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229 Conclusion Lebanon’s current political system has deep historical roots, dating back to developments in Mount Lebanon in the mid-nineteenth century. As a result of the contingent interaction between structural transformations in the region and the political machinations of European powers, Ottoman officials, and various local factions, a hybrid mix of republican and communal power-sharing institutions were established to govern the area. These, in turn, precipitated a series of reactions from elite political actors—“feedback” dynamics, in the terminology of historical institutionalism —that had the effect of privileging informal and factionalized political dynamics relating to communalism and clientelism at the expense of democratic ones that required the strengthening of centralized, formal institutions. With the imposition of the French mandate state in Lebanon in 1920, these asymmetrical effects were further reinforced and have become “sticky” over time, leading to a situation whereby the Lebanese polity has become increasingly resistant to institutional change or, in other words, “path dependent.” Even with the destabilizing effects of its long civil war, which could have opened up opportunities for significant change in its regime structure, Lebanon’s confessional democracy was in the end resuscitated, its reestablishment underpinned by a series of “reversals” in state formation that had the effect of entrenching these political legacies more deeply. As this study has shown, however, Lebanese politics is not all about sectarianism—hegemonic though its dynamics can be. Rather, the Lebanese political field remains vibrant, full of a diverse set of political orientations and movements. This should not be surprising for a number of reasons. First, as Pierson reminded us at the beginning of this study, there is nothing within the analysis of “path dependence” that implies that a particular political trajectory is “locked in.” Rather, there always exists some room for “restricted” and “intelligent” forms of agency able to take advantage of cracks that exist within any system of political domination. The 2011 popular mobilizations in the Arab world have reaffirmed this 230 Reproducing Sectarianism important truth. Second, our analysis of the Lebanese case reveals these cracks to be seemingly quite large. Its political system, for example, is a paradigmatic case of “dispersed domination”—on the one hand, characterized by a powerful, factionalized, and entrenched regime structure, while, on the other hand, featuring a weak state incapable of penetrating and extending a unified and institutionalized set of political rules deep into Lebanese society. It is precisely this absence of “unified domination” by the Lebanese state—let alone by any one of the various communal and clientelist factional networks in the country—that has given numerous if shifting opportunities for “restricted agency” to a wide array of actors within civil and political society. In the pre–civil war period, these included the increasingly militant mobilizations of labor unions and students , the efforts by new associational elements to address problems of unequal socioeconomic development, the drive to reform state institutions by President Chehab and his networks of technocrats and security officials, as well as the more radical efforts to mobilize powerful countermovements by Kamal Jumblat and the Lebanese left. Even given the reversals in socioeconomic development and state formation brought about by the civil war, one nonetheless saw the rise of a similar, if self-limiting, vibrancy in the post–civil war period, symbolized by the numerous civil reform movements that include the rights-oriented advocacy networks examined in this book. In analyzing forms of “restricted agency” within Lebanon, this study has directed its particular focus on the role of civil society actors, narrowing in on the activities of associative networks that emerged in the post–civil war period advocating for rights-oriented policy reform within the areas of gender relations, the environment, and disability. Despite the vibrancy, creativity, and determination of those who were a part of these associational networks, however, it is important to remember that their efforts started from a position of double disadvantage. Not only were they calling for reform to policies and institutions in a polity that exhibited strong “path-dependent” qualities, but they also were operating within a broader civil society whose structural underpinnings generated and privileged associational forms that were linked to the prevailing sociopolitical order. Just as the market and the state in contemporary Lebanon have been composed of a fractious array of forces linked to communities, clans, and classes, so too has its civil society, producing an environment whereby associations representing new social and political forces have been forced to contend with an array of associational elements...

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