Beyond Lebanon’s Power-Sharing

Lebanon’s Ta’if Agreement, although implemented as a tool for conflict reconstruction, did not build a sustainable peace, nor has it created the base for democratic and economic development. Rather, it perpetuates elites’ interests at the expense of an ever-poorer population, while crystallizing fragmentation along sectarian identities, thus increasing the security dilemma. New literature on Lebanon’s power-sharing system is questioning how to build cross-sectarian cooperation and trust in Lebanon and, in doing so, is widely looking at the potential peacebuilding of civil society initiatives. The central point of the paper is that thinking about conflict transformation in Lebanon requires investigating the relation between power-sharing and civil society within a perspective of creating inclusive institutional mechanisms for the latter.