3 Years after the Arab Uprisings: The Strategic Choices of Lebanon’s Anti-Establishment Movement, by Karim Safieddine – 28 June 2024

From Arab Reform Initiative

Drawing on focus groups with activists, Karim Safieddine examines the strategic choices of Lebanon’s nonsectarian opposition since 2011, from the You Stink movement and the October 2019 uprising to the 2022 parliamentary elections, and what they reveal about leadership, organisation and electoral politics.

In 2011, the Arab world embarked on a series of popular insurrections that called for the rejection of authoritarianism, rising inequality, and unemployment. Millions of people across the region joined the protests to break the cycle of fear created by neoliberal police states that had a strong hold on their daily lives. In the case of Lebanon, street protests had a somewhat different angle: the struggle for the fall of the sectarian regime. Published material on Lebanon’s post-2011 social movements often elaborate on the “dilemma of sectarian politics” fragmenting the movement from within (Meier, 2015), the “lack of political organizing” (Halawi & Salloukh, 2020), and a “civil society focus” (Vértes et al., 2021) as some of the frames in which we recognize how the creation of power from below is potentially obstructed. While these insights are crucial, there seems to be an overall gap in the literature about centering particular behavioral and discursive choices, prompting this attempt to demystify the country’s nonsectarian opposition. There is a need for an in-depth, microanalysis of the day-to-day choices made by specific groups and organizations engaging in political practice from below, as opposed to utilizing analytical frames that focus on overall structural fields informing these decisions. Any analysis of the rise of this anti-establishment movement that does not incorporate the emergence of alternative social relations centering the lives of individual organizers indirectly discounts the primary motivations and stories that inform their involvement and its impact.

Since 2011, nonsectarian activists, whom I conceive of here as political workers, have built coalitions; launched campaigns; organized demonstrations; run for elections; and built political groups, movements, factions, and parties that attempt to sustain and empower their political positioning in a precarious social and institutional climate. Repression, emigration, economic crises, COVID-19, and resource asymmetry are some of the macrostructural and top-down challenges that have inhibited the capacity of these movements to transform power relations in their contexts.

Despite these particular hindrances, the will of these actors and the political opportunities available to them at key moments encouraging popular insurrection have put forth crucial and everlasting discursive developments, culminating with the You Stink movement of 2015 and the October 17 uprising in 2019. These developments are highlighted by the choices and alignments pursued during the 2022 parliamentary elections, which in and of themselves sparked important debates regarding issues of organization and the dynamic relationship between movements and state institutions with regard to representation and policy.

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Karim Safieddine is a doctoral student and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Arab Reform Initiative. His research looks at how social movements in Lebanon challenge or reproduce prevailing power relations and ideological norms.

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