Lebanon: Books

Lebanon's significance to the Middle East and the global arena is greater than its small size suggests - bordering Israel and Syria, it holds a geo-strategic role as the playing field for their competition as well as for their allies, America and Iran. This book examines how American diplomacy has responded to the intersection of local, regional, and international factors in Lebanon. David Hale examines several key episodes in US diplomatic history with Lebanon, starting with the country's independence in 1943, up until the present moment. Crucial events such as the Lebanese Civil War, the Cedar Revolution, and more recently the spillover from the Syrian Civil War, are examined within the context of the respective US government administrations of the time and their foreign policy strategies.

Traditionally, humanitarianism is considered a nonpolitical urgent response to human suffering. However, this characterization ignores the context of the politics that created the crises in the first place. In The Politics of Crisis-Making, Estella Carpi exposes how the politics of defining crises affect the social identity and membership of the displaced. Her ethnographic research in Lebanon brings to light interactions among aid workers, government officials, internally displaced citizens, migrants, and refugees after the 2006 war in Beirut's southern suburbs and during the 2011-2013 arrival of refugees from Syria to the Akkar District (northern Lebanon).

In this Policy Focus, richly illustrated with local maps, former Lebanese journalist Hanin Ghaddar reveals the widening gaps between the country's Shia community and its Hezbollah overlords, especially since mass protests shook the nation in October 2019.

In October 2019, hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Lebanon to protest austerity measures in what became known as the "thawra." These were the largest mass protests seen in the country's modern history. The Lebanon Uprising of 2019 puts the revolution in its historical and regional context and also follows the huge transformations that have been unraveling in Lebanon ever since. The book is a unique source of testimonies that brings to the fore the voices of those scholars, activists, researchers, and journalists who took part in the protests or were closely involved in the unfolding events. T

This book sheds light on diverse aspects of a country thus far renowned for its various forms of instability and turmoil by portraying it from very different angles. With its diverse chapters, this book aims at proving that Lebanon is moving away from the stereotypical image it once had and towards a country much like the one that Lebanese people have been dreaming of restoring.

Lebanon seems a country in the grip of permanent crisis. In recent years it has suffered blow after blow, from Rafiq Hariri's assassination in 2005, to the 2006 July War, to the current Syrian conflict, which has brought a million refugees streaming into the country.This is an account not just of Lebanon's high politics, with its endless rows, walk-outs, machinations and foreign alliances, but also of the politics of everyday life: all the stresses and strains the country's inhabitants face, from electricity black-outs and uncollected rubbish to stagnating wages and property bubbles.

This book reveals how the financial foundations of Lebanon were shaped by the history of the standardization of economic practices and financial regimes within the decolonizing world. The system of central banking that emerged was the product of a complex interaction of war, economic policies, international financial regimes, post-colonial state-building, global currents of technocratic knowledge, and private business interests.

This book uses empirical and case study research, including qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), statistical methods, observations and interviews, to compare which policies and institutions to build trust have a greater impact on divided societies in the Middle East. The book focuses on Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, but analyses the results from these societies by also comparing other political and ethno-religiously divided societies beyond the MENA region. Chapter 6 and 9 specifically on Lebanon.

With changes such as the fall of the Ottoman empire, the rise of US power after World War II, the end of the Cold War and the new focus on the region in the aftermath of 9/11, Lebanon has at various junctures been bolstered or undermined. This book tracks all of this, offering insights into the workings of Lebanon s domestic politics which will appeal to researchers of the international relations of the Middle East and Lebanon's political history.

Drawing on his research into sectarian-political struggle in Beirut, the author shows how boundaries in a divided city are much more than simple physical divisions and reveals the ways in which city dwellers both experience them and subvert them in unexpected ways. This study offers an alternative view to the mainstream narratives of what is meant by a border, and provides insights, methods and lessons that may be applied to other cities around the world affected by conflict and political-sectarian segregation.

What is the future of the oil and gas sector in Lebanon? Following the recent discovery of these valuable resources in the southern Mediterranean, including in the Cypriot and Israeli offshore reserves, the possibility of Lebanon also becoming a petroleum-producing country has been raised. This collection of essays addresses the major challenges and opportunities that accompany the country's hope to join the petroleum club.

The modern state of Lebanon is home to 18 officially recognised different religious communities. Political office and representation are shared along confessional lines, and the privileges of power are distributed accordingly. One key prerogative is exclusivity when it comes to personal status laws: the family legal affairs of each community. This book offers an account of how the sharia is invoked both with Lebanon's state legal system, as Muslim family law, and outside it, as a framework for an Islamic life and society.

Antikonfessioneller Aktivismus im Libanon wurde bisher, im Gegensatz zum Konfessionalismus, von der Forschung kaum beachtet. Karolin Sengebusch untersucht die bisher größte Protestwelle gegen den libanesischen Konfessionalismus (2010-2012) und analysiert diese mit Konzepten der sozialen Bewegungsforschung und der politischen Differenz. Die Studie setzt diese unterschiedlichen Organisations- und Aktionsformen in Bezug zu den Politikkonzepten und Zielen der Aktivisten. Die Diversität der Formen kann dabei durch die Existenz verschiedener Ziele innerhalb einer sozialen Bewegung erklärt werden.

This book explores the thirty-year trajectory of the Free Patriotic Movement that aimed to achieve the freedom, sovereignty and independence of Lebanon from the Lebanese political elite and Syrian hegemony. It sheds light on the movement’s activism, changes and sectarianism throughout the stages of movement emergence, persistence and party transformation.

The recent influx of Syrian refugees has stimulated domestic political action against the Jordanian and Lebanese governments. That is the dramatic argument at the heart of Anne Marie Baylouny's When Blame Backfires.Baylouny examines the effects on Jordan and Lebanon of hosting huge numbers of Syrian refugees. How has the populace reacted to the real and perceived negative effects of the refugees?

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide and is central to European policies of outsourcing migration management. This book explores the parallels between the country's engagement with the recent Syrian refugee influx and the more protracted Palestinian presence. It questions the dominant idea that the haphazardness, inconsistency, and fragmentation of refugee governance are only the result of forced displacement or host state fragility and the related capacity problems.

This edited volume investigates the political and socioeconomic impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on Lebanon and Jordan, and these countries' mechanisms to cope with the rapid influx of refugees. The sudden population increase has resulted in severe pressures on infrastructures and services, as well as growing social tensions between the refugees and host communities.

This edited volume investigates how refugee communities in the Middle East have adapted to secure their livelihoods within the informal economy. Focusing on Lebanon and Jordan, which between 2011 and 2020 received more refugees as a proportion of their population than any other countries in the world, this edited volume investigates the informal mechanisms that Syrian refugees have adopted to fit into the informal economies of Lebanon and Jordan in the face of significant challenges and barriers. The volume investigates how legality, temporality, connectedness, gender, and geography, among other factors, have influenced the emergence of refugee communities' informal adaptive mechanisms.

This textbook examines the diplomatic and historical setting within which the Arab-Israeli conflict has developed, and gives students the opportunity to study the Middle East peace process through a presentation of primary documents that have been instrumental in the development of the conflict from the mid-1800s through the present. This third edition includes an updated and expanded introduction and a significant expansion of the number of documents.

El presente trabajo aborda la relación triangular entre Líbano, Siria e Israel en la geopolítica regional del Medio Oriente, en particular desde el surgimiento de Líbano y Siria como Estados independientes (1943y 1946 respectivamente), y la creación del Estado de Israel en 1948. Dicha relación, se analiza a la luz de los cambios operados en el sistema internacional, regional y local.

In this book, Newby provides the first detailed examination of credibility's essential place in peacekeeping. With empirically rich analysis, Newby explores the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and its navigation of political tensions in one of the world's geopolitical flashpoints, a place where the mission's work is constrained by weak local legitimacy born of a complex political situation. Peacekeeping in South Lebanon unpacks the day-to-day business of running a peace mission and argues that credibility should be regarded as an independent construct when considering how a peacekeeping operation functions and survives.

The UNIFIL has been deployed since 1978 in South Lebanon to prevent hostilities between Israel and non-state actors operating from the Lebanese territory. This book brings together researchers and practitioners from various backgrounds, including from the two beneficiaries of the UNIFIL - Lebanon and Israel. Grounding their contributions either on first-hand experience or on fieldwork, the authors address a variety of issues affecting a peace mission such as the UNIFIL.

Lebanon and Israel/Palestine are two political entities that expanded in 1920 and 1967 respectively, and became divided societies characterized by periods of stability and conflict. This book provides the first detailed comparison between the two states and also explores the effects of their expansion on their changing relations. Bridging the gap between comparative politics and international relations, it will interest students of Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, the Middle East, and conflict and peace.