Anticonfessionnalisme et alteractivistes au Liban

Abstract

Cet article a pour objet l’émergence de nouvelles formes de contestations antisystème dans le Liban d’après-guerre. Il s’intéresse à l’engagement d’activistes anticonfessionnalistes, pour la majorité des jeunes, indépendants des formations politiques traditionnelles, qui revendiquent une séparation du politique et du religieux et aspirent à construire un projet démocratique. Afin de saisir ces modalités d’engagement qui émergent à l’écart du champ de la politique institutionnelle, cette recherche se base sur différentes méthodes qualitatives, observation participante, entretiens biographiques et semi-directifs et un « moment » d’intervention sociologique. Elle révèle comment la voie de la subjectivité que prennent les activistes les rapproche et les éloigne simultanément de la réalisation de leurs aspirations à la démocratie.

Mediterranean in Dis/order

“…In the summer of 2015, Lebanon saw the biggest antisectarian demonstrations in the country since the end of the war-under the slogan "You Stink" and around the group tul'it rihetkun (Di Peri and Meier 2017). The garbage crisis that had erupted when the main landfill closed down and the private company responsible for garbage collection failed to get its contract renewed was considered the result of corruption and clientelism, the immobility of the decision-making process, and the deterioration of democratic rules, all of which were the product of sectarianism inside the political space (Kassir 2016). After this popular demonstration, which had ended without the political elite seriously taking the civil society's demands into consideration, some activists of the "You Stink" and "We Want Accountability" groups joined efforts again in 2016 to found a new political campaign aimed at challenging the political order at the administrative level in Beirut: Beirut Madinati-Beirut My City, for sustainable development based on garbage recycling (Lebanon Support 2016).…”

Social Movements and Politics during COVID-19

“…During the pandemic, the uprising did not enter a period of latency, but protesters sustained their grassroots efforts to build the country they aspire to. Attention to the unanticipated scope of street protests since October 2019 has in fact largely overlooked the long and often 'invisible' struggle of the post-war antisectarian movement that paved its way and the 'alter-activist' mode of engagement youth have been resorting to for years to challenge the sectarian oligarchy (Kassir, 2016).…”