A deeply divided population. An explosion, a mass government resignation. A militia stronger than the military, an invasion from the South. And yet, survival.
In January 2025, elections in Lebanon brought to power President Joseph Aoun, the first president in three years since the previous president stepped down after the 2020 crisis. Since then, the tentative ceasefire with Israel after the 2024 war has held, keeping the country out of war by a thread, even while Israel continues to exert extreme pressure upon both Hezbollah and the Lebanese government via continued operations in the country. Despite this external coercion, as well as the current domestic challenges combined with the perils of the past, the Lebanese state’s ability to endure signals a distinctive resilience in what is widely considered a failed state. In fact, Lebanon could even be a model for peace in the Middle East, as the state perseveres amidst dominant paramilitaries, foreign invasions, and frail governments.
The Collapse
Easily-explosive balancing acts are nothing new for the Lebanese state. Lebanon devolved into a civil war in 1975, when general unrest against the right-wing Maronite Christian government entangled with the significant influx of Palestinian fighters fleeing Jordan to detonate decades of ethnic tensions. Harsh, calculating, and often brutal Syrian and Israeli maneuvering delegitimized the Lebanese government outright. As the war raged on, army defections to anti-government factions increased among many ethnic groups, leaving primarily Maronite Christians in the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF).
Thus, the Lebanese people began to see the LAF as simply another sectarian Christian militia under Israel’s thumb, unable to protect the Lebanese people from both insurgent groups and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) encroachment, according to Steven Simon in his book, “Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East.” As the dust settled, the Lebanese government and its international backers emerged as the weakest powers in Lebanon. Those troubled years absolutely mangled the legitimacy of the Lebanese state.
A State Within a State
That civil war additionally saw the emergence of Hezbollah, a faction so powerful that it is often considered “a state within a state.” Rather than some kind of power vacuum, Hezbollah was created as a direct response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, as the book “Grand Delusion” goes on to discuss. With high-level Iranian and Syrian support, Hezbollah became a major player in the war, executing the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing which killed hundreds of American and dozens of French peacekeeping soldiers. With this external support combined with vocal support within Lebanon, Hezbollah jumped into politics as a legitimate actor and entrenched itself as a key part of post-war Lebanon.
Despite entering official politics, Hezbollah never disarmed, creating a security apparatus clearly distinct from the Lebanese state. Such a peculiar, idiosyncratic relationship between sectarian paramilitaries and official security forces would normally spell doom for a nation.
Is Lebanon Unique?
The relationship between the Lebanese government and Hezbollah has neither been one of forced co-optation nor one of entirely rogue anti-state paramilitaries, which, in countries such as Iraq and Sudan, seem to be the only possibilities. Instead, the government has been able to keep Hezbollah close and push it away simultaneously. While Hezbollah exerts considerable political influence within the civilian government, keeping the two somewhat connected, the LAF also reformed after the war in an attempt to yet again be a more diverse and representative military of Lebanon’s ethnic kaleidoscope, creating something inherently diametrically opposed to Hezbollah. While the LAF is certainly not a force to forget, Hezbollah is the dominant political party, a paramount national security force, and terrorist organization all in one. If sovereignty is defined as a state’s monopoly on violence within its own territory, then Hezbollah has been the greatest invalidation of the Lebanese government’s sovereignty ever since the former’s rise to power.
Legitimacy Against all Odds
Despite a devastating war in which the state emerged a feeble survivor followed by Hezbollah’s immediate threat to state authority, the Lebanese government endured with institutions more-or-less intact, albeit with some sizable reforms. The factions in Lebanon see this deliberating forum as a mode of power moderation, and the perseverance of this system through the worst of crises as signaling a tolerance or even desire for it among the many actors. Indeed, some experts believe that Hezbollah enjoyed its hybrid status as a non-state actor with legitimacy within the state (as a powerful political party) because it allowed Hezbollah satisfactory levels of influence and control without accountability or responsibility to the people or state. In this way, Hezbollah conforms to the limited democracy that is the Lebanese state out of its own self-interest.
It is not unlikely that other actors in Lebanon also see self-benefit in the functioning of this moderate platform, as it provides a way for each to check and control their oppositions, which would be too difficult and too costly to properly dominate. Even in an environment of pure self-interest, this self-regulation demonstrates how a semblance of democracy can arise among recalcitrant actors with no real individual commitment to democracy. With the entrenchment of disparate actors, such as Hezbollah and the right-wing Christians in their own ideologies, a strong and united central government seems largely infeasible at the moment. Instead, the central government, which is really more of a regulatory body, remains weak yet relatively functional.
Managing the Mess
There is a name for this form of governance: consociationalism. In general, it is an arrangement where ostensibly opposed and endemically entrenched social groups enter into a moderate forum of competition and power-sharing. An interview with comparative political scientist and UC Berkeley professor Steven Fish highlights many of the prospects and pitfalls of consociationalism. According to him, consociationalism may be a solution in which groups that distrust each other can co-exist in a single state, sometimes leading to ethnic and religious cleavages fading away as contentious political issues.
This idea of a status quo of institutionalized tensions relates back to the apparent desire within the factions in Lebanon to maintain the consociational arrangement. As Fish contends, “if consociational arrangements enable all communities to feel like they have a piece of the action in the national government, and they have the right to make their own rules in their own communities, even if they do not sync exactly with the rules in other communities, it could give some portion of the population a stake in sustaining that state as a national entity.”
Fish goes on to explain that “consociationalism does not mean including armed groups or militias in government. In fact, it aims to disarm them.” While Lebanon has created a framework to execute this disarmament, which is arguably the keystone outcome of recent developments, progress has been slow. But to the point of unique resiliency, Fish does note that “what is remarkable in Lebanon, perhaps, is that they still actually do have something resembling a state, … and so it is possible to say that Lebanon’s consociational arrangements have enabled the endurance of something resembling a state, even [with] the presence of these very heavily foreign-funded, violent proxies.”
Though something of a state with relatively inclusive decision-making does exist, its weak nature has meant that government decisions often are not as impactful on the populace as compared to unilateral decisions made by groups such as Hezbollah. Thus, as Fish contends, a strong central state within the consociational system is still important, even if it passes down authority to other groups.
Thus, a gradual shift from consociationalism to asymmetric federalism, a system where individual entities have the power to form their own autonomous structures with a stronger central body that is still a coalition of all the distinct social groups, might be what is in order for Lebanon. This is easier said than done, of course, and the details would need years of negotiations to hammer out. However, Lebanon’s current state of governance does have cause for optimism. Despite all of the challenges facing Lebanon, its current socio-political environment surprisingly holds up to international standards beyond that of a failed state.
Freedom … Partly
Lebanon ranks as the second most free Arab state (after Tunisia), though still only “partly free” in Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2025 ranking. Its electoral system is relatively pluralistic, protections exist for certain civil liberties, and citizen organization is largely unabridged. Of course, Lebanon also faces major obstacles in terms of government functioning, political gridlock, party entrenchment, power consolidation, radical empowerment, and corruption.
In fact, while consociational arrangements create state resiliency and are often needed after conflicts, they often end up overstaying their welcome far past their due dates, and they also often entrench power structures benefiting sectarian elites. Lebanon’s consociationalism has created gridlock, leaving it unable to enact the sweeping institutional reform required to create a fully functioning state. However, the principles that seem to prevent the entire system from collapsing still stand.
It ultimately must be accepted that the reality is that the Lebanese state itself is weak and that its individual factions are strong. But with strategic, realistic prescriptions, rather than calls for a drastic sprint toward representative democracy (something unheard of among the Arab states), such a situation is not at all doomed. Whether intentional or not, the Lebanese system gives rise to a state that serves as a forum for competition between multifarious antagonistic entities. Thus, Lebanon achieves something unique: taking extremist, fascistic radical armed groups that all despise each other and putting them into suits, so that they compete with the fury of their words rather than the fury of their weapons. It is the first step on a long, treacherous, and far from guaranteed bridge toward democracy, teetering above a chasm threatening war, collapse, and destruction. But if the correct lessons are taken away from Lebanon’s experience, the world may just find a model for Middle East democratization.
Featured Image Source: Reuters
