Limiting violent spillover in civil wars: the paradoxes of Lebanese Sunni jihadism, 2011–17

Abstract

Research on violent spillovers in civil war has often exaggerated the potential for conflict contagion. The case of Lebanon is a counter-example. Despite the massive pressure of the horrific war in next-door Syria, it has, against all odds, remained remarkably stable – despite the influx of more than 1 million Syrian refugees and almost complete institutional blockage. This paper, based on ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews from Lebanon, studies the determination to avoid a violent spillover into Lebanon from the perspective of the country's Sunni Islamists. Recent trends in the scholarly literature have shown that Islamists are not inherently revolutionary, nor always dogmatists, and often serve many social purposes at home. The main argument is that the Syrian war has not been imported into Lebanon; instead, the Lebanese conflict is externalized to Syria. Lebanon's conflicting factions, including the Islamists, have found the costs of resorting to violence inside Lebanon to be too high. Even those Lebanese Sunnis who have crossed the borders to fight in Syria do so because of domestic reasons, that is, to fight against Hezbollah on Syria soil, where they can do so without risking an explosion of the Lebanese security situation. Sectarianism, in the sense of opposition to Hezbollah and the Lebanese Shia, is the main driver of radicalization for Lebanese Sunnis.

Anti-Muslim hate on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean: Lebanon, the Hijab, and modernity/coloniality

“…Lebanon survives through a delicate confessional power balance between its three main religious constituencies (Christian Maronites, Sunni Muslims, and Shia Muslims) as it continues to navigate multiple lines of global division under a weak state with an ongoing project of neo-liberal westernisation (Hajjar 2009;Hermez 2015;Hakim 2013;Peri 2014). In this respect, sectarianism is often offered as the standard lens to analyse Lebanon's various problems, contradictions, and instability where Sunni-Shia divisions have increasingly attracted attention (Baytiyeh 2017;Bray Collins 2016;Cammett 2014;Gade 2017).…”

Competitive clientelism in secondary cities: urban ecologies of resistance in Lebanon

“…In Tripoli, the dissolution of religious authority and deep-seated conflict within the country's highest Sunni authority (Dar al-Fatwa), together with the regional surge of jihadism had swelled the numbers of Salafists (Rougier 2015), that added a doctrinal layer to a communitarian conflict by branding opponents non-believers (takfiris). The Salafists were mobilised by the Syrian civil war and locally by the Alawites' allegiance to the Assad regime, as well as being radicalised by new jihadist groups like Fatah al-Islam (Knudsen 2011), and more so after start of the Syrian revolt when the Nusra Front and Islamic State (or 'Daesh'), gained a foothold in Tripoli (Rougier 2015), but the jihadist influence in Tripoli remained limited, with the internal conflict displaced to Syria (Gade 2017).…”

“…The army campaign was part of a security plan endorsed by the Future Movement but drew criticism of the army being Hizbollahcontrolled, especially the army's powerful intelligence branch (mukhabarat al-jaysh); 'The mukhabarat controls the conflict and the militias'. 7 The army also suffered defections from its ranks and kidnappings of soldiers by jihadist groups on the border with Syria (Gade 2017).…”