Lebanon in search of sovereignty: Post 2005 security dilemmas

Abstract

Lebanon's option in favor of a "weak" state implied that armed forces remained voluntarily limited and under-equipped. Traditionally, external defense was neglected and the state kept neutral in international and regional conflicts while the relation between militarization and state-building was deliberately distended. In the wake of the civil war priority was given to the reconstruction of military and police institutions, erected as a "central pillar" of the state. From 1990 to 2005, this reconstruction remained impeded due to the enduring segmentation of the society and the imposed percolation of Syrian political culture, and because state's security remained under regional threats. Then, 2005 witnessed a reconfiguration of the national scene, the withdrawal of Syrian forces and the reinforcement of security cooperation with the West. The paper explores a main hypothesis: post-2005 Lebanon remained a state with limited sovereignty with a "bifurcated" defense strategy and little military capability. Armed forces were prone to fragmentation along primordial identities, and sometimes privatized. Authoritarianism loomed as the ultimate recourse against state dissolution and societal strife. The paper is organized in two sections: (1) The first section shows how reconstruction of national armed forces remained precluded by lack of national sovereignty, due to Syrian rule and Israeli occupation. The transformation of war rendered obsolete the numerous but poorly equipped and inadequately trained Lebanese army in contrast to Hezbollah's "national resistance" as illustrated during the summer 2006 war waged by Israel and in the struggle against Fatah al-Islam in 2007. (2) The second section argues that the segmentation of society percolated into armed forces resulting in the alienation of some confessional groups from the army and the involvement of some military in trans-boundary political economic networks. Sectarianism in the security institutions mirrored the re-confessionalisation of the society and impeded their capacity to police the domestic scene