Power-sharing after Civil War: Thirty Years since Lebanon’s Taif Agreement

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Notes

Notes

1 The Taif Agreement is more formally known as the Document of National Accord. Taif, however, did not coincide with the end of violence, which continued until the end of 1990.

2 For a more systematic analysis of the new wave of consociations, see Rupert Taylor, Consociational Theory: McGarry and O’Leary and the Northern Ireland Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge).

3 Matthijs Bogaards, “Lebanon: How Civil War Transformed Consociationalism,” in Power-Sharing: Empirical and Normative Challenges, edited by Allison McCulloch and John McGarry (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).

4 A number of scholars and policy makers have advocated consociational power-sharing as a means to end the conflict in Syria. See, for example, Imad Salamey, Mohammed Abu-Nimer, and Elie Abouaoun, Post-Conflict Power-Sharing Agreements: Options for Syria (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018).

5 William Harris, Lebanon: A History, 600–2011 (New York: Oxford, 2012), 235.

6 See Theodor Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon, 2nd ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015); Picard, Lebanon; Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (London: Pluto, 2007).

7 For a description of sectarianization, see Nader Hashemi and Dany Postel, “Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East,” The Review of Faith and International Affairs 15, no. 3 (2017): 1–13.

8 Melani Cammett, Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (New York: Cornell University Press, 2014).

9 See Picard, Lebanon; Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon; Bassell Salloukh, The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (London: Pluto, 2015).

10 See Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (California: University of California Press); Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988).

11 The slogan “no victor and no vanquished” was first used at the end of the 1958 crisis in which Lebanon was brought to the point of civil war.

12 See John Nagle, “Between Entrenchment, Reform and Transformation: Ethnicity and Lebanon’s Consociational Democracy,” Democratization 23, no. 7 (2016): 1144–61.

13 See Bogaards, “How Civil War Transformed Consociationalism”; John Nagle, Social Movements in Violently Divided Societies: Constructing Conflict and Peacebuilding (Abingdon: Routledge); Picard, Lebanon; Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon; Salloukh, The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon.

14 For an overview of Lebanon’s governance institutions, see Imad Salamey, The Government and Politics of Lebanon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

15 For a more extensive overview of these events, see Michael Kerr, “Before the Revolution,” in Lebanon: After the Cedar Revolution, edited by Are Knudsen and Michael Kerr (London: Hurst, 2012), 23–38.

16 Samir Kassir, Beirut (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 445.

17 See Stephan Rosiny, “A Quarter Century of ‘Transitory Power-sharing’: Lebanon’s Unfulfilled Taif Accord of 1989 Revisited,” Civil Wars 19, no. 4 (2015): 485–502.

18 Arend Lijphart, Power-Sharing in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

19 Reinoud Leenders, Spoils of Truce: Corruption in Postwar Lebanon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

20 Salloukh, The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon, 3.

21 John Nagle, “Crafting Radical Opposition or Reproducing Homonormativity? Consociationalism and LGBT Rights Activism in Lebanon,” Journal of Human Rights 17, no. 1 (2018): 75–88.

22 Maya Mikdashi, “Sextarianism: Notes on Studying the Lebanese State,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and North African History, edited by Amal Ghazal and Jens Hanssen (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 31.

23 For example, in 2015 the then minister of foreign affairs, Gibran Bassil, refused to amend the nationality law to grant equal rights to female citizens, citing sectarian demographic anxieties.

24 Brendan O’Leary, “Power-sharing in Deeply Divided Places: An Advocate’s Introduction,” in Power-sharing in Deeply Divided Places, edited by Joanne McEvoy and Brendan O’Leary (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press), 1–66.

25 Cammett, Compassionate Communalism.

26 Hannes Baumann, “Social Protest and the Political Economy of Sectarianism in Lebanon,” Global Discourse 64, no. 3 (2016): 634–49.

27 Bassell Salloukh, “The Architecture of Sectarianization in Lebanon,” in Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East, edited by Nader Hashemi and Dany Postel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 225.

28 Iolanda Jaquemet, “Fighting Amnesia: Ways to Uncover the Truth about Lebanon’s Missing,” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 3, no. 1 (2009): 69–90.

29 A notable example of this situation was the shock resignation of the then prime minister Saad Hariri in Nov. 2017, a move claimed by many commentors to have been ordered by Saudi Arabia as a way to counter Iran’s influence over the political institutions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Nagle

John Nagle is a Reader in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. He has published three monographs and more than 25 articles in leading journals. Dr. John Nagle acknowledges the Leverhulme Trust for its support (Ref: 2017-616).

Mary-Alice Clancy

Mary-Alice Clancy is Honorary Research Fellow in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen. She has published two books and her research has been extensively covered in The Guardian, BBC, and the Irish Independent.