Editor’s Note

This issue includes two close studies of the aftermath of the Tunisian Revolution, two dealing with Lebanese Shi‘a and Hizbullah, and one with a 1981 diplomatic sidelight of the Lebanese Civil War, as well as a Book Review Essay on missed opportunities in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Tunisia is frequently noted as the one success story of the “Arab Spring” uprisings, an uneven but generally successful transition to democracy. The first two articles in this issue deal with aspects of Tunisia’s transition.

The first article looks specifically at the transition, though from a different vantage point than most studies. A team of three scholars examine postrevolutionary politics from the bottom up, through an exploration of dynamics in several Tunisian municipalities that emphasizing the role of local figures as opposed to a focus on centralized state institutions. Frédéric Volpi is senior lecturer in international politics at Scotland’s University of St Andrews, Fabio Merone is a PhD candidate at Ghent University, and Chiara Loschi has a PhD in political science and international relations from the University of Turin.

In our second article, Kasper Ly Netterstrøm, a doctoral candidate at Florence’s European Studies Institute, offers a case study of the role played by a civil society organization of the former regime, the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT). Before the 2010/11 revolution, democratization theorists saw such regime-backed organizations as co-opted and thus unlikely to contribute to the democratization process. Netterstrøm shows how the UGTT proved the theorists wrong by playing a key role in the democratic transition, independent of the political parties. This role was recognized when the UGTT shared the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize with three other Tunisian civil society organizations.

Our next article also looks at labor’s interaction with politics, but through a survey of how Hizbullah has co-opted unions to advance its economic agenda. Dr. Joseph Daher of the University of Lausanne provides a study of how the party-cum-militia has used its power to promote neoliberal policies and the interests of an increasingly wealthy business base, despite its origins as a revolutionary, anticapitalist movement among pious, working-class Shi‘a. Daher’s article is part of a larger study on the political economy of Hizbullah, which is the subject of his forthcoming book.

Then, Farah Kawtharani of the University of Michigan–Dearborn provides an interpretation of the work of one of Hizbullah’s main critics among Lebanese Shi‘a. The late jurist and scholar Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, who headed the Islamic Shi‘i Supreme Council from 1978 until his death in 2001, was an advocate for the political integration of Shi‘a into broader society Lebanese. Shams al-Din’s position put him at odds with Lebanon’s growing sectarianism, particularly embodied by Hizbullah and in the Shi‘i community.

Our fifth and final article also deals with Lebanon, with the US diplomacy around the 1981 crisis surrounding the deployment of Syrian missiles around the town of Zahle, led by the late diplomat Philip Habib. The United States sought to avoid an Israeli strike that could provoke open conflict with Syria. The “Lebanese missile crisis” would be overshadowed by Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, but Fadi Esber — a founding associate of the new Damascus History Foundation and Managing Editor of their Dimashq Journal — recaptures the story for us using recently declassified documents.

In our Book Review Essay for this issue, Ambassador Philip C. Wilcox, Jr., reviews two books deling with missed opportunities in the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Dennis Ross and Elie Podeh.

In addition you will find the usual full range of book reviews and our quarterly Chronology. Between issues I would remind you that there is a wealth of content on the Middle East Institute’s website at www.mei.edu, as well as my daily MEI Editor’s Blog accessible through the website or directly at http://mideasti.blogspot.com.