Disarticulation and chains of equivalence: agonism and non-sectarian movements in post-war Beirut

Abstract

Divided cities are characterised by intergroup contestation over the wider issue of state legitimacy. Violent conflict has left a legacy of segregation, weak public services and clientelistic networks. Debates and practices for conflict management in divided cities centre on accommodationist or integrationist approaches. While accommodationist methods seek to recognise and accommodate ethnosectarian divisions within public institutions, it risks intensifying ethnosectarian polarisation and empowering elites to deepen control over communities. Integrationist methods, alternatively, aim to foster shared identities and relationships between groups, but are too optimistic in assuming that divisions can be overcome through rational deliberation. As an alternative, I deploy Mouffe’s theory of agonistic conflict to show how various non-sectarian movements contest the hegemony of a sectarian system that reproduces exclusion and inequality. To this end, I use key dimensions of agonism – ‘rearticulation/disarticulation’ and ‘chains of equivalence’– to analyse different types of non-sectarian actors and successive waves of protest, known as ‘You Stink’ and the ‘Thawra’, in post-war Beirut.

Keywords:

• Arab Spring
• civil society
• peacebuilding
• resistance and activism
• sectarianism and communalism
• urbanisation

The divided city

Divided cities are the ground zero upon which ethnosectarian¹ conflicts emerge and are sustained in the long term. Cities such as Belfast, Jerusalem, Beirut and Mostar are shaped by violently contending visions of state belonging that have left a legacy of polarisation across the polity and wider society (Bollens 2018; Gusic 2019; Nagle 2013, 2016, 2018; Nucho 2016; Strömbom 2019). These are places characterised by residential segregation, sectarian political parties and clientelistic networks (Cammett 2014; Parreira 2020). The desire to operationalise the goals of peace are frustrated by the divided city’s sectarianised spatial realities comprising a mosaic of local histories, geographies and power relationships (Bollens 2018).

The intractable character of contestation in divided cities presents major challenges to agencies tasked with peacebuilding. Debates and practices for conflict management broadly, though no means exclusively, centre on either accommodationist or integrationist approaches (see Nagle 2016; Bollens 2018; Gusic 2019). While accommodationist methods recognise and accommodate ethnosectarian divisions within public institutions, they risk intensifying polarisation by empowering elites to deepen their control over communities. Integrationist methods, alternatively, aim to foster shared identities and relationships between groups, but are too optimistic in assuming that divisions can be overcome through rational deliberation.

What other imaginaries are there to express alternatives to the status quo of ethnic polarisation? A less frequently considered conceptual framework for dealing with antagonistic conflict in divided cities is agonism (though see Strömbom 2019). While agonistic thinking embraces a range of interpretations, the work of Chantal Mouffe (2000, 2005a, 2005b, 2013, 2014, 2016) is most apposite. Although Mouffe does not directly address divided cities, her rendering of agonism merits close consideration for such places regarding how a violent clash of democratic political positions can be channelled into progressive political projects. Mouffe’s agonism takes seriously the ineradicability of antagonism – that social and political relations will always entail conflicts between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – which refuse to be resolved, closed down and completed as expressions of the democratic ideal by appeals to common reason. Mouffe argues that antagonistic differences involving incompatible political projects have to be acknowledged and affirmed in order for new counter-hegemonic narratives and practices to emerge.

In this paper I encourage conceptual travelling – the application of theory to new contexts – by using agonism as a framework to critically examine the potential of political contestation to engender progressive projects in divided cities. In deploying agonistic theory, my empirical focus is not so much on the conflictual relations between the main ethnic/sectarian groups; rather, I illuminate the activism of social movements that represent political identities typically excluded from a polity in which all political and social issues are ultimately dominated by the main ethnic/sectarian cleavage. Such movements range from feminists to LGBTQ, labour movements and activists campaigning against corruption and poor public services (Nagle 2016, 2018; Geha 2019a; Halawi and Salloukh 2020). These social movements do not purposely advance sectarian interests on behalf of a particular ethnic group, fomenting intercommunal antagonism and even spawning forms of collective violence in the process. They are instead non-sectarian in character by embracing a constituency and a set of policies that refuse to cohere to narrow sectarian limits (Geha 2019a).

In presenting an agonistic analysis of non-sectarian movements in divided cities I am wary of being lured by the false appeal of ‘third way-ism’ (Valbjørn 2020), the claim that agonism represents a superior third-way alternative that goes beyond the ‘simplistic’ binaries of integrationism/accommodationism. My deployment of agonism here is not normative in the sense of extolling a particular way of understanding the world that leads to policy prescriptions in divided cities. Agonism instead provides a particular conceptual framework to critically analyse how non-sectarian movements generate new forms of conflict and political cleavages that enable the pluralisation of interests and identities in divided cities.

To explore these issues this paper examines non-sectarian movements in Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon. Beirut is characterised as a divided city containing institutionalised sectarian cleavages that result primarily as a legacy of the civil war (1975–1990). While accommodationist forms of power-sharing have been deployed in an effort to sustain peace and security, this has been critiqued for exacerbating sectarian tensions and fomenting dysfunctional public institutions, corruption and clientelism (Leenders 2012; Salloukh 2019). Yet, in recent years, significant rounds of social movement activism and protest have been sustained by actors that cross cut sectarian boundaries to take to the streets of Beirut to challenge the post-war hegemony. These two waves of activism – You Stink (2015) and the Thawra ‘Uprising’ (2019–2020) – provide the main focus for this paper.

This paper thus seeks to contribute to agonistic research in several ways. It firstly examines the urban context of agonistic conflict, specifically post-war divided cities. Secondly, it highlights the role of social movement actors as agents of agonistic conflict. Thirdly, it critically engages with the extent to which agonistic conflict can sustain peacebuilding through struggles for gender inequality, the recognition of sexual diversity, and demands for public services.

This paper draws on ethnographic data collected during seven periods of research in Beirut, including circa 50 extensive interviews with activists, politicians and policymakers. Nearly all of these were conducted between 2014 and 2020, which gives the opportunity to show the development of activism over a period in Beirut that witnessed intense waves of contention by non-sectarian actors. Purposive sampling was used for the selection of interviewees to access expertise rich with inside information. Snowballing, in the form of word-of-mouth recommendations from interviewees, helped to expand the constituency of people interviewed. Semi-formal interviews were conducted in a range of places, including cafes, bars, community centres and offices. A thematic approach was used to identify key motifs regarding tactics, strategies and spaces used by activists, and the perspectives narrated by other actors. I position this within a constructivist epistemology that focuses on understanding the social context in which individuals attach meaning to their social reality. This data is triangulated with extensive reports, social media sources and policy documents produced by activists, human rights groups and media outlets. Given that activists are, in many cases, violently persecuted by the various arms of the state, and are routinely threatened by non-state actors, including militants, all interviews are anonymised. This issue is particularly relevant for LGBTQ activists. Same-sex relations are criminalised in Lebanon and activists have in recent times been subjected to persecution and harassment by state and non-state forces (Nagle and Fakhoury 2021). Interviews with these activists were always in places identified by them as safe.

Violently divided cities: integrationism and accommodationism

The driving force of polarisation in divided cities is linked to contested ideas of state legitimacy underpinned by a legacy of inequality between groups. In divided cities, social identities are often constrained by ethnic, sectarian and national allegiances, which provide little room for multiple identities and political projects crosscutting cleavages. For this reason, civic life, social life and political mobilisation tend to occur within rather than across groups, typically buttressed by residential segregation (Gusic 2019; Nagle 2013, 2016; Nucho 2016; Bollens 2018).

Yet many divided cities are increasingly marked by the ongoing retrenchment of the state in terms of producers and distributors of public goods (Leenders 2012; Cammett 2014). The history of violence has left these cities largely absent of the ‘modern infrastructure ideal’ (Graham and Marvin 2001) – centralised and consistent urban forms of governance for the production and distribution of public goods and services (Farooqui 2020; Nagle 2021, 6). Rather, the art of urban governance encompasses a dense composite of state and non-state actors exercising power through formal and informal institutions (Farooqui 2020). In this environment, non-state actors have often become the main agencies responsible for providing health, security and other infrastructural services to their communities on a sectarian basis (Nucho 2016; Parreira 2020).

Divided cities generate a pressing need for the design of institutions and processes to support peace (Bollens 2018; Gusic 2019). Two contending methods can be identified in relation to dealing with antagonistic ethnosectarian divisions: accommodationism and integrationism. Accommodationism accepts that there are limits to which ethnosectarian identities can be transformed in divided cities (see Nagle 2013). In starting with this assumption, accommodationism strongly overlaps with the ‘politics of recognition’ as a mode of conflict resolution (Taylor 1994). Recognition theorists claim that social and political conflict emerges when a group’s identity is misrecognised, unrecognised or palpably disrespected by members of other groups (see O’Neill 2003). Since this lack of recognition can manifest itself in material and status inequalities, the process of tackling injustice and misrecognition requires a strategy involving both redistributive polices and the formal recognition of identities within social and political institutions. In the context of divided cities, accommodationism finds expression through what Bollens (2018) calls the ‘equity strategy’: a system of allocating power and urban services equally to the main groups. The most notable instrument for accommodationism is expressed via power-sharing, a system that aims to give representative power to the salient ethnosectarian groups within government and across the public sector. While power-sharing institutions are typically designed for state government institutions, it is also often the case that power-sharing practices are deployed at the municipal level in divided cities (see Nagle 2016).

Accommodationism, however, can be questioned for institutionalising and even exacerbating divisions. By placing the emphasis on mechanisms, institutions and legislation to recognise rival groups, accommodationism lacks engagement with the belief systems that underpin conflict. When placed within the institutional setting of power-sharing, accommodationism can often expedite dysfunctional political institutions prone to deadlock and collapse (Horowitz 2014). Given its emphasis on allotting public services where strategic resources are allocated along strictly sectarian and clientelist lines, accommodationism often generates resource-based conflicts (Halawi and Salloukh 2020). Accommodationism, moreover, promotes the interests of the main ethnosectarian groups while simultaneously marginalising those groups and identities that do not align along the main cleavage, such as feminists, LGBTQ people, socialists and those who simply refuse to align with ethnosectarian categories (Nagle 2018).

As an alternative to the pitfalls of accommodationism, the strategy of integrationism has been promoted. Integrationist frameworks are largely oriented towards ending conflict by encouraging the formation of new collective identities that bring rival ethnosectarian groups together under the umbrella of a shared public identity, with ethnicity relegated to the private sphere (see Horowitz 2014). A common sense of citizenship is nurtured by uniform, singular and equal rights, formal social equality and justice. The public sphere is also a place where citizens debate in a rational manner issues concerning the common good rather than subordinating them to particularistic ethnic demands. This project entails a ‘reasonable pluralism’ to undergird the democratic order: the requirement that citizens do not seek to impose their own conception of the ‘good’ on others who do not share it (see Mouffe 2005b).

Integrationism can be challenged for seeing conflict between contending political projects as merely rational contestations over material interests and justice. These clashes instead form intangible identity disputes that involve intense and un-negotiable passions of belonging in divided cities Political antagonism, argues Mouffe (2014), is not necessarily pathological and destructive, and cannot be resolved by bringing together a multiplicity of perspectives and values to constitute a harmonious and non-conflictual ensemble. Thus, when it comes to divided societies, we can say that integrationism is overly optimistic that different political projects and communal identities can simply be sutured to fashion a collective whole (Nagle 2016). Yet, while there may be some overlap between integrationist and accommodationist approaches, it is safe to state that accommodationist methods have become the dominant and even hegemonic mode of conflict management in divided cities (see Bollens 2018).

Agonistic conflict: articulation and equivalence

What might an agonistic perspective contribute to understanding the progressive potential of conflict in divided cities? Mouffe (2016) forces us to acknowledge that there ‘will always be antagonism, struggles, and division of the social, and the need for institutions to deal with them will never disappear’. For Mouffe (2016) the ineradicable forms of group difference, which cannot be annexed, subsumed or reconciled into a unified political culture, represent a ‘radical negativity’, a space that must be filled by a strategy of political engagement between adversaries. Antagonistic political conflicts are important, argues Mouffe, because they construct choices between alternatives that are not seen as rational.

Mouffe has primarily placed agonism within the context of pluralistic, liberal societies, in which conflict increasingly centres on the rise of populist political projects. Agonistic politics can occur in such contexts if adversaries subscribe to what Mouffe (2014, 151) terms the ‘grammar of democratic life’, a shared allegiance to ‘the ethico-political values that constitute its principles of legitimacy, and to the institutions in which these are inscribed’. For agonistic politics to take place, it is a priori that an ‘opponent is not considered an enemy to be destroyed but an adversary whose existence is perceived as legitimate’ (Mouffe 2014, 151). It is essential, Mouffe (2014, 154) stresses, that any agonistic conflict occurs between ‘adversaries and not on a friend/enemy mode that might lead to civil war’.

Lauding the putatively progressive aspects of conflict risks minimising the immensely negative outcomes of contestation in divided cities, including ethnic cleansing and violence. It is notable that Mouffe has rarely considered the applicability of agonism to places with a legacy of violent polarisation or non-democratic contexts. In one striking exception, Mouffe identified Northern Ireland’s peace process as containing agonistic possibilities, since it has, she claims, given a space for nationalists and unionists to transform violent antagonism into healthy political adversarialism (Mouffe 2013). Given that the institutional architecture of Northern Ireland’s peace process is primarily rooted in power-sharing, it is accommodationist in character. This suggests that agonism overlaps with accommodationism when it comes to dealing with violently polarised societies and cities. Yet Northern Ireland’s power-sharing arrangements have also been characterised by dysfunctionalism and collapse, while at a wider societal level little evidence of reconciliation and peacebuilding is apparent (Nagle 2016; Bollens 2018).

Yet agonism is applicable for understanding particular dimensions of conflict and peacebuilding in divided cities if we deploy a richer and more inclusive form of its potentiality. Agonism, I argue, can capture new forms of political imagination that challenge existing distributions of power, and which proliferate political spaces to disrupt the existing status quo of the hegemonic system that legitimates division.

More specifically, three key features of Mouffe’s rendering of agonism are relevant to non-sectarian movements in divided cities. First, agonistic politics is not only concerned with the progressive potential of conflict between adversaries; the purpose of such endeavours is to construct counter-hegemonic projects: alternative modes of imaging political community. Such counter-hegemonic practices involve what Mouffe (2000, 2005a, 2005b) calls the ‘double movement’ of ‘disarticulation’ and ‘rearticulation’. While ‘disarticulation’ refers to a politics of destabilisation, the process of exposing and challenging the naturalness and common sense of hegemonic structures, which also act to repress alternatives, ‘rearticulation’ is when a variety of demands turn into claims that challenge existing power constellations (see also Tambakaki 2014). Mouffe’s (2014, 151) concept of hegemony is important here, since she highlights the contingency of hegemonic orders – the fact that they seek to construct a sense of themselves as the natural order, thus ‘concealing the originary acts of their contingent political institutions’. Every order, continues Mouffe (2014, 151), ‘is the expression of a particular structure of power relations and it is always established through the exclusion of other possibilities’. Thus, in divided cities hegemonic projects can be understood as the predominance of ethnic, sectarian and nationalist movements and interests, where the idea of ethnic polarisation in itself is largely ‘natural’ and sedimented into political institutions. Non-sectarian movements, through their efforts to pluralise and undermine the hegemony of ethnic politics, mobilise the strategies of ‘disarticulation’ and ‘rearticulation’.

Second, ‘rearticulation’, Mouffe argues, requires the construction of ‘chains of equivalence’ between movements made up of allied groups aiming to transform existing power relations (Mouffe 2014; see also Laclau and Mouffe 2000). These movements come together to forge democratic struggles that constitute new forms of counter-hegemony. Chains of equivalence captures how various marginalised and disadvantaged non-sectarian movements in divided societies coalesce, often briefly, to assemble creative and deeply political strategies to unveil and even remake the current hegemony of ethnosectarian politics. While these groups maintain their distinct identities and political demands, they also coordinate around an agenda of equivalence with other marginalised groups (Nagle 2021). The movements within their chain thus have a distinctive relation to the existing hegemony, and each group’s experience and interests are irreducible to the others’ (Purcell 2009). The concept of chains of equivalence directs our attention to the fact that hegemonic systems are reproduced through via multiple lines of inequality – gender, class, sexuality, race – and that change can only come about by attacking the pressure points of the system through coordinated activism.

Third, Mouffe (2000, 2014) urges us to take seriously the power of ‘passions’ and ‘affect’ in contemporary politics. For Mouffe, the group identities that always underpin ‘us’ versus ‘them’ are adversarial conflicts. Passions are central to agonistic politics and democratic practice because they stimulate people to act and become involved in movements engaged in eroding the common effects of existing hegemonic practices. The act of ‘rearticulation’ requires movements to form new and different regimes of powerful desires and effect, ‘so as to bring about a collective will sustained by common affects able to challenge the existing order’ (Mouffe 2014, 157).

In divided cities, ‘passions’, of course, drive divisive and antagonistic ethnic politics. Rival claims to political legitimacy and state sovereignty require citizens to identify themselves intensively with mutually exclusive political movements. Group attachments tend to be expressed in terms of Othering: viewing the rival group in terms of negative stereotypes and prejudice, and as mortal enemies, which has the corollary effect of legitimating sectarian violence. Yet, despite the hazards involved in passionate politics, passions, when harnessed by non-sectarian actors, can help with the formation of the ‘chains of equivalence’ needed for various actors to come together, and it helps them delegitimise and reconfigure the narratives of division and the actors who may benefit – politically and economically – from ethnic/sectarian partisanship. Passions, moreover, provide the fuel for actors in social movements to stimulate alternative ways of imagining society and politics from that served up in the staple diet of sectarian antagonism.

In recognition that non-sectarian movements constitute a heterogeneous field of actors, who nevertheless form alliances at particular junctures, this paper aims to further develop agonistic theory by emphasising the existence of different agonistic actors and conflicts. For the purpose of analysis, I identify two types of movement actors that use agonistic frameworks to challenge the hegemony of divisive sectarian politics: pluralisers and intersectionalists. Pluralisers are actors who focus their energy on creating new societal conflicts around rights for sexual difference, gender equality and tolerance for migrants – issues that have been marginalised in the context of a sectarian polity. They are pluralisers because they are trying to make society recognise the existence of and rights for multiple forms of identity and belonging that have hitherto been excluded and repressed. Intersectionalists, alternatively, seek to identify the multiple pinpoints through which the system creates inequalities while simultaneously creating alliances across marginalised groups to attack the system at its weak points. Intersectionalists thus bring together pluralisers through the building of alliances and networks.

Beirut: the divided city

As a divided city, Beirut provides an important case study to examine the potential of agonism for peacebuilding. Beirut’s status as a divided city largely stems from the civil war (1975–1990). While the conflict was not simply sectarian and featured leading roles for external actors, the war undoubtedly led to an amplification of sectarian divisions across the city (Cammett 2014). In the context of state collapse, the numerous sectarian militias became the main actors in terms of providing services for their communities, ranging from medical care to education, refuse collection, and the supply of gas and electricity (Nucho 2016). In so doing, the militias used a combination of violence and services to cement control over their fiefdoms. By the end of the war, the largest militia groups were operating as states within the state, with their own social welfare departments, press and media outlets, and powerful political parties proclaiming to defend the interests of particular sects (Nagle and Clancy 2019).

Rather than engender reconciliation, the post-war era has seen the entrenchment of sectarianism in all domains of political and social life, owing to strategies of accommodationism (Salloukh et al. 2015). The institutionalisation of sectarian divisions is put into practice through the exercise of post-war power-sharing. Power-sharing is underpinned by the ‘allotment state’ (‘muhasasa’), which grants all of the constituent groups − 18 Muslim and Christian sects – representation in government and across public offices (Leenders 2012), thus making sectarianism the foundation of society–state relations (Cammett 2014). Power-sharing is legitimated as the best option to protect Lebanon’s sectarian pluralism by ensuring a covenant of coexistence between the state’s powerful sects (Salloukh et al. 2015). Yet in presenting themselves as the guardians of sectarian pluralism, the sectarian elites position themselves as bastions of peace and security (Geha 2019a), thus legitimating the use of violence and coercion to maintain the status quo.

In parallel with the strong sectarian system is a weak state, calculatingly cultivated by sectarian leaders. State retrenchment is maintained by sectarian elites, as this provides cover for them to control services and to use them as instruments of coercion and booty. Sectarian networks control as much as 60% of basic health services in Beirut (Cammett 2014), while the supply of electricity and gas, microcredit and even the construction of roads are utilised as forms of extractive power (Nucho 2016). Indeed, the weak state ensures the continuation of the strong sectarian system. In particular, the economically marginalised are obligated to seek sectarian patronage for a range of social services (Salloukh 2019). In return for accessing services from the sectarian parties, individuals are expected to reciprocate by casting their ballot on election day. These forms of power wielded by sectarian networks are further expedited by how these groups have actively constructed segregation in the city, illuminated by a patchwork of homogeneous, self-contained and exclusive spaces that have increasingly colonised the urban environment (Salloukh et al. 2015, 29).

Through exclusively privileging the interests of the main sectarian groups, the accommodationist system has the further effect of negatively regressing demands for gender equality and rights for LGBTQ people, workers, migrants and refugees. Indeed, as Salloukh et al. (2015, 2) argue, the system is set up to prevent ‘the emergence of alternative, transsectarian or non-sectarian, modes of political mobilization’. Yet, in spite of and in reaction to the divisive sectarian system, a range of non-sectarian movements resist their marginalisation and exclusion, including feminist, anti-corruption and privatisation, LGBTQ, labour, refugee and anti-racist groups (Nagle 2016).

Garbage politics and ‘You Stink’

I now turn to examine agonistic conflict in Beirut through two waves of mobilisation: ‘You Stink’ (2015) and the ‘Thawra’ ‘Uprising’ (2019–). Both cycles of contention were a response to the deliberate failures of the sectarian state to produce goods and services. This situation is partly attributable to the ‘allotment state’ noted above, in which public positions and resources are handed out according to sectarian quotas (Salloukh 2019). Power-sharing has allowed sectarian elites to capture public and private institutions in the shadow of the state, which they use to further political power and personal enrichment through corruption and patronage networks (Leenders 2012).² Thus, sectarianism is renewed on a daily basis through the sectarian parties’ provision of essential services and infrastructure, which is used to create cultures of dependency tightly binding communities with elites (Nucho 2016). The situation is facilitated by Lebanon’s failing economy, characterised by exponentially rising public debt, which has left half of the population living in poverty and increasingly reliant on the informal sphere of sectarian networks (Salloukh 2019). Rather than merely reflecting existing sectarian divisions, the weak state and strong sectarian system combine to elevate citizens as sectarian subjects above all other forms of social and political identity (Salloukh et al. 2015).

Illustrative of this situation is trash collection in Beirut. Rather than being administered by municipal authorities, in the post-war era refuse collection was handed to the private sector – itself connected to particular sectarian parties. Yet, given that the authority to award contracts to private companies was held by the power-sharing government, the issue of refuse disposal was fundamentally one that was subject to pie-sharing and patronage politics, with the main parties agreeing on how the largesse would be allocated to clients. This consensus collapsed in 2015 as the result of political conflict and subsequent paralysis within the power-sharing government. The government, unable to agree on extending the contract to the company responsible for trash collection, oversaw a situation in which thousands of tonnes of decaying waste quickly amassed in the streets of Beirut.³ In a rapid response to an unfolding major health and environmental catastrophe, a new non-sectarian movement – ‘You Stink’ – organised demonstrations in Beirut city centre to accuse the government of prioritising sectarian politics above the health of the wider population. You Stink was notable for its ‘unprecedented cross-class, cross-region, and cross-sectarian’ character (Halawi and Salloukh 2020, 324). In daily demonstrations, protestors held refuse bags and wore paper masks to cover the stench of the trash and as a symbolic act against what they viewed as a ‘stinking’ political class that needed to be ‘cleaned up’ (Nagle 2018; Geha 2019a; Halawi and Salloukh 2020).

Thus, rather than protests limited to garbage collection, the movement used trash to illuminate the policies of sectarian polarisation, corruption and neoliberal privatisation deployed by a failed leadership. As Geha notes (2019a, 79), while the trash crisis was an environmental crisis, ‘it was framed purely in political terms and as such garnered support from anti-system and anti-sectarian activists in Lebanon’. A leading activist explained to me that the sectarian elites ‘are using the sectarian system for their corruption, so it is a vicious circle and you have to find a way to stop it’.⁴ Another activist asked, ‘How can we hope to build peace with people whose survival depends on maintaining a state of non-peace?⁵

The contestatory politics advanced by You Stink can be understood as agonistic conflict. Mouffe’s iteration of agonistic conflict against hegemonic systems entails the double movement of ‘disarticulation’ (exposing and rupturing existing hegemonic discourses and practices) and ‘rearticulation’ (assembling new and old elements into different configurations of counter-hegemonic power). ‘Disarticulation’ is more than exposing deeply embedded forms of social inequality and injustice reproduced by hegemonic orders; it is a struggle to destabilise the discursive forms of meaning that underpin such systems. It is only once the naturalness of the hegemonic order is disrupted that we can engage in ‘rearticulation’: establishing a relationship among elements such that their identity is modified. Disarticulation and rearticulation thus evince the dual use of the meaning of ‘articulate’: to speak and to join together (Mouffe 2000).

The You Stink movement utilised disarticulation strategies by identifying not only the dysfunctionalism of the sectarian system but how elites actively expedite systemic weakness in order to economically and politically benefit from its reproduction. As Halawi and Salloukh (2020, 333) explain, the whole apparatus of the system, encompassing political economic, institutional, legal, interpersonal, ideological and infrastructural practices, has made ‘sectarian modes of identification assume a form of common sense or hegemony for most Lebanese’. Disarticulation, in this context, is the process by which activists inspire people to formalise shared understandings of their situation as one of oppression and marginalisation. This project of disarticulation involves the act of unveiling how poor public services – such as refuse collection – political dysfunctionalism, corruption and declining living standards, rather than discrete issues, are fundamentally interwoven dynamics produced by the sectarian leaders. A key aim of protests was thus to illuminate the sectarian system and its leaders as the objects of responsibility and blame. A You Stink leader argued that the movement represented ‘the silent majority that is disenfranchised, but they are not powerless’.⁶ The activist continued:

People are angry in Lebanon and what the politicians do is that they turn this anger toward the sectarian ‘other’. What we try to do is redirect the anger at the actual culprits. For once we realise that our economic and our day-to-day anger shouldn’t be directed at one another: it should be directed at the people in power and for us to make them accountable. As long as we keep redirecting the anger this might get the people to forget about their sectarian background and go towards the higher goal: a better country for us all …. There is no such thing as sectarian segregation unless it’s in the mind of our politicians. (see Nagle 2018, 1385)⁷

For a You Stink leading activist, a central mission is to smash the ‘god-like’ stature of the sectarian elites:

They have been treated as gods for the past thirty years …. They are supposed to be held accountable when they fail and they have failed us miserably. We are killing off their god-like aspect and bringing them down to the ground and when you have them on the ground, you will beat them up. (see Nagle 2018, 1385)

Rearticulation and chains of equivalence: the Thawra

While You Stink engaged in disarticulation strategies, the issue of enacting rearticulation is more problematic. Rearticulation involves the moment of politicisation, when discontent and disaffection turn into claims that challenge existing power constellations. Certainly, You Stink’s activists not only hoped to expose corruption, clientelism and political dysfunction – they also identified these issues as fundamentally the product of the sectarian system. The movement, in addition, articulated a powerful alternative vision to the sectarian system. This alternative politics was enshrined in the very constituency of the movement – the fact that it brought together all sectors of the population and transcended sectarian boundaries represented a form of prefigurative politics that imagined an inclusive and pluralistic society.

This of course generates questions regarding the extent to which You Stink effected change through its protests. It is clear that the protests did not lead to the overthrowing of Lebanon’s sectarian elite and the dismantling of power-sharing. Yet, rather than dismiss the protest as failures, we can attempt to understand the movement’s longer term legacy. For hegemonic practices to be challenged through agonistic conflict requires marginalised and disadvantaged groups to assemble deeply political strategies. The act of rearticulation necessitates disparate political projects transforming into forms that challenge existing power structures. Thus, sectional political particularisms are transformed into broader movements built on alliances of marginalised groups. This alliance building, this rearticulation of fragmented identities and political actors, is radical since hegemonic systems seek to maintain the status quo of separation and inequality.

As noted earlier, Mouffe terms this ‘chains of equivalence’ (Mouffe 2014). In a chain of equivalence various hitherto disconnected political projects coalesce for a period as groups equivalently marginalised. Being equivalent, notes Purcell (2009), is not to say that actors are identically disadvantaged. These chains of equivalence sustain intersectional politics for different activist groups, since each group has a specific relationship with the existing hegemony but is still set within broader alliances. Such intersectional movements also permit the opportunity to contest the hegemonic system at a number of points where it is reproduced while also fostering networks between movements.

While the intensity of the You Stink movement eventually dimmed in terms of street protests, it generated chains of equivalence among issues, grievances and movements. It is here where we can return to the idea of movement actors as pluralisers – groups that seek to pluralise a society dominated by antagonistic ethnosectarian identities – and intersectionalists – dense networks of actors that forge alliances within the framework of major waves of protest. The You Stink protests quickly evolved into a broad-based mobilisation. In the context of post-war Beirut, the movement made connections between what seemed disconnected agendas to eventually become linked issues in contesting the sectarian system. For this reason, the protests became popularly known as ‘al-Hirak’ (‘The Movement’), particularly as it expanded to embrace overlapping political actors: feminist collectives, environmentalists, queer activists and leftists. These actors made connections among various issues, ranging from the lack of public services such as electricity and sanitation to Lebanon’s collapsing economy, dysfunctional governance, gender inequality and processes of violent exclusion against non-normative sexual populations and migrants. In protests, there was consensus that these ills can largely be ascribed to the corrupt elite and their ‘garbage’ politics of sectarianism. Notably, the You Stink protests provided space for plural movement actors and identities that have been marginalised in the context of Lebanon’s sectarian system, especially feminist, LGBTQ and migrant workers.⁸ In a celebrated piece of graffiti that adorned a wall in Beirut’s downtown area during You Stink Protests in 2015, the linkages between some of these issues were starkly illuminated: ‘No Homophobia, Racism, Sexism, Classism’. Thus, in this sense, the protests came to encompass activist networks, such as feminists and queer activists, that grafted several different political projects onto the protests. The protests became a site for pluralisers aiming to generate plural political identities and conflicts, and for intersectionalists to bring these programmes together in dense activist networks.

While the You Stink demonstrations eventually waned, the chains of equivalence forged through the mobilisation provided a solid base of activist networks that could be reactivated under certain conditions in the future. The legacy of alliance building was galvanised with renewed intensity in October 2019, as a series of major protests erupted and quickly came to be known as the Thawra (‘Uprising’). The Thawra primarily began in response to a cascading series of crises caused by a major financial meltdown in Lebanon⁹ that was to leave more than 50% of the population below the poverty line. The Thawra movement quickly embraced a number of connected issues: corruption and the expropriation of public funds alongside demands for public services and jobs. As with You Stink, the Thawra represented a non-sectarian movement, described in media reports as ‘cutting through the sectarian divisions that for so long have dominated Lebanese life’ (Patience 2019). As Majed and Salman (2019) note, the sectarian ‘regime’s politics of division’ was ‘challenged by the uprising’s politics of solidarity’. If, as we saw earlier, the leaders of You Stink sought to illuminate the state’s corrupt sectarian leadership as the rightful target of people’s anger, then protesters in the Thawra ‘dared point fingers at their own sectarian leaders, confident in the knowledge that their counterparts from other sects are doing the same’ (Halawi and Salloukh 2020, 324). Activism in Beirut involved not only noisy demonstrations in defiance of the sectarian elite, but the occupation of places that had been privatised in the post-war era, and though street closures.

The Thawra generated new dimensions in making chains of equivalence a signature identity of the movement. It articulated clear connections between social injustice and the corrupt political economy of sectarianism, and in terms of how the sectarian system reproduces itself through regulating gender and sexuality. Indeed, one of the more significant characteristics of the Thawra was that it not only opened up space for feminist and queer movements, these actors assumed leadership in some of the uprising’s major marches and campaigns. In this sense, the process of disarticulation enacted by the movement highlighted the complex ways in which neoliberalism and sectarianism work in conjunction to reproduce patriarchy, homophobia, class inequality and antagonism between sects (see Geha 2019b; Mikdashi 2018).

Throughout the protests, feminist groups staged successive women’s marches in Beirut. In their chants and slogans, they demanded rights for women and queer people and protection against sexual harassment and violence.¹⁰ A feminist and queer activist explained:

The feminist initiatives brought something amazing to the protests. Queer rights, anti-racist organizing, refugee organizing, coalition work. It all started to ‘come out’. One of the most visible set of actors were feminist activists. Many of these activists embraced LGBTQ activism and they were at the front lines of the protests.¹¹

In this sense, Mouffe’s concept of chains of equivalence strongly overlaps with the idea of intersectionality, in which various issues and identities are assembled to foster alliance building across multiple struggles. Intersectionality has become a major framework to understand the differences that lie within social categories and where these differences interact to generate systemic privilege and inequality (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013). Thus, we need to bring in sex, ethnicity, race, class and ability, among many forms of social position, and show how they overlap and intersect to determine, in many cases, gradations of power and exclusion. The point of intersectionality is that it helps us understand the real-world consequences that determine the limits of life for people, ranging from their access to public services and employment to their daily experience of harassment and prejudice.

A feminist activist in Beirut explained how contesting sectarianism involves understanding its intersectional dimensions, which in turn necessitates cross-cutting networks: ‘you have to look at the sectarian system from an intersectional perspective. You have to look at in terms of how it affects your social class, your economic class, your race, your ability, your sexuality’.¹² Through understanding the multiple overlapping ways in which the sectarian system generates inequality across society, activists seek to build coalitions of actors that can provide opposition. Thus, opposing racism, poverty, patriarchy and homophobia constitutes interlinked struggles within the framework of the sectarian system. An activist noted how the Thawra forged a site for a political project in which queer feminists chanted slogans and organised events targeting intersections between sexuality, migration, weak public services, sectarianism and corruption.¹³ On the protest tents erected in Beirut city centre, activists juxtaposed numerous slogans daubed in various colours: ‘No To Political Parties And To Sectarianism’, ‘No To Homophobia’, ‘This Is A Feminist Revolution’, and ‘Domestic Migrant Rights’. In these spaces, LGBTQ and feminist activists claimed intersectionality as a frame to interlink a number of political projects and identities (Nagle and Fakhoury 2021).

As has been illuminated in the activism of You Stink and the Thawra, two broad but profoundly overlapping categories of agonistic conflict were advanced by non-sectarian movements: pluralisers and intersectionalists. Pluralisers want to introduce new forms of social and political conflict closed down by the binaries reproduced by ethnosectarianism. Pluralisers refuse to accept that their identity coheres to simplistic expressions of ethnosectarian identity. They thus force wider society to confront the reality of plural political projects and modes of being, such as differences along the axes of gender, sexual diversity, ethnicity and class. In seeking to pluralise society, it follows that there is a need to connect these marginalised forms of identity without subsuming them within a monolithic political movement. Intersectionalists thus challenge the hegemony of a system that not only relies upon maintaining sectarian polarisation but which excludes and separates the rights and demands of women, non-normative sexual populations, domestic workers, migrants and refugees.

‘All means all’: passionate activisms?

As noted earlier, central to Mouffe’s parsing of agonistic conflict is the centrality of effect and passions in social movement activism. Political projects, argues Mouffe (2014, 2018), are never merely rational expressions in which actors solely pursue interests; the construction of ‘we/they’ forms of identification also involves deep passions. Such passions are particularly powerful when movements appeal to the ‘underdog’ against ‘those in power’. This emerges, claims Mouffe, when the subject of collective action – the people – are capable of reconfiguring a lived social order as unfair.

Passion and affects are certainly at the core of the non-sectarian movements and protests depicted in this paper. Claims for the recognition of sexual diversity and rights for women, refugees and migrants, alongside demands for greater democratic accountability and an end to clientelistic politics and poor public services, all involve passionate articulations of identity, often in opposition to the unfairness of sectarian politics. Being non-sectarian generates a sense of identity that stands in antagonism to the current status quo of divisive sectarian politics. This antagonism to the sectarian system and its cadre of elites was expressed during the You Stink and Thawra mobilisations in 2015 and 2019. In demonstrations some participants chanted ‘Kellon ya’ani kellon’ (‘All of them means all of them’), a call and demand for all sectarian leaders to be made accountable. This expression of opposition allowed for the formation of a sense of ‘we-ness’, the forging of collective identity that transcends sect, class and gender divisions while simultaneously recognising the distinct claims of different groups. To be non-sectarian generates emotionally infused identities that symbolise inclusivity, sharing and tolerance.

Yet, in articulating such passions, do non-sectarian movements transgress Mouffe’s (2014, 151) demand that movements adhere to ‘the ethico-political values that constitute its principles of legitimacy, and to the institutions in which these are inscribed’? If so, groups are required to be adversaries rather than enemies who constitute lines of battle that ‘might lead to civil war’. Demanding the abolition of the sectarian system and the removal of the sectarian elite appear to foment a more revolutionary approach. Indeed, some of the actors within You Stink and the Thawra have made such objectives a core driver of their activism. For example, a group called ‘Ishaab Yurid’ (‘The People Want’) called for the complete dismantling of the sectarian system through revolutionary action, while another party – ‘Mouwatinoun wa Mouwatinat Fi Dawla’ (Citizens in a State) – openly sought control of the levers of power in order to constitute a civil state that provides an ‘alternative to the kind of postwar consociational power-sharing that reified sectarian identities, destroyed state institutions, and sanctioned violence against women and marginalised groups’ (Halawi and Salloukh 2020, 330). However, a more complex or at least pluralistic set of demands and political projects exists in the rubric of non-sectarian movements, not all of which cohere with calls to dispense with the system in total. Some actors within You Stink and the Thawra articulate reformist measures or at least space within the system for the inclusion of multiple forms of identity and politics.

Neither is it the case that participants in non-sectarian movements necessarily desire to reject sect-based identities. Their concern is with basic issues related to everyday life – with public services, availability of public spaces, jobs, addressing gender inequality and respect for sexual diversity. Moreover, non-sectarian movements are committed to the ‘grammar of democratic life’. They advocate not violence but the use of peaceful protest to change the structure of state society relations in post-war Lebanon. Indeed, it is notable that protests involving hundreds of thousands of people in Beirut drew on the tenets of non-violent direct action. Passions and affect, therefore, stimulate people to take to the streets to demand alternatives and social change.

The framework of agonistic conflict, passions and affect is more problematic when we consider the sectarian elites. It is not realistic to claim that they see anti-system, non-sectarian protestors involved in You Stink and the Thawra as worthy adversaries whose political identities merit recognition. Lebanon’s sectarian elites have instead used all of the tools at their disposal to stymie political and social change. As Geha (2019c) explains, Lebanon’s sectarian elites have employed co-optation, counter-narratives and repression to demobilise protests that challenge the core pillars of sectarian representation.¹⁴ During protests, elites have even tried to pass a new amnesty law as an opportunity to protect themselves from any form of accountability.¹⁵ Any attempt to change power-sharing is repelled by elites on the basis that they are the sole guarantors of stability and that any change to Lebanon’s sectarian system would open the door to conflict and violence. For instance, during the You Stink protests a prominent sectarian leader accused the protesters of attempting ‘to topple what is left of the institutions and the government, which would shake and endanger stability and civil peace’ (Daily Star 2015).

This prompts us to ask whether agonistic conflict can occur in a situation in which not all of the salient actors subscribe to its core tenets. Addressing this question necessitates that we return to the issue of how far agonism can apply to places marked by ongoing patterns of political violence and sectarian polarisation, and where a panoply of state and non-state actors deploy their various arms to repress actors mobilising for political and social change. This observation is pertinent in relation to the dynamics of apparent growing urban sectarian polarisation in the afterlives of the 2011 Arab Uprisings. Several regimes and states are characterised by what Parreira (2020) terms the ‘art of not governing’ – an approach to governance marked by state absenteeism in policymaking and service provision. Rather than seek popular consent through widening the social contract, elites are united by the same goal: to stay in power at all costs. Urban environments are thus key sites marked by increasing sectarian division, socioeconomic inequality and concomitant struggles for legitimacy and power. In order to maintain control, regimes are willing to use violence and coercion against groups seeking accountability, change and equality. Such regimes are more concerned with maintaining the status quo than with opening up space for agonistic conflict.

Conclusion

Divided cities are places characterised by conflictual cleavages that permeate all spheres of politics and society. Contestation between groups in such places tends to become intractable since it involves mutually exclusive visions of state legitimacy. Scholarly and policymaking debates directed towards conflict management and peacebuilding in divided societies gravitates around two contending but occasionally overlapping concepts: integrationism and accommodationism. These ideas are used to deal with the main ethnosectarian groups involved in conflict. Yet while accommodationism is too pessimistic about the potential of ethnosectarian divisions to be transformed, integrationism is too optimistic about the capacity of such divisions to be overcome through consensus.

In this article I have applied Mouffe’s conceptual framework of agonism to help conceptualise some of the dynamics of non-sectarian activism in the divided city of Beirut. Mouffe accepts agonistic conflict as a key dimension of political struggle, which needs to be understood as potentially generating progressive change, if set within the parameters of healthy adversarialism. Agonistic conflict, argues Mouffe, is not just the recognition of the existence of conflict, but the establishment of truly alternative, counter-hegemonic projects, which involve processes of ‘disarticulation’, ‘rearticulation’, ‘chains of equivalence’, ‘passion’ and ‘affect’. I have sought to show how these forms are evident in non-sectarian movements in Beirut as they seek to challenge the hegemony of the sectarian system. I have, in addition, modestly developed agonistic theory by showing different, though complementary, types of agonistic movements: pluralisers and intersectionalists.

A remaining question is: What does this all point to? Do non-sectarian movements, through the use of agonistic frameworks, stimulate real change? If we were to look at public policies and institutions as evidence of the change brought about by non-sectarian movements, we would probably not find much to support this claim. The capacity of these waves of non-sectarian protest to sustain genuine political transformation in the teeth of a power-sharing system designed to withstand change is limited. Halawi and Salloukh (2020, 326), notably, argue that the You Stink and Thawra movements squandered an opportunity for ‘true political organisation’ through their refusal to construct a common programme. These movements instead preferred to create loosely structured, non-hierarchical networks that never reached the point of articulating an agenda for concrete political change. There is also the risk of internal tensions within the movement, which often fragments and disrupts organising and collective action. Often, such disputes are caused by the lack of a common political framework, limited cohesion and poor organisational structures that limit decision-making and accountability. Where the movements showed evidence of fracture, the strongly organised sectarian parties acted to intimidate or co-opt ‘an assembly of disorganized non-, anti-, or cross-sectarian groups’ (Halawi and Salloukh 2020, 330).

LGBTQ, feminist, anti-corruption and other non-sectarian movements cannot claim that they have made the government accede to their demands. Yet change can be understood in different ways: pluralisers and intersectionalists, as agonistic movements, have transformed public consciousness, forged networks and solidarity across several political projects and exposed the hegemony of the system so that it can be placed under threat. As expressed by an activist: ‘This is our aim. Breaking the wall through counter-narratives’.¹⁶

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (Ref: 2017-616).

Notes on contributors

John Nagle

John Nagle is Professor of sociology at Queen’s University Belfast. He is also Fellow for SEPAD (Sectarianism, Proxies & De-sectarianisation), a project hosted at the Richardson Institute, Lancaster University. His research focusses on divided cities, particularly Belfast and Beirut. He examines social movement activism in divided cities and in the context of post-war power-sharing. He has published six books and more than 50 articles and chapters in leading international journals and edited volumes.

Notes

1 ‘Ethnosectarian’ is used in this paper to capture the politicisation of ethnic and sectarian group identities.

2 The 2019 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) ranked Lebanon among the world’s most corrupt countries and territories – 137th of 180. In surveys, 67% of Lebanese citizens believe that most or all government officials are involved in some form of corruption.

3 Parliamentary elections had been postponed twice and a presidential vacuum prevailed.

4 Interview with leading You Stink activist, January 2016.

5 Interview with leading civil society activist, June 2015.

6 Interview with leading You Stink activist, January 2016.

7 Interview with leading You Stink activist, January 2016.

8 The ‘kafala’ system refers to migrant domestic workers employed in private households and where the legal residency of workers is tied to their contract with their employer. Lebanon has an estimated 250,000 kafala workers. Abuses of kafala migrants include employers forcing them to work excessive hours, denying them rest days and holidays, and confiscating their passports.

9 Gross domestic product growth contracted by 6.7% in 2019 and 19.2% in 2020.

10 Lebanon’s legal system – enshrined in Article 9 of the constitution – is characterised by legal pluralism, which in effect grants a high degree of autonomy to the 18 formally recognised sects over their internal matters. The personal status laws sustain inequalities between women and men. For example, all sects allow girls to marry at a younger age than boys, women are prohibited from passing their nationality to their children, it is much more difficult for women to obtain a divorce compared to men, and marital rape and other forms of domestic violence have been sanctioned. Same-sex relations are criminalised under Article 534 of Lebanon’s legal code (see Mikdashi 2018).

11 Interview with LGBTQ activist, November 2019.

12 Interview with feminist activist, October 2017.

13 Interview with feminist activist, November 2019.

14 At different times during the protest, most of the sectarian parties have been involved in a bid to settle sectarian scores. For example, Hizbullah joined the protests against the Banque du Liban since that institution was perceived by Hizbullah as being punitive against the party (see Halawi and Salloukh 2020, 327).

15 In 2019. The Lebanese government sought parliamentary approval for a blanket amnesty law to pardon public officials accused of embezzlement, corruption and misuse of public office.

16 Interview with feminist activist, November 2019.