measurable control by a state over a bounded territory. Such an understanding is misleading and even obstructive of peace for Lebanon. The accepted view of Lebanon as a ‘weak state’ suffering from chronic conflict and the myth of its capital Beirut as cyclically destroyed and reconstructed actually normalise imaginative geographies that ultimately impact on international action. Through the concept of ‘hybrid sovereignties’, this article goes beyond traditional views of legitimate state power and irregular nonstate ‘dissidence’ as dwelling in distinct legitimacy categories. Engaging theoretically with epistemologies of hybridity, and relying empirically on official foreign policy statements, archive material, and interviews conducted in Beirut between 2005 and 2010, the article considers Lebanese sovereignty as resulting from complex hybridisations between state and nonstate actors. Firstly, I review scholarly approaches to sovereignty and engage with the notion of hybridity to set a basis for discussing Lebanon's sovereignty beyond the ‘weak state’ discourse. Secondly, I show that ‘weak state’ approaches to Lebanon fail to account for differential views of sovereignty and weakness from inside the Lebanese political system. Thirdly, I use the notion of hybrid sovereignties to interpret political violence during two moments of intrastate conflict: the early phases of the civil war in 1975–76, and the May 2008 clashes in Beirut. In both moments, distinctions between accepted binaries, such as state/nonstate, legitimate/illegitimate, security/insecurity, and domestic/foreign, blurred. Both state actors and nonstate militias performed sovereignty practices increasingly resembling each other, and coconstituting each other through Beirut's physical environment. Exposing Lebanon's hybrid sovereignties demystifies the self-fulfilling prophecy of the ‘weak state’ rhetoric and its deadly consequences for Lebanon.

Urban Geopolitics 8 Years on. Hybrid Sovereignties, the Everyday, and Geographies of Peace

“…Rather than being simply a terrain waiting for war to ‘scale down’ from the state, the city instead embodies specific hybridizations between state and non‐state sovereignty, which I have called elsewhere hybrid sovereignties (Fregonese, forthcoming). Hybridity is a mixing of different ontological categories “that transgress[es] or disconcert[s] binary terms that draw distinctions between like and unlike categories of objects – such as self/other, culture/nature, animal/machine or mind/body” (Whatmore 2009, 361).…”

“…Rather than having ‘scaled down’ from the state, both during the civil war and during more recent urban clashes, sovereignty has been the result of hybridizations between state and non‐state actors. At different points in time, the state, army, militias and private security contractors have contested the control of infrastructures such as roads, housing, electricity (Verdeil 2009), airports, media premises and telecommunication networks (Fregonese, forthcoming). Sovereignty appears here as a collective of knowledges, agents and practices thriving alongside and beyond the state, and shaped by the presence and changes of urban materiality.…”

“…Despite work conducted elsewhere on cities and violence – a small part of which in Italian, German, and French is analyzed here – geographical literature about cities and war is overwhelmingly Anglophone‐centric. It is also limited to a handful of case studies: former Yugoslavia (Coward 2002, 2004, 2009), Palestine (Graham 2004a,b), and the more ethnographic accounts of conflict in Lebanon (Fregonese 2009, forthcoming; Ramadan 2009, 2010). However, if we are to account for an urban century, the linguistic and empirical scope of urban geopolitics needs to be broader.…”

Fluid Sovereignty: State–Nature Relations in the Hasbani Basin, Southern Lebanon

“…Whether "fragile," "failing," or "failed," the absence of effective sovereignty is often equated with the dispersal of control of the means of violence amongst rival security providers (Zartman 1995;Rotberg 2004;von Trotha 2005); and despite critical objections, including from geographers, to a causal inference that bypasses wider geopolitical and geo-economic drivers (Sidaway 2003;Elden 2009;Jeffrey 2009;Fregonese 2012;Grimm, Lemay-Hébert, and Nay 2014), the global policy currency of fragile statehood is bolstered by Western cartographies of conflict in which weak governments are disabled or overrun by other wielders of armed force.…”

The Politics of Insecurity in the Arab World: A View from Beirut

“…Research on security issues in Lebanon has helped to develop concepts and approaches, such as the notion of "hybrid-sovereignty." This research is increasingly relevant to understanding security politics across the Arab world, where non-state and substate actors have come to exercise state-like capacities and authorities (Abboud and Muller 2012;Fregonese 2012). Such scholarship, especially when based on extensive local fieldwork, provides maps of the diverse understandings and lived experiences of insecurity (Fawaz, Harb, and Gharbieh 2012).…”