Reproducing Sectarianism: Advocacy Networks and the Politics of Civil Society in Postwar Lebanon

Chapter 6: Chehabism from Below?: Disability Advocacy and the Challenge of Sustaining Policy Reform

183 6 Chehabism from Below? Disability Advocacy and the Challenge of Sustaining Policy Reform “Why should the handicapped always have to beg? Why shouldn’t it become a right?”1 Lebanon has become the home to one of the most vibrant disability sectors in the Middle East. Paradoxically, it was a sector that only began to develop more fully out of the ravages and disabling effects of civil war. Supported by the rise of a global disability movement that was itself spearheaded by the rising consciousness of people with disabilities themselves, several disability advocacy networks emerged within wartime and postwar Lebanon, all seeking to build an institutionalized national policy domain within which a rights-based disability policy framework could be promoted . As with activists within the women’s and environmental fields, all looked to the Lebanese state as the locus of their reform efforts—hoping that the postwar period would provide opportunities to reform state institutions and, in particular, social policies as they pertained to people with disabilities. Indeed, with the creation of a policy deliberation council on which people with disabilities were represented, the implementation of a service delivery program designed to provide technical aids on the basis of “rights” rather than “belonging,” and the passage of a comprehensive law on disabilities whose norms mirrored those within relevant international conventions, it appeared that associational activists within the disability field had succeeded where other associational advocacy movements had failed—in effect, creating a policy framework for a rights-based disability policy domain from scratch. Sustaining these reforms, let alone expanding on their success, however , has proved to be an exercise in frustration. Material resources have 184 Reproducing Sectarianism been scarce in the public realm, limiting the capacity of the state to follow through on its commitments to the delivery of such basic life-giving needs as technical aids to people with disabilities; and state capacity has been limited, especially with respect to its ability to mainstream new disability policies across its various ministries. The most formidable obstacles, however , have been political. On the one hand are Lebanon’s political class, who, for the most part, remain uninterested in the task of formulating national social policies in such areas as disability, preferring instead to instrumentalize distributions in the social field for their own particularist political advantage. On the other hand lie many of the large social welfare and disability institutions, variably linked to the main confessions or political parties of the country, that have been able to instrumentalize the sectarian dynamics that underlie the preexisting social policy framework of the state in ways that allow them to carve out a claim to a portion of state resources and fend off challenges to their autonomy from competitors and reformers. In short, this case study of disability politics provides paradigmatic examples of two central arguments of this book. First, it clearly reveals the existence of asymmetrical power relations within Lebanese civil society, symbolized here by the power disparities between disability advocacy networks and confessionally linked disability institutions. Second, it reveals the degree to which the sectarian political framework in Lebanon is instrumentalized as much by elements of civil society as by elements within political society, thereby contributing to the reproduction of a weak and fragmented disability policy arena. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first examines the historical roots of Lebanon’s disability policy domain as it entered the postwar period—roots that have long generated powerful dynamics leading to the exclusion and marginalization of people with disabilities in the country. The second section analyzes the rise of disability advocacy networks, ones that revolved around two, sometimes competing, subnetworks , both of which sought to take advantage of the perceived opportunities of the emerging postwar period to advance policy reform and reshape the Lebanese state in the social welfare field. It was as a result of these efforts that the more formal institutional parameters of Lebanon’s disability policy domain were created. The third section documents the resilient, hegemonic power of informal sectarian dynamics, instrumentalized and reproduced as they were by the powerful elements within Lebanese civil and political society. The chapter concludes by arguing that while significant successes have been achieved at the levels of both policy discourse and social awareness, particularly among people with disabilities themselves, rights-based institutional reform at the national level 185 Chehabism From Below? remains at best piecemeal and precarious, subject to constant contestation...