Introduction
For much of the post-Cold War period, approaches to state weakness – and failure – were dominated by institutional conceptualisations inherently wedded to ‘objective’, Western notions of the role of the state in society.Footnote 1 The state's primary purpose was defined in terms of measurable ‘good governance’, as the provision of a set of public goods, disproportionately refined and operationalised in Western capitals, universities, and think tanks, based on Western ideas regarding the purposes of statehood. The state's success in the delivery of these public goods could be measured objectively, through baskets of indicators pertaining to security, politics, the economy and social welfare, as still apparent in metrics like the Brookings Institution's Index of State Weakness in the Developing World and the Fund for Peace's Fragile States Index.Footnote 2 This positivist approach to the phenomenon was extensively criticised from a wide range of perspectivesFootnote 3 – even at its height – and now appears to now have reached an impasse, with some going so far as to assert that, having become theoretically incoherent, empirically thin, and politically charged, it ‘cannot serve either informed analysis and explanation or informed policy and, thus, should be abandoned’.Footnote 4
Several authors have argued that the solution to this impasse could consist in rejecting the Western templates of statehood within established approaches to state weakness, in favour of a purely ideational treatment of the state.Footnote 5 Their perspective charges the orthodox, institutionalist models of the state – and their related conceptualisations of state weakness and failure – with having neglected the ideational elements of statehood in favour of objectively measurable benchmarks that do not travel well, or say very little in very different cultural contexts. Nicolas Lemay-Hébert and others therefore point to Durkheim's distinctly ideational definition of the state as ‘the very organ of social thought’, comprising ‘the sentiments, ideals, beliefs that the society has worked out collectively and with time’Footnote 6 as an alternative to the predominantly Weberian approaches to the state as, primarily, a set of institutions enjoying a monopoly of legitimate violence over a population and territory.
Such an explicitly interpretive, legitimacy-centred approach, they argue, would allow scholarship to move away from the universalist generalisations associated with the traditional ‘institutionalist’ approaches, by acknowledging the entanglement of states and their societies through a wide variety of possible social contracts.Footnote 7 This would open the way towards open-ended approaches to state weakness and state-building, sensitive to local conditions and demands, not wedded to the top-down impositions of norms – based on distinctly Western conceptions of good governance and ideal-type statehood – that might not travel well in the Global South,Footnote 8 a point also made by recent ‘localist’ approaches to peacebuilding.Footnote 9
These two issues – the need for interpretivist approaches to state weakness, and for a move away from Western-centrism, towards local sensitivities and priorities in understandings of weak states – are, in fact, interrelated. For much of the post-Cold War period, a state's legitimacy was assumed to spring from a universally applicable, Western, liberal-democratic, free-market template – hence the positivist assumption that it could be achieved subject to the effectiveness state institutions producing an exogenously defined range of public goods.Footnote 10 The ideational, ‘Durkheimian’ view of the state would allow us to move away from this misconception by implying that workable solutions require a rootedness in local structural conditions and cultural preferences; it implies a legitimacy that needs to be filled in by local participants, their expectations of the state, their own specific hopes and fears – which might differ considerably from their Western, liberal counterparts.
In what comes below, I argue that, properly adapted, Securitisation Theory (ST) – with its central concept of ‘securitisation’ – provides the appropriate framework aimed at delivering this interpretive, locally rooted perspective. It is an inherently discursive approach, offering a conceptual framework that focuses the scholar's attention on the most important – existential – issues within a given society, as apparent in local, culturally specific ‘speech acts’ identifying threats to referent objects, and advocating emergency action in response; in so doing, it allows for a choice between truly important matters – ones that would carry the potential of existentially driven violence – from others. Through what I call ‘securitisation gaps’, the approach can also be linked to ideational conceptualisations of the state, and state weakness or failure – long called for by critics of the more conventional approaches to the phenomenon: the basic underlying idea is to identify instances where groups see the state as a threat to, or, alternatively, as a guarantor of fundamental – culturally specific, material, or ideational – values.
The following sections will thus move the argument towards this securitisation-based approach to statehood, and state weakness through a double movement. The first section will lay the groundwork for the introduction of such an approach to state weakness by exploring the notion of the state as an idea, rather than as a set of clearly bounded, sovereign institutions in the existing literature; an ideational alternative to the hitherto dominant institutional conceptualisations of statehood will, I argue, bracket the ‘objective’ aspects of statehood hitherto preferred in the dominant literature in favour of intersubjectivity. Building on this, I will then engage with debates within ST to highlight its link to the ideational notions of statehood outline above, by linking legitimacy with securitisation. The concept of ‘securitisation gaps’ – instances where the security discourses and practices of state and society diverge – will then be introduced and operationalised in a subsequent section, across two logics – substitutive and reactive – and three levels of intensity – latent, manifest, and violent.
The framework will then be applied to the complex, post-Civil War politics of Lebanon: more specifically, the most recent instance where large-scale extraordinary measures were taken by various social groups – the 2019 October Uprising – will be analysed as to the place of the state in its underlying security discourses. Having provided an account of the evolving – and culturally specific – perceptions and expectations of the state, the article will then conclude with considerations for further research.
The ideational state, legitimacy, and securitisation
Revalidating the ideational aspects of statehood
The neglect of the ideational in mainstream, institutional approaches to state weakness is, in fact, puzzling, once one remembers the role of ideas in most mainstream approaches to statehood, including Weber's: after all, apart from being traditionally associated with interpretive, ‘verstehen’ epistemologies, Weber talks of a monopoly of legitimate violence, injecting his definition with a crucial ideational component. And legitimacy – or, as per Weber, the degree to which the state order ‘enjoys the prestige of being considered binding’Footnote 11 ties in well with Durkheim's ‘sentiments, ideals, beliefs’, pointed out as crucial to interpretivist understandings of state weakness advocated by Lemay-Hébert and others.
How can one rethink more contemporary approaches to state weakness to fully account for these ideational elements, present in both these foundational approaches to statehood? While, as argued above, these elements were largely absent in conventional, late twentieth-century approaches to state weakness, they did play a part in early – and long-neglected – theorisations of the phenomenon. Ideational elements were thus clearly visible in subsequent conceptualisations of the weak state by Barry Buzan, Kalevi Jaakko Holsti, and Joel S. Migdal, either in their own right, or alongside institutional and material factors. Buzan thus pointed to the ‘idea of the state’ as ‘the most abstract … but also the most central’ component in a three-pronged conceptualisation of the state, alongside the purely material, and institutional aspects of statehood.Footnote 12 Meanwhile, Holsti clearly articulated the crucial importance of the ideational to statehood and stateness in stating that ‘[i]t is in the realm of ideas and sentiment that the fate of states is primarily determined.’Footnote 13
But it is in Migdal's work that one finds a more contemporary conceptualisation of state weakness that is particularly suited to challenging the mainstream's neglect of the interpretive: he describes the state's primary function, in distinctly ideational terms, as the provision of a collective ‘strategy of survival’ for its underlying society, a collection of ‘blueprints for action and belief’ that help socialised individuals and substate groups make sense of the world around them and survive.Footnote 14 While this brackets out the more material, institutional elements underlying the state in favour of an uncompromisingly ideational approach, it also allows for a questioning of the state's role within a society's aforementioned strategies of survival: the extent to which the state features in a society's embedded blueprints for action and belief as the effective guarantor of existential values – as opposed to being left out as either ineffective, or even a threat – becomes an important question.
Collective knowledge on the state and its role in society thus underlies legitimate rule, defined as (to paraphrase Weber) the obedience of societies to commands that have turned into maxims governing their social interaction.Footnote 15 But such collective knowledge will not be entirely coherent, and the state's role in the blueprints of various parts of a given society will vary: as Migdal elaborates in his later work on the ‘State-in-Society’, the state is a Bourdieusian ‘field of power’, its ideal-type ‘image’ (as posited by Weber) at times reinforced, at other times undermined by the actual ‘practices’ of its multiple parts.Footnote 16 This results in a view of the state as a paradoxical duality:
(1) as the powerful image of a clearly bounded, unified organization that can be spoken of in singular terms …; and (2) as the practices of a heap of loosely connected parts or fragments, frequently with ill-defined boundaries between them and other groupings inside and outside the official state borders and often promoting conflicting sets of rules with one another and with ‘official’ Law.Footnote 17
It is these ‘conflicting sets of rules’ that I aim to capture through this adaptation of ST's focus on the practices and discourses related to issues of existential import to a given society: its interpretivist framework can be linked to Migdal's radically ideational and agonistic view of the state-in-society and its relationship to society through four interconnected arguments, to which I turn below. Firstly, while often accused of state-centrism, ST has, from the beginning, allowed for securitising actors and audiences outside the state in a variety of issue areas. Secondly, in conceptualising security as a field of discursively instituted practice, recent reformulations of ST have posited a link between these securitisations outside the state, and state legitimacy. Thirdly, recent work has also recognised the imperfect nature of that field of practice, and the relevance of various forms of contestation outside, and against the state: fractures and contradictions can therefore point to deficiencies in state legitimacy, and, hence, to state weakness. Finally, I shall introduce ‘securitisation gaps’ as conceptual solution to capturing this fracture and contradiction, defining them as instances where the security discourses and practices of state and society diverge.
Securitisation and the state
When it comes to its relationship with statehood and the state, ST has – not without reason – been accused of being state-centric, especially in its initial (‘classical’) iterations.Footnote 18 There was, indeed, a strong bias in favour of state actors – and a commensurate assumption of state legitimacy – in the first applications of ‘securitisation’.Footnote 19 The approach's foundational text – with its Western-centric and Schmittian biases – does at the very least imply an inbuilt partiality towards individuals of established authority, often identical to those in control of a more or less perfectly sovereign state:Footnote 20 in Migdal's above-mentioned terminology, it posited the state as ‘image’, a clearly bounded, unitary actor whose coherence and sovereignty was, as a rule, assumed.
There is, however, nothing inevitable about ST's state-centrism: both its foundational texts, and subsequent applications – for instance, on ontological securityFootnote 21 – have provided roles for securitising actors outside the confines of the state.Footnote 22 The potential for a conceptual move away from assumptions of stable Weberian statehood has moreover been enhanced by C. Wilkinson's admonition that the Western scholar take account of the ‘thick’, local contexts of securitisations, lest (s)he transfer the state-centric luggage of Western social science into situations where the state is not the only centre of authority.Footnote 23
This critique has – alongside othersFootnote 24 – led to the emergence of strongly contextualised variations on the original conceptual framework provided by ST, where, rather than representing largely self-contained speech acts between actor and audience, securitisations have to be seen as embedded in their surrounding social structure, which they both affect and are affected by. This fundamental insight has widened a split within ST between a poststructuralist, ‘philosophical’ approach, which, like its ‘classical’ counterpart, treats discourse as largely freestanding and at most passively constituted by the attendant power structures in a given society, and sociological and constructivist approaches, which view securitisation in much broader, and more broadly contextualised terms, as a Bourdieusian field of practice entangled in a mutually constitutive – some would even say causalFootnote 25 – relationship with their more distal context, including power, authority, and legitimacy.Footnote 26
These acknowledged causal entanglements of discourse and practice with context open up the possibility of tying securitisation to the ideational elements of statehood and state weakness through the notion of state legitimacy. Seeing securitisations as a discursive field, rather than individual discursive events or acts – as in classical/poststructuralist approaches – makes them commensurate with Migdal's own Bourdieusian views on the state as a contested and imperfectly bounded strategy of survival; ST's recent linking of securitisation and state legitimacy – ‘the most potent factor determining the strength of the state’Footnote 27 – and its acknowledgment of securitisations as ‘ruptured’ and ‘agonistic’ further reinforces its conceptual affinity with this very ideational approach to state strength, and weakness.
Securitisation, legitimacy, and contestation
Indeed, explicit linkages between securitisation and legitimacy have already been made within the conceptual confines of ST itself: Juha A. Vuori thus sees legitimacy as one of the possible aims of repressive securitisations by the Chinese state,Footnote 28 while Thierry Balzacq directly ties securitisation to Weber's views on legitimacy, when he makes the claim that security practices emerging from securitisation depend largely on the presence of legitimate authority.Footnote 29 But, as we have also seen above, the assumed presence of such legitimate authority within the state is problematic: viewed as the adherence to the state as a ‘strategy of survival’, it is, more often than not, fractured between different, competing forms of social organisation, and, hence, discourse and practice.
The presence of such fracture and contestation is also acknowledged in the literature on securitisation – even if it hasn't yet been tied directly to ‘legitimacy’. Holger Stritzel, for instance, asserts that ‘discursive fields can be understood as only imperfectly constituted and severely ruptured’,Footnote 30 while Balzacq and others similarly point to the importance of contestation in various forms – resistance, desecuritisation, emancipation, and resilience – in contemporary, ‘thickly contextualised’ understandings of ST, which is viewed in inherently agonistic terms.Footnote 31 The imperfect, contested nature of securitisation-as-a-field implies the possibility of alternative forms of legitimacy, and alternative, non-state sources thereof: just as in ideational approaches to state weakness and failure, the legitimacy of the state as provider of security can no longer be assumed – indeed, in a world of imperfectly constituted, contradictory security discourses and practices, non-state actors can, and do play a role in resolving the securitisations of a given society.
ST's acknowledged entanglement and contestedness of securitisation and legitimacy thus opens ST as a possible interpretive way out of the impasse of ‘conventional’ approaches to state weakness called for by the likes of Lemay-Hébert and Sonja Grimm, by providing a means of assessing the nature of state legitimacy much more directly. In such an inherently ideational, securitisation-based approach to stateness and state weakness and failure, securitisations become a proxy for Durkheim's dispositions, or Migdal's contested strategies of survival, all three of which are inextricably linked to state legitimacy, and, through it, statehood itself; divergences in these dispositions, strategies and, indeed, securitisations – which I have decided to refer to as ‘securitisation gaps’ – similarly come to underlie legitimacy gaps, and through them, state weakness/strength, and failure.
To reiterate, securitisation gaps are instances where the security discourses and practices of state and society diverge; they contain two basic logics, and occur over three intensities. In terms of their logics, firstly, securitisation gaps can be substitutive or reactive, depending on whether they emerge from an inability of the state to address a society's securitisations, or the securitisation of its policies as threats by that society. Furthermore, securitisation gaps occur at three different levels of intensity: they can remain latent, strengthen into manifest securitisation gaps, or escalate into the violent level, depending on whether the underlying securitisations advocate continued obedience to the state, or involve an element of disobedience, or even intentionally lethal violence. The following section will aim to develop these concepts in-depth, with the aim of providing a fundamentally intersubjective approach to state weakness that addresses the charges of Western-centrism levelled at the dominant literature, and eventually opens the way towards conceptualising polities that fall outside the often-reified Weberian mould.
Introducing securitisation gaps
First, a caveat on what securitisation gaps are not: they do not aim to neatly classify states into categories like ‘weak’, ‘failed’, or ‘strong’. This tendency of the mainstream, positivist approaches was extensively attacked in the critical literature for, among others, opening the road to a delegitimising, interventionist stigmatisation of ‘failed’ and ‘weak’ states and societies in the Global South.Footnote 32 Instead of identifying ‘weak states’, I aim to operationalise ‘state weakness’ as an underlying structural characteristic of statehood, comprising ideational ruptures in the body politic that could affect states of any size, and of any strength: the starting assumption is that, while some states are more coherent than others, no state will be perfectly coherent, and that weaknesses can be found anywhere, although they might differ in intensity. It is the nature of these weaknesses, not the nature of the states themselves that demands categorisation here.
The identification and categorisation of these weaknesses as securitisation gaps starts with finding and classifying the divergent securitisations by social groups with alternative strategies of survival by examining the role of the state within them. Within these divergent securitisations, is the state seen as a threat to established values, or, alternatively, is it seen as ineffective in addressing any such threats? The narrating of the state as either threatening or ineffective will, respectively, allow for the distinction between ideal-type reactive and substitutive logics in securitisation gaps. A second question will relate to the extent to which the extraordinary measures advocated in response to the threatening or ineffective state diverge from the ‘strategies of survival’ mandated by the state. Are they presented as conforming to the state's legal-institutional framework? Or are they acknowledged by their securitising actors, and accepted by their audiences as going against or ignoring state authority? Do they involve the justification of sustained lethal violence as legitimate? The intensity of securitisation gaps – latent, manifest, violent – will depend on how the securitising social groups resolve these questions.
Securitisation gaps: Logics and intensities
As implied above, divergences between the security discourses of the state and those of specific social groups can emerge in two ideal-type ways: either the state fails to address the security concerns of those groups, or it adopts policies that, in clashing with the same, may lead to the state itself being securitised as a threat. In the first instance – which I will refer to as a securitisation gap's substitutive logic – the state will be viewed as unresponsive to the security concerns of parts of its citizenry: social groups will securitise threats and expect their state to respond – in vein. In the second instance – which I will refer to as a securitisation gap's reactive logic – an over-active, often captive or predatory state will be seen as infringing on the security of such social groups: its actions will be securitised as a threat in distinct sections of society. In both cases, this may result in extraordinary measures that challenge state authority: circumventions of the state through kinship networks or vigilante groups ensuring economic or physical security, or instances of more direct resistance through civil disobedience or armed insurrection.Footnote 33
A securitisation gap's intensity, on the other hand, will depend on the type of measures taken by social groups in response to the perceived threatening or negligent nature of a given state. Two questions can be asked when looking at securitisation gaps: firstly, whether or not the underlying securitisations of state action or inaction result in measures being taken that challenge the state's authority; and, secondly, whether these measures include an element of intentionally lethal violence. The first question refers back to the distinction made in the broader literature between securitising moves – where referent objects are securitised without eliciting extraordinary measures – and acts – where such extraordinary measures do occur. In ST's ‘classical’, state-centric approaches, this division is relatively clear: most states provide internal legal procedures that allow for the relatively distinct identification of exceptions to everyday rules made by their agents in response to emergencies. This latter approach can be transposed to securitising moves against the state within society at large: taking the state, its laws, and its institutions as providing the rules for everyday social relations, the securitising acts underlying securitisation gaps can be deemed to occur when social groups end up counteracting or circumventing these rules – as expressed in their rejection of state authority in addressing relevant threats – thus taking these issues outside the realm of ‘everyday politics’, into their own, decentred version of ‘prepolitical immediacy’.Footnote 34 Failing this, the securitisation gaps remain latent, with their underlying issues, at most, ordinarily politicised.
The second question – on the presence or absence of violence within those extraordinary measures taken – emerges from the importance of the monopoly of legitimate violence for the stability of the state, and, more broadly, from the significance of peaceful social relations for the ‘good life’ in any given polity. Seen from that perspective, illegality or extra-legal ‘extraordinary measures’ encompass a wide range of possible courses of action, going from entirely pacific acts of defiance, to violent intra-state conflict: whether or not the securitising actors within a given social group successfully advocate illegal extraordinary measures that are, in addition, intentionally lethal thus becomes an additional, productive distinction to make.
The result is a three-tiered scale of intensity for securitisation gaps, ranging from latent – when securitising moves may or may not be made, but any measures taken by social groups in response to a threatening or negligent state remain firmly within the state's legal-institutional realm; over manifest – when the securitising moves turn into acts, and emergency measures taken in response to state-related threats challenge state authority; to violent – when these adopted emergency measures contain an element of sustained, intentional lethal violence. Combined with the two – reactive and substitutive – logics – the framework thus comes to encompass a range of phenomena taken by substate actors, ranging from legal efforts at self-help or protest (in case of latent gaps) over illegal but non-violent forms of subversion and resistance like civil disobedience (in case of manifest gaps) to violent episodes, including vigilantism and armed insurgencies (in case of violent gaps). A summary of these logics and intensities, along with relevant examples, is provided in Table 1.
Table 1. Securitisation gaps – logics and intensities.
How does one operationalise the above framework? There are, after all, an almost infinite number of social groups, issue areas, and securitisations where divergences between state and society could be identified. In fact, the combination of gaps, logics, and intensities with several pre-existing elements of ST – scale, and sectors – could help both direct and structure a research design aimed at practical application. Social groups can encompass anything from a village community, over small activist groups, to large-scale, national opposition movements; their numerous securitisations can occur over a wide range of issues. How does one create order out of this potential chaos?
When it comes to scale,Footnote 35 it is up to the scholar, within a given context, to decide just how ‘micro’ he or she intends to go, as long as the choice allows for the identification of the basic elements of securitisation: securitising actors, audiences, referent objects, and extraordinary measures taken in defence of those objects. In extremely fractured societies, or in cases where the often unheard, latent securitisations of small marginalised groups are in focus – Lene Hansen's telling silencesFootnote 36 – going down to the very local level – and using ethnographic methodologies – may be productive; in other cases, where nationwide processes are the point of concern, the analyst might choose a more ‘macro’ approach, capturing the larger fissures between a given society and the state through the analysis of media or elite and counter-elite discourses. In any case, this would be a decision for the analyst to make, within the specific contexts of a given society, and according to the particular requirements of his research question.
Sectors would be a second way of adding structure and focus to any analysis: included precisely for this purpose in the overall framework of ST, they would enable the scholar to further order his or her research design, either by limiting its scope to a specific range of sectors, or by using sectors as ‘analytical devices’.Footnote 37 After all, the political, military, economic, societal, and environmental sectors identified in the approach's foundational literature elucidate a set of very different issue-specific contexts within which securitisations occur, and using these as a structuring device could therefore prove fruitful in elucidating the perceived role of the state in each of these.
This is the approach I will take in looking at the shifting weaknesses within the brief, and illustrative case study below: throughout the post-Civil War period, the Lebanese state has remained classified as ‘weak’ from the perspective of much of the ‘traditional’, positivist literature.Footnote 38 While these were extensively critiqued for their familiar failings of Western- and state-centrism, the interpretive frameworks offered in response were often either tailored specifically to the Lebanese case, or insufficiently focused on providing a clear, focused conceptual link between state, discourse/practice, and legitimacy and authority.Footnote 39 In applying the ‘securitisation gaps’ framework to the particularly challenging Lebanese case study, I will illustrate how it provides room for interpretation that combines an openness to country-specific conditions, with universal adaptability and applicability – within the limitations posed by an article-length study.
Indeed, while ‘drilling down’ into the small-group level of analysis could be interesting in this particular case, space constraints will limit my perspective to discourses and practices by social groups operating at the national level, with sectors used as ordering devices in my accounts of security discourse and practice. After a brief introduction into the post-civil war politics of Lebanon, and a short discussion of the securitisation gaps prevalent at the time – particularly during the previous major bout of political unrest, between the ‘Cedar Revolution’ of 2005Footnote 40 and the Doha Agreement of 2008 – I will turn to the most recent spasm in the Lebanese body politic, the ‘October Uprising’ of 2019–20,Footnote 41 as my main, illustrative case study.
Social media were an important channel of communication throughout the protests; in combination with open-source media reports, they provide a plentiful source for the security narratives emanating from groups associated with the uprising,Footnote 42 and for the reactions the country's embattled elites and their supporters (see Table 2). Focusing mainly on the period between the outbreak of the protests on 17 October 2019, and the week immediately following the appointment of a new government under Hassan Diab, on 21 January 2020, I shall aim to illustrate how the securitisation gaps underlying these protests were fundamentally different from what had come before, while also providing varying views of the weaknesses in the Lebanese body politic not necessarily wedded to preconceived liberal notions of ‘ideal’ statehood and political organisation.
Table 2. Social media channels analysed.
Operationalising the framework: Lebanon and its idiosyncrasies
My analysis of Lebanon's most recent period of discord must start from an understanding of the specific nature of the Lebanese state following the 1975–90 civil war. From the Lebanese Republic's inception in 1943, its internal politics have remained organised around ethno-religious constituencies, led by their respective elites through political parties that effectively function as instruments of sectarian mobilisation and patronage.Footnote 43 The consociational division of labour between the 18 recognised ethno-religious components of Lebanese society requires a culture of compromise that has often remained lacking during prolonged periods of time: faced with a constant tug-of-war between competing sectarian interests, the Lebanese state was thus, more often than not, situated in the grey zone between stalemate and collapse, resulting in two civil wars: a brief one, in 1958, and the prolonged, and highly destructive intra-state war of 1975–90.Footnote 44
These underlying tensions were only partially resolved by Syrian- and Saudi-brokered 1989 Taif Accords, which reshuffled the balance of power between the three main sects – Shia and Sunni Muslims, and Maronite Christians – to the detriment of the latter, in a still consociational, and expressly sectarian constitutional framework guaranteed by a ‘temporary’ Syrian military presence.Footnote 45 The preoccupation of the pro-Western prime minister, Rafic Hariri, with Lebanon's – intensely neoliberalFootnote 46 – reconstruction, and the relative inability of dissenting political forces to challenge Syria and Hezbollah – which, as the only political party, had retained its arsenal in order to ‘resist’ Israel's occupation of the south – meant the acceptance of a status quo by Lebanon's political forces for the first decade-and-a-half following the end of hostilities.Footnote 47 But by early 2005, that relative intersectarian calm had declined: demands that full Lebanese sovereignty be restored, Syrian troops be withdrawn, and Hezbollah surrender its arms became more vocal. A period of acute internal political instability was subsequently much intensified by Hariri's assassination on 14 February 2005, for which a high-ranking Hezbollah militant would eventually be found guilty by a special UN tribunal, in December 2020.Footnote 48
A very partial and therefore quite misnamed Cedar ‘Revolution’ immediately followed Hariri's killing.Footnote 49 Mostly elite-led, its immediate effects were twofold. Firstly, the country's elite coalesced into two antagonistic camps, a division which would remain relevant in the following decade: between the Sunni-dominated, pro-Western ‘March 14 alliance’, led by Hariri's second son, Saad, and the pro-Iranian/Syrian ‘March 8’ coalition, dominated by Hezbollah. Secondly, it led to the election of a pro-Western government and the withdrawal of Syrian troops. But a brief armed conflict over Hezbollah's communications infrastructure in 2008 eventually saw the pendulum swing back in the party's favour, with the March 8 coalition gaining the right of veto within subsequent consociational governments through a guaranteed one third of the seats under the ‘Doha compromise’ mediated by Qatar.Footnote 50 The issue of Hezbollah's arms was also sidestepped through a commitment that they would not be used to resolve internal political differences.Footnote 51
While space constraints prevent a detailed exploration of the securitisation gaps underlying these post-2005 developments, several unifying themes shaping Lebanon's security discourses could be provisionally discerned during these instances of internal instability. A first was the continued sectarian nature of Lebanon's securitisation gaps – all talk of ‘revolution’ notwithstanding. While the defection of the Maronite-dominated Free Patriotic Movement from the March 14 to March 8 coalition in 2006 had cemented the transition away from Lebanon's traditional Christian/Muslim sectarian divide, according to Karim Knio, ‘the sectarian players [had] reformulated and redefined their roles but the sectarian structure they [were] embedded in [was] still intact’:Footnote 52 notwithstanding their cross-sectarian nature, both dominant coalitions still remained a cobbling together of sectarian movements, rather than paving the way for a more secular political culture.
As a result, securitisation gaps between state and society still opened up depending on which of the competing groups dominated a particular government, or even which sect was seen as dominating a particular government department. This was clearly visible in periods when these gaps turned manifest or violent, as, respectively, in 2005 and 2008: in fact, only the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) enjoying a measure of cross-sectarian respect – as opposed to other, politicised and sectarianised sections of the security apparatus and other state institutions.Footnote 53 This fractured and impermanent nature of the Lebanese state also encouraged the Lebanese to circumvent its authority in numerous substitutive securitisation gaps – legal/latent, or illegal/manifest – in their quest for socioeconomic security in a highly neoliberal environment, through private initiative or informal – sectarian – patronage networks.
Secondly, these securitisation gaps were exacerbated by the ‘porousness’ of the Lebanese state, with the two ‘camps’ taking extraordinary measures against counterparts they saw as acting as proxies for external forces. For the Hariri camp, the problem was Syria and Iran's influence; for the Hezbollah faction, it was Western meddling – including through the UN Special Tribunal tasked with investigating the Hariri assassination. The state's inability or unwillingness to confront an intensely securitised Israeli threat also sustained a violent substitutive securitisation gap by handing Hezbollah an argument for its continued militarisation in a ‘permanently exceptional’ circumvention of the state's usual monopoly of violence, a circumvention successfully defended in 2008. The weaknesses within Lebanon's body politic thus remained inextricably entangled with the geopolitics of the wider region, and while the state maintained nominal ‘neutrality’ – as after the ‘Doha Compromise’ – much of foreign policymaking remained fragmented and ‘outsourced’ to Lebanon's various factions.
Last but not least, these securitisations were held in check by an overarching and pervasive ‘meta-securitisation’ of the civil war itself: the country's elites used the fear of a return to violence as a way of managing intersectarian dissent, and stepping ‘back from the brink’ – as visible on several occasions between 2005 and 2008, and beyond. Dread of a rerun of 1975–90 proved a powerful dissuasive force in the sectarian brinkmanship of that period.
Towards the ‘October Uprising’
During much of the following decade, these sectarian securitisation gaps remained largely intact. Neither Hezbollah's opponents, nor the state were now able to directly challenge the party's retention of its arsenal; in fact, its circumvention of the state's monopoly of violence escalated into its armed involvement – in defiance of the state's proclaimed neutrality, and in concert with Iranian strategic objectives – in the Syrian civil war.Footnote 54 The country saw a succession of often tortuously assembled consociational governments, with various ministerial posts and departments parcelled out – as customary – between the sectarian political parties, and the March 8 alliance jealously retaining its veto.Footnote 55 The meta-securitisation of the civil war and the continued cohesion of the LAF – albeit in the face of increased disaffection from parts of the Sunni communityFootnote 56 – helped contain any violent spillover of the civil war in Syria: hostilities between Sunni and Alawite communities in the northern city of Tripoli were successfully contained, as were attacks by Jihadist groups in northern and eastern border regions.
But a new range of issues, and fissures, between the Lebanese state and society emerged as the previous decade wore on. Securitisation gaps in the economic and environmental sectors had largely remained latent in the first decades following the civil war, with the securitisation of the state, or of state inaction on issues like poverty, inadequate services, pollution, or corruption eliciting grumblings of discontent and elements of self-help, and sectarian patronage, but few recourses to overt, large-scale acts of defiance against the sectarian system as a whole, rather than one or the other sectarian ‘camp’. This would change from about 2015 onwards: Lebanon's civil society – invigorated in the backdrop of the 2005 Cedar Revolution – moved from the background to directly challenge excesses it saw as emanating from the sectarian system itself. Loosely organised thematic groups like ‘You Stink’ coalesced around environmental issues, protesting the state's inability to deal with rubbish disposal through acts of civil disobedience – blockades, flash mobs.Footnote 57 The resulting mobilisation translated into a more coherent political movement called ‘Beirut Madinati’, which broadly attacked sectarianism and participated – rather unsuccessfully – in the 2016 local elections.Footnote 58
These developments eventually fed into the ‘October Uprising’ of 2019–20.Footnote 59 Tensions had been heightened in previous weeks because of the inability of the Lebanese state to tackle large-scale forest fires devastating the country's precious cedar forests, prompting protests in preceding weeks and days;Footnote 60 the uprising itself was subsequently triggered by an economic rescue plan proposed by the latest ‘national unity’ government led by Saad Hariri, and its inclusion of a tax on instant messaging apps like Whatsapp, used by Lebanese to circumvent their overpriced state-owned telecoms providers.Footnote 61
The resulting economic securitising acts – by a wide network of grassroots organisations and activists not associated with Lebanon's sectarian centres of power – led to an unprecedented wave of civil disobedience by ordinary Lebanese from a cross-section of society, largely coordinated through social media. They quickly escalated to include a broad range of pent-up existential grievances held by the Lebanese against their state, over a wide range of sectors. Anti- and cross-sectarian narratives made these protests quite different from the previous (Cedar) ‘Revolution’, indicating a near-complete alienation between the protestors and a state widely seen as either ineffectual, or threatening, across several sectors – the political, economic, and societal, among others. A new set of anti-sectarian securitisation gaps had become manifest, out in the open for all to see.
In the economic sector, securitisation gaps emerged in reaction to the rentier-seeking nature of a collapsing monetary and banking system, the inadequate provision of electricity by state-owned utilities, crumbling infrastructure and plunging living standards more generally.Footnote 62 The bloated banking system, considered the pride of Lebanon's economy in previous, less contentious times, was thus routinely described as a ‘Ponzi scheme’;Footnote 63 the Central Bank (BDL) and its ‘unaccountable’ long-time governor, Riad Salameh, were at the service of an amalgamated financial-political elite in control of the state used for patronage funded by massive public debt,Footnote 64 maintained through a ‘financial engineering’ whose failure now lay at the basis of a ‘death sentence’ economic collapse existentially threatening all Lebanese, and whose underlying structures had to be overthrown.Footnote 65
An inability to provide basic utilities – electricity, communications, water supply and sanitation – had also long underlain latent, substitutive securitisation gaps, with ordinary Lebanese circumventing the state by paying extortionate rates to operators of private generators, or maintaining ever-present cisterns as a back-up supply; these gaps now also burst out in the open as Lebanese attacked the corruption behind state incapacity.Footnote 66 The disproportionate consequences of the above for various income groups also gave the securitisation gaps on display in the revolution's social media a class-based aspect – and not just in those accounts associated with the radical left: ‘solidarity’ – through mechanisms circumventing the state – with the poor, the left behind, migrant workers, Palestinian and Syrian refugees was thus regularly referred to: victims of an unjust system of selective patronage and exclusion, and – especially for those groups further on the left – of the neoliberal economic policies imposed by both the local and global political-economic elites.Footnote 67
In the political sector, securitisation gaps directly challenged many of the assumptions underlying the stability of the Lebanese state since the Taif accords in the early 1990s, and the Doha consensus of 2008: these sectarian ‘covenants’ were dismissed as outdated, ineffective and self-serving, helping perpetuate a ‘mafia’, an ‘octopus’ of corruption and divisiveness threatening all Lebanese through its horse-trading and backroom deal making.Footnote 68 Instead, most protesters argued in favour of a complete removal of the political elite regardless of sect – clearly expressed through the uprising's central slogan, ‘kullon yaani kullon’ or ‘All Means All’ – in favour of a transitional technocratic government paving the way for genuinely secular rule for all Lebanese.Footnote 69 Accusations of foreign meddling were thrown back at all sections of the ruling elite, promises of reform were ridiculed, and suggestions that revolutionary instability might herald a return to civil war – the major ‘meta-securitisation’ of the post-Taif era – were angrily rejected as empty ploys aimed at thwarting the real change.Footnote 70
With these economic and political securitisations, the split between elite and protesters, state and society widened to include societal issues, related to the very definition of Lebanese identity. Beyond a rejection of sectarianism as the basis of Lebanese political system lay a redefining of the meaning of ‘being Lebanese’, perhaps best expressed in the slogan ‘My Sect is the Revolutionaries’, and the elevation of a civic – or, on the political left, of class – over a sectarian identity.Footnote 71 Lebanon's legal regulation of social relations (birth, marriage, inheritance) had long been founded on a sectarian basis, and the long-standing demand that Lebanese be provided with secular personal status laws that would, among others, allow for intersectarian marriages officiated in the country was indeed revolutionary.Footnote 72 Demands for gender equality – expressed in challenges to domestic violence, or discriminatory citizenship laws, among other sectarian-patriarchal excesses – were also voiced by women's groups active among the demonstrators, as were issues like disability rights in which the state had been found wanting in previous years.Footnote 73
Many of these issues had already been taken up in civil society before the uprising, or had led to the Lebanese circumventing or challenging the state while remaining within the legal framework; they had, in other words, remained latent. The illegal, extraordinary measures taken by the protesters changed that, and turned their underlying securitisations into manifest securitisation gaps. Throughout the months in question, calls to disobey law enforcement – by ‘reclaiming public space’, and demonstrating in front of the objects of the demonstrators’ ire, including the Banque du Liban (BDL – the Central Bank), the Association of Lebanese Banks, the state electricity monopoly – were actively reproduced by most of the channels under review.Footnote 74 As the weeks and months went on, discourses and their associated ‘extraordinary measures’ radicalised. With the BDL imposing capital controls on ordinary Lebanese – in a technically illegal move which to many demonstrators indicated the impotent and subordinate nature of the Lebanese state – what had started out as peaceful demonstrations in front of the BDL, and isolated direct action by the radical left expanded into occupations of bank branches by ordinary citizens.Footnote 75 For one, attempts by the establishment to install governments which the protesters did not see as meeting their demands resulted in – violently suppressed – efforts at preventing sessions of parliament, coordinated and supported through social media.Footnote 76
Abuses by the security forces reinforced the view of their role in enabling the continued capture of the Lebanese state by, and maintaining security for these sectarian elites, rather than the population at large; tips on how to peacefully resist these organs of state authority thus also proliferated on social media. Unlike previous years, when other, more politicised and sectarian branches of the security forces might have been the object of popular ire, a growing sense of alienation emerged between large sections of the protestors and an erstwhile focus of national unity – the LAF themselves. Rather than the product of a post-civil war cross-sectarian consensus, they came to be seen as just another organ of elite repression and corruption, a perception intensified by their perceived inaction against regime thugs (‘shabiha’) regularly attacking demonstrators on the street;Footnote 77 tellingly, apparent attempts by the LAF to mediate between a small group of self-appointed representatives and the authorities were angrily rejected, as were suggestions by a minority that the army take over from Lebanon's sectarian elite.Footnote 78 The challenge to the sectarian state's legitimacy in favour of an alternative, non-sectarian project was thus near complete, at least on the protesters’ part.
But while a host of grassroots social groups had emerged that transcended sectarian divides and challenged sectarianism itself, these challenges were, in fact, quite partial. Securitisation gaps with a sectarian motive continued to be of relevance, in two ways: sectarian groups took (extra-legal) emergency action in defence of the sectarian system itself, and of referent objects specific to their particular sect. Predictably, the sectarian elites securitised the uprising as the harbinger of chaos and potential civil war, and were vocally supported by their adherents and clients in counter-demonstrations in their respective strongholds, complementing their recourse to states of emergency and ‘official’ security forces.Footnote 79 Demands for ‘secularism’ were reportedly less vocal in conservative, Sunni-dominated Tripoli,Footnote 80 while Hezbollah and its allies suppressed a perceived threat to their (armed) role as the ‘resistance’ by sending thugs to intimidate the anti-sectarian protestors and journalists, which they and their media attacked for – unwittingly or not – being in the service of foreign forces.Footnote 81
Overall, the sectarian system has proved more resilient than was hoped by the participants in the ‘October Uprising’: their immediate result was the installation of a government of supposed ‘technocrats’, led by former minister of education Hassan Diab, on 21 January 2020.Footnote 82 Far from satisfying the cross-sectarian revolutionaries’ central slogan (‘All Means All’) continuing political linkages to the elite meant that this government still suffered from a lack of legitimacy apparent in the protesters’ reaction to its appointment.Footnote 83 Its lukewarm attempts at reform were blocked by a parliament still controlled by the traditional sectarian forces and an uncooperative BDL, while a debt default in March 2020, the COVID19 pandemic, and the particularly destructive port explosion in August last year – widely believed to be the result of neglect and corruption – appeared to confirm many of the securitisations of the ineffectual statehood maintained during the demonstrations earlier that year.Footnote 84 Following the resultant fall of the Diab government, Lebanon appeared to have come full circle, with Saad Hariri once again engaged in the traditional tortuous sectarian horse trading typical of earlier years, still unable to form a new executive as late as in April 2021.
This has left the country beset by a dangerous, two-layered set of manifest securitisation gaps: the elite-led, sectarian gaps of old – underlying clientelism and corruption, pro-Western vs pro-Iranian/Syrian orientations, and other substitutive circumventions of state authority – have recently been complemented by a series of grassroots ‘post-sectarian’ gaps of a more reactive nature, with a more extensive range of decentralised actors directly securitising post-Taif Lebanon's sectarianism as a threat. Lebanon's current loss of legitimacy is thus of a dual nature: first, in the circumvention of its norms and institutions by the sectarian elites, and, secondly, in the rejection and challenging of its sectarian logic by a large part of the population. Whether the contention that emerges from these quite divergent views of Lebanese statehood will remain manifest, rather than escalating into violence – in the absence lethal extraordinary measures by those challenging state authority – very much remains the question at the time of writing, when the country is still under a caretaker government; the odds are very much against the Lebanese state recovering from such a massive – and complex – loss in public trust.
Conclusion
Securitisation gaps provide a radically interpretive route towards understanding state weakness, by operationalising the long-neglected ideational elements of statehood and state weakness through an adapted, well-established methodological framework. From this perspective, a state's strength, or its weakness are constituted by its role in a given society's security discourses and practices, as apparent in an ensemble of securitisations and counter-securitisations. The shortcomings of traditional approaches to state weakness – their claims to a rigid, and often Western-centric objectivity, their focus on bureaucratic solutions to the detriment of traditional structures, their frequent, and often politically expedient stigmatising of polities not conforming to the Weberian norm – are countered by an ability to understand, rather than explain divergences in the culturally conditioned expectations of a given society towards the state as a provider of security. Such an interpretive, multilevel, and agential approach elicits a measure of intellectual humility, by no longer positing the Western Weberian model as an ideal, and divergences from that model as pathology.
The holistic view of state weakness provided by this perspective opens up several additional avenues for further research, beyond the application of the framework above to other states described as ‘weak’ in the conventional sense. Firstly, because of its rejection of the taken for granted nature of the strong, Western Weberian state, and of simple, often stigmatising distinctions between strong (usually Western) and weak (usually Southern) states, it could, for once, turn our attention to the often-idealised states of the Global North, providing an insight to the securitisations that are, among others, at the root of their diminished legitimacy. Questioning the role of populist securitising actors, and their ability to talk to the existential concerns of large swathes of Western populations may be one way of examining the crisis of the liberal, Western state, for instance – a line of inquiry made all the more pertinent by events like the recent storming of the Capitol in Washington, DC. Similar exercises examining the securitisations by separatist actors and social groups against ‘their’ respective states could be carried out in both North, and South. Rather than making an often stigmatising categorisation between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ states, the goal would be to identify weaknesses within states: and every state, however developed, would have its specific fissures, its legitimacy gaps – some large, some small, but all of them essential to understanding legitimacy, or the lack thereof, without preconception.
The scalability of the above approach also opens up the possibility of including the often neglected – or even dismissed – micro-level of analysis in such mappings. While this wasn't applied to the brief and necessarily constrained Lebanese case study provided above, an ethnographic, monograph-length insight into what Bubandt has referred to as ‘vernaculars of security’Footnote 85 might provide valuable, finer-grained views of the relationship between social groups, and the state than the national-level one offered above: in the Lebanese case, for instance, one could examine securitising moves and acts by actors in villages, in the smaller-scale components of civil society, or even within the family or clan; how such smaller-scale audiences engage in self-help or resistance within such micro-scale social groups; and how these efforts than aggregate into the larger-scale protests like the October Uprising. Just as securitisation gaps can decentre our view from the Western-centric Weberian ‘gold standard’ of statehood, the micro-level – and attendant ethnographic methodologies – may decentre our views of the security discourses and practices from those of elites, opening up a systematic way of studying small-group security concerns within the wider context of state-society relations.
Eventually, a detailed, multilevel mapping of securitisation gaps could point the way to pragmatic solutions to the problems afflicting a wide range of states and societies, through their ad-hoc, open-minded desecuritisation – ST's solution of choice – unbound by the Western ideas of ‘appropriate’ statehood and a fixation on national-level elites. Indeed, in the Lebanese case proffered above, the cross-cutting securitisations between sectarians and anti-sectarians suggest a need for unorthodox institutional outcomes – attuned to specific local social, cultural, and structural conditions. In Lebanon and elsewhere, the required desecuritisations might result in something more akin to Thomas Risse's idea of ‘Hybrid Political Orders’,Footnote 86 Richmond's notion of ‘Peace Formations’,Footnote 87 or Ken Menkhaus'sconcept of ‘governance without government’Footnote 88 than the ideal of the centralised, monopolistic, secular, Western Weberian state.
While the objections to desecuritisation are well known – the absence of emancipatory politics, the danger of ignored silences, excessive cultural relativism – these could be overcome: the search for a normative basis for (de)securitisation is, after all, ongoing, ignored silences could be uncovered by listening to social groups at the micro-level, and cultural relativism could be avoided through the discovery of emancipatory potential in local contexts. But these are elements for future exploration; as it stands, suffice it to say that an interpretive approach to statehood – or governance, broadly conceived – would add to Western traditions a non-elitist cross-cultural humility that has so far been largely lacking, through the realisation that there are no pre-set, exclusively liberal forms of legitimacy. To paraphrase an often-used dictum in International Relations: the twenty-first century, post-liberal state might have to become what societies make of it.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my appreciation to Megan Daigle, Rita Floyd, George Kyris, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, Adam Quinn, and Marco Vieira for their helpful comments on early drafts of this article. I am also indebted to the three anonymous reviewers of this final version for their incisive and constructive feedback.
Kevork Oskanian is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. He obtained his PhD at the London School of Economics’ Department of International Relations, and has previously taught at the LSE and at the University of Westminster. His current research interests include the international relations of Eurasia, and post-liberal approaches to international society and the state.
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