The paper analyzes the transformations occurred in the two most active and relevant communities in Lebanon after the end of the civil war, namely the Sunni and the Shiites, in the light of Arab uprisings and of the changes in the regional balance of power. If the meta-narrative of the ‘sectarianization’ of the Middle East, especially after 2011, has powered the interpretation of the regional events as marked by the struggle between Sunni and Shiites, the analysis of the transformations of the above mentioned communities in Lebanon and of their impact on the internal and external level, provides one of the best examples against this simplistic representation: the sectarian contraposition is deeply rooted in Lebanon, a pars constituent of its system, but, despite the rhetoric, both communities tend to have more pragmatic and accommodating attitudes instead of exacerbating sectarian confrontation as the afore-mentioned meta-narrative tends to impose. While it is true that each community has witnessed the radicalization of certain positions and that, over the years, major changes are taking place, those have been fuelled by the meta-narrative that is emerging at the regional level and not by a desire to bring the country to the brink of the abyss.
hegemony (Traboulsi, 2014;, the contention here is that the Maronite community's resizing process has created in-between border spaces within this community, where new discourses aimed at questioning this system of control arise. To justify this in-between border spaces' relevance to understanding discourses of dissent, the analytical category of liminality will be explored. This category was first introduced in anthropology by Van Gennep (1909) and gradually adopted more broadly in the social sciences -particularly in border studies. If, as Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (2007) assume, liminal spaces (which they call borderscapes) are places where the relationship between space, lived experience and power transforms and modifies reality, this concept will be particularly useful in our case study. According to this view, such liminal spaces, unlike static and fixed spaces, are a "context from which discourses and practices of 'dissensus' can originate, thought which it is possible to think of alternatives to the static exclusivity of landscapes of dominant power (counter-hegemonic borderscapes)" (Brambilla 2015, 24).The focus on the concept of in-between border spaces as a direct expression of liminality will help answer the questions of why counter-hegemonic discourses arise in marginal spaces and how these spaces become liminal. We argue that the manifest incapacity of the Maronite elites with regard to bordering and ordering (Popescu 2012) the 'margins' of their own community, especially after the
The case of Hizbullah offers an important opportunity to examine Islamist actors. Created during the 1980s as a religious-oriented movement with a clear Islamic agenda, it gradually shifted towards a more pragmatic position, entering Lebanese political life in 1992. In its early days Hizbullah adopted a clear anti-system posture and strongly criticised the consociational Lebanese system and the international order. By comparing three key moments in the political evolution of the movement this article analyses the strategy of Hizbullah from an anti-system perspective. The aim is to demonstrate how playing as a dual anti-system actor (as both social movement and party) on two interrelated levels (domestic and external) has been a strategic and informed political choice. Hizbullah has been able to juggle these positions over the years, activating or silencing its domestic anti-system attitude to the benefit of the external one. To have a differentiated anti-system attitude has allowed it to maintain a double (but always coherent) position in the different systems it plays, adapting its anti-system posture to the political circumstances, to its goals and to the international context.
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