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Abstract
Lebanese youth are constructed through fragmented lenses, and are recipients of partial, unresponsive, and often irrelevant policies. Despite these constraints, many youth have become actively engaged in political life, especially since 2005. Three types of youth engagement can be identified: i) the ‘conformists’, who privilege their sectarian belonging, ii) the ‘alternative groups’, who engage in professional NGOs, and iii) the new ‘activists’, who prefer loose organising centred on progressive and radical issues. New forms of youth activism in the contested city of Beirut have been able to exploit interstitial openings for seeds to grow into potentially “disruptive mobilizations”. While these resistances may have been limited up to now in time and space, youth activist groups still embarrass, hold accountable and constrain hegemonic politics. They may be generating seeds of collective action that still have to be further structured and organised.
Keywords:
Acknowledgements
The ideas presented in this article were elaborated in the framework of POWER2YOUTH, an EU-funded project under the Seventh Framework programme (Fp7/2007-2013), grant agreement n° 612782. I would like to thank two anonymous referees and the journal’s editor for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. All errors, of course, remain my own.
Notes
1 Schwedler and Harris, “What is Activism?”
2 Bayat, “Activism as Social Development”.
3 Khatib and Lust, “Introduction”, 3, 5.
4 Ibid., 5.
5 Bayat, Life as Politics.
6 Khatib and Lust, “Introduction”, 5.
7 Cavatorta and Durac, Civil Society and Democratization.
8 Khatib and Lust, “Introduction”, 15.
9 Herrera, “Introduction”, 5.
10 Boudreau, Global Urban Politics.
11 Nicholls and Uitermark, Cities and Social Movements, 10. This also echoes with the notion of identifying “cracks in the system” to advance change by expanding them, as elaborated by sociologist Elizabeth Shove (mentioned in McGrail, “Cracks in the System”, 22.)
12 Traboulsi, Social Classes and Political Power; Salloukh et al., The Politics of Sectarianism.
13 Daou, “Feminisms in Lebanon”.
14 Anderson, “The Student Movement in 1968”.
15 Amel’s vision states that “we should exit of the confessional system, to move towards the civil society and the citizenship in a civic and democratic state.” For more information, see http://amel.org/about-us/vision/
16 I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer who pointed out this dimension. Historicising today’s youth activism also helps explain why some people from the older generation have chosen to engage in many of today’s young activist groups. Indeed, they seem to recognise in their programs and actions many of the goals and horizons they sought when they used to be politically active.
17 Gambill, “Student Politics in Lebanon”; Chehayeb, “Fairuz, Hezbollah”.
18 Paciello and Pioppi, Youth in South East Mediterranean, 17.
19 Harb and Fawaz, “Influencing the Politics of Reconstruction”; Harb, “Beyrouth-Madinati”.
20 Power2Youth is subtitled “A Comprehensive Approach to the Understanding of Youth Exclusion and the Prospects for Youth-led Change in the South and East Mediterranean”. www.power2youth.eu
21 The research team included Nadine Khayat and Maguy Arnous, whom I thank for their input and help.
22 Harb, Le Hezbollah à Beyrouth.
23 Atallah, “Turning a Research Idea”.
24 Abi-Yaghi and Catusse, “Non à l’Etat-holding”.
25 Today, Lebanon is amongst the top ten countries in the world in terms of remittances, reaching about 20% of its GDP (according to Kasparian, L’émigration des jeunes libanais), with a diaspora said to reach seven million people (two times its population).
26 De Bel-Air, “Factors of Youth Exclusion/Inclusion”.
27 Many young men find jobs by resorting to military enrollment in armed forces associated to political parties, militias, and/or private security, as well as employment in the national army and police. They end up having a strong presence in streets and public spaces, which they control, patrol, police, and secure, either officially or unofficially, but most often visibly. No studies document this source of employment for Lebanese youth.
28 Makhoul and Harrison, “Intercessory Wasta and Village Development”.
29 Tabar, “Country of Emigration and Immigration”. While the GCC is a destination for mostly skilled professional labour, Africa attracts less skilled youth and mostly people working in commerce, often in black market trade.
30 In its 2014 Global Wealth Databook report, Credit Suisse states that 0.3% of the Lebanese population own 50% of its wealth. http://stateofmind13.com/2015/02/18/0-3-of-lebanese-own-50-of-lebanon/
31 Academic studies on youth can be distinguished according to three methodological approaches, which I differentiate on the basis of discipline. First, scholars of economics, psychology (and sometimes sociology) investigate youth through quantitative tools, yielding a macro-level understanding of youth issues: they measure unemployment, education and migration rates, proposing indicators and costs; they evaluate values and assess related impacts on belonging; and they calculate participation in media. Second, political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists study youth using both quantitative and qualitative methods, conducive to meso- and micro- levels of youth analysis: they work on youth-led civil society organisations, young people’s agency in participating in public life (online and political), and youth’s negotiations of norms and practices. Third, public health researchers adopt a policy-oriented approach to analysis of youth’s practices. Mixing quantitative and qualitative methods conducive to policy recommendations, they examine youth’s (particularly adolescents’) relations to drugs, alcohol and sexuality, as well as to mental health, well-being and happiness, focusing on school and university students rather than ‘youth’ (See Karam et al., “Alcohol Use among University Students”, Karam et al., “A Rapid Situation Assessment Study”, and El Kak, “Sexuality and Sexual Health”). In addition, academic knowledge production on Lebanese youth is mainly produced in the English and French languages. I only identified minor sources in Arabic. Sources in different languages seldom cite each other. Even within the same language, there is compartmentalisation within each discipline, and scholars in one discipline are often unaware of findings in another.
32 Harb, “Assessing Youth Exclusion”.
33 See the Youth Forum website: http://www.youthforum-lb.org/en/. It seems to have been last updated in 2015.
34 Interview with a member of the Youth Forum, June 2015. For instance, while the National Youth Profile discusses at length the role of specific legal regulations enabling patriarchy and hetero-normative values and constraining the social integration of youth in Lebanon (particularly women and LGBTQ groups), the Youth Policy in Lebanon mentions broadly the need “to amend all laws to guarantee total equality between men and women in rights and duties” without specifying exactly what these laws are.
35 Clark and Zahar, “Critical Junctures”.
36 Harb, “Assessing Youth Exclusion.”
37 Nagel and Staeheli, “International Donors, NGOs.”
38 Ibid., 20.
39 Harb, “Assessing Youth Exclusion.”
40 I use “professionalisation” here in the sense of “NGO-isation” to refer to the fact that NGOs have little potential for fostering significant democratisation given the typically project-focused and short-term nature of their activities (see Jad, “The NGO-isation of Arab Women’s Movements”). As such, NGOs end up focusing on fundraising activities to secure their staff salaries and sustain themselves, and thus on project completion. In other words, “paying professionals [becomes] the norm while activists and volunteers start to disappear in a trend that [leads] to less action-oriented and more managerial type of organization” (Mitri, “From Public Space to Office Space”, 91).
41 On sectarian political parties’ service provision, see Cammett, “Partisan Activism and Access to Welfare”.
42 Sectarian political parties have been quite successful in mobilising youth, contrary to secular political parties such as the Lebanese Communist Party or the Syrian Socialist National Party, which are unable to attract young people as evidenced by their very limited impact on political life.
43 On Sunni youth’s mobilisation, including the short-lived excitement around Ahmad al-Assir, see Rabil, Salafism in Lebanon.
44 This is especially true for political parties with strong ideology such as the Tachnak and the Lebanese Forces, which best compare to Hezbollah in terms of managing autonomous professional institutions, but with far less financial resources. For the other political parties where political ideology is more fluid, such as the Amal Movement, Future Movement, Aoun’s FPM, PSP and the Kataeb, mobilisation strategies are less organised and professionalised, more clientelistic in their structure, and parasitic of public resources. This and the following discussion on Hezbollah’s organizations are based on Harb, Le Hezbollah à Beyrouth.
45 Ibid.
46 Saghieh, Youth Participation, 192-5.
47 Ibid.
48 Joseph, “Conceiving Family Relationships”, 274; Mikdashi, “Sex and Sectarianism”.
49 Faour, The Silent Revolution.
50 Herrera, “What’s New about Youth?”
51 BRD, Mapping Civil Society Organizations, 7-8, 60.
52 Ibid., 23.
53 Daleel Madani is an information and research centre for and about civil society in Lebanon, which includes an online searchable directory of NGOs in Lebanon .http://daleel-madani.org/directory.
54 On environmental NGOs, see Karam, Le Mouvement Civil au Liban; on disability rights, Kingston, Reproducing Sectarianism; on elections, see Atallah, “Turning a Research Idea”.
55 Leenders, Spoils of Truce.
56 Clark and Zahar, “Critical Junctures”.
57 For more on the post-2005 period in Lebanon and power reconfigurations, see Picard, “Lebanon in search of sovereignty.”
58 Ibid.
59 Interviews, June 2015.
60 Ibid.
61 Interviews, October 2015.
62 Clark and Zahar, “Critical Junctures”, 7.
63 Interviews, June 2015.
64 Clark and Zahar, “Critical Junctures”, 7.
65 Sukarieh and Tannock, Youth Rising?; Moghnieh, “Global Expertise”.
66 Kothari, “Introduction”.
67 Nagel and Staeheli, “International Donors, NGOs”; Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism.
68 Karam, Le Mouvement Civil au Liban; Kingston, Reproducing Sectarianism; Clark and Salloukh, “Elite Strategies”.
69 Salloukh et al., The Politics of Sectarianism, 53, 58-9.
70 National elections in Lebanon are designed in such a way as to allow the most powerful political parties to win the most votes, namely the ones led by sectarian elites and their constituencies. Scholars often note election law as the cornerstone of any significant political change in Lebanon. See Salloukh, “The Limits of Electoral Engineering”.
71 For more on the so-called 2008 conflict in Lebanon, and the ensuing changing rules of the political game in Lebanon, refer to the ICG report Lebanon: Hizbollah’s Weapons Turn Inward.
72 Interview, June 2015.
73 On the work of Samidoun, see Moghnieh, “Global Expertise”; on the role of the AUB Reconstruction Task Force, see Al-Harithy, Lessons in Post-War Reconstruction.
74 Maaroufi, “Can Lebanon’s Secular Youth?”
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Electricity shortages across Lebanon are notorious. A severe drought in 2014 also took a further toll on people, who now had to purchase water from dubious uncontrolled sources. Traffic in Lebanon has reached very high levels of congestion that significantly constrain people’s mobility.
78 Abiyaghi et al., “From isqat an-nizam at-ta’ifi ”, 78.
79 The following two paragraphs are based on interviews held in November 2015, as well as participant observation with these groups, informal conversations with their activists, and a desk review of their social media campaigns, their websites and reports which I have been conducting since 2013. For more, see Harb, “Cities and Political Change.”
80 Interview, November 2015.
81 On the role of action-research in social change, see Pettit, “Learning to Do Action Research”.
82 See their website, www.beirutmadinati.com, to check these documents, as well as their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. The Beirut Madinati crowdfunding campaign gathered close to $200,000 in less than three weeks. I am one of the early members of Beirut Madinati. This and the next paragraph are based on my insider’s experience of the movement.
83 Informal conversation, May 2015. Of course, Beirut Madinati is not to be romanticised and incorporates many challenges. For a critical review of its municipal campaign, see Cambanis, People Power and its Limits.
84 Nicholls and Uitermark, Cities and Social Movements, 11, 16.
85 To read more about the current electoral law, see Atallah “Our New Electoral Law”.
86 Diamond, “Postscript. From Activism to Democracy”, 324-6.
87 Paciello and Pioppi, “Youth in the South East Mediterranean”, 17.