INTRODUCTION

The wave of popular uprisings that swept across the Arab world starting in December 2010 left no Arab state unscathed. The deafening anthem leading these uprisings, "Al-shab yurid isqat al-nizam" (people want to overthrow the regime), rattled authoritarian regimes from Morocco to Oman. Prospects for those long-anticipated democratic transitions seemed bright in the immediate aftermath of authoritarian regime collapse in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Soon enough, however, what had commenced as genuinely peaceful uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria mutated into regime-manufactured sectarian or tribal contests. Authoritarian regimes deployed sectarian conflicts at home or aboard either to insulate themselves from domestic pressures, militarize otherwise peaceful uprisings, or, alternatively, advance their geopolitical objectives. Nowhere was this overlapping use of sectarianism more striking than in Syria. An authoritarian regime sectarianized what had commenced as a national and peaceful popular uprising, while an external actor, Saudi Arabia, deployed sectarianism to topple the Syrian regime as part of a realist strategy aimed at compensating for Riyadh's geopolitical losses in Iraq after the 2003 USA invasion. Tehran also used sectarian symbolism to rally Shi'a fighters from across the Arab world in defense of its Syrian bridgehead into the Arab world and its larger geopolitical interests.

Paradoxically, however, the explosion of sectarianism in the Arab world after the popular uprisings underscores the malleability of sectarian identities and modes of political mobilization. Far from being immutable and ahistorical essences, sectarian identities, like other vertical cleavages, are historical constructions; their intensity and centrality to modes of political mobilization is based on specific political, ideological, and geopolitical contexts. Domestic and regional dynamics in the Arab world have not always been driven by sectarian calculations; nor has sectarianism been the most important marker of political identities and group mobilization. Sectarian cleavages overlapped or cross-cut with other cleavages throughout the process of state formation; their primacy and intensity in a number of Arab states was a result of authoritarian regime strategies. Moreover, sectarian modes of political mobilization thrive on state weakness and ideological vacuums. The lesson of the hitherto short history of the Arab states system is unequivocal in this respect: the salience of sectarian, tribal, ethnic, regional, or any other vertical or sub-national identity rises as the ideological and material power of the state declines. Across the Arab world, dormant sectarian, tribal, religious, or ethnic affiliations flared up because of state collapse caused by the 2003 USA invasion of Iraq and, later, the militarization and sectarianization of the Arab uprisings.

Lebanon is quintessential in this respect. Since independence, sectarianism was institutionalized in the form of multiple corporate consociational power-sharing arrangements, namely the 1943 National Pact and the 1989 Ta'if Accord, in the context of a centralized but institutionally weak state. Control of state institutions and revenues by an overlapping alliance of sectarian/political and economic elite consecrates a sectarian institutional set-up and lubricates sophisticated clientelist networks that co-opt large segments of the population, thus ensuring that the Lebanese remain unequal sectarian subjects compartmentalized in self-managed communities, rather than citizens with inalienable rights. The closer integration between the country's sectarian/political and economic elite in the postwar period placed the state's fiscal policies at the service of their class interests. This has created a vicious political economic circle whereby sectarian elite control of state institutions and resources produces the kind of socioeconomic policies that serve the material interests of an increasingly tightly integrated and overlapping sectarian/political and economic postwar elite which, in turn, provides them with the material and clientelist wherewithal to reproduce sectarian identities and modes of political mobilization. The relationship between sectarianism and class relations in both pre-war and postwar Lebanon is thus reciprocal rather than linear. Suad Joseph long ago noted how "the barriers of class and sect were inextricably linked" in Lebanon, and how sectarian cleavages tend to uphold the class structure. Similarly, Fawwaz Traboulsi contends that sects serve as "enlarged clientelist networks designed to resist the inequalities of the market and compete for its benefits and for the appropriation of social wealth and services of the state"; they are also adept at "enlisting outside help in their struggle for power or for sheer survival." Far from being irrelevant, then, the centralized but institutionally weak Lebanese state is deployed instrumentally by a sectarian/political elite bent on reproducing sectarian identities and obviating the emergence of alternative, trans-sectarian or non-sectarian, modes of political mobilization. Syria's demolition of the prewar political elite, and the consequent emergence of unipolar or bipolar postwar sectarian leaders dominating the country's major communities, facilitated this dynamic in the postwar era. This mongrel combination of an institutionally weak but centralized state, one in which sectarian actors often align with external patrons to bolster their power against local opponents, sustains a stubborn institutional and clientelist complex, enables the sectarian/political elite to reproduce sectarian identities and institutional dynamics, and exposes the country to external manipulations, geopolitical contests, and perpetual crisis.

This book joins a wave of post-culturalist studies rejecting ahistorical cultural explanations of Lebanese politics and the durability of sectarian identities. Unlike essentialist and ahistorical primordial explanations of the persistence of sectarianism and sectarian identities in Lebanon, works in this post-culturalist paradigm underscore the very modern and productive power of sectarianism in Lebanese politics. They examine the historicity of sectarian identities, sectarianism as practices of social reproduction, material domination, and national imagination, gendered and class-based resistance to sectarianism, the genealogy of institutionalizing sectarian identities, the impact of sectarian networks and considerations on state institutions and public policies, the provision of social welfare, and the distribution of public expenditures, and, finally, sectarian elite strategies sabotaging postwar civil society organizations (CSOs) trying to promote "institutionalized platforms" within civil society proper, or, alternatively, challenging openly the sectarian system.

On this post-culturalist view, then, and far from being a relic of a traditional pristine past, sectarianism is a modern constitutive Foucauldian socioeconomic and political power that produces and reproduces sectarian subjects and modes of political subjectification and mobilization through a dispersed ensemble of institutional, clientelist, and discursive practices. It is a holistic political economic and ideological system that permeates almost every nook and cranny of Lebanese life, undergirded by a clientelist patronage network and a symbolic repertoire that incorporates large segments of Lebanese society into corporatized sectarian communities. The result is a distorted incentive structure that redirects individual loyalties away from state institutions and symbols and towards sectarian communities, and their political and religious elite. This distorted incentive structure makes it difficult for most people to even think of viable alternatives to the political economy and ideological hegemony of the sectarian system. As a form of socioeconomic and political power, sectarianism serves an array of material and ideological objectives.

The overlapping alliance between members of the sectarian elite and the country's commercial-financial oligarchy "manipulated sectarianism to uphold class." They deployed sectarianism to camouflage the wide income disparities not only among regions but also within sects, and to obfuscate debates about the country's political economy. Sectarianism also serves as a country-wide patronage system that enables an otherwise discordant alliance of political and economic elite to maintain their control over the economy; it perpetuates a lopsided economic model privileging investment in the tertiary sector at the expense of the productive sectors; it protects existing business cartels, and impedes the emergence of a trans-sectarian working-class consciousness and concomitant interest-based rather than identity-based political affiliations. Sectarianism is often invoked as a fig leaf to normalize a type of everyday lawlessness that, in turn, impedes the emergence of any semblance of rule of law and transparent and accountable institutions: whether in dividing the state apparatus into elite-recognized sectarian fiefdoms, exposing state finances and the country's natural resources to the neopatrimonial predatory appetites of the sectarian elite, in protecting corrupt clients and institutions, in perpetuating regional and sectoral economic disparities, in politicizing everything, from the judiciary and the state's oversight agencies to public sector appointments, sports activities and university campuses, or in sanctioning different forms of violence — especially against women and the voiceless.

Much like other disciplinary institutions — such as the modern state, the prison, or the clinic — the sectarian system and its institutional, political, economic, and symbolic ensemble aim at manufacturing docile sectarian subjects who abide by the rules of the sectarian political economy and its ideological hegemony. The disciplinary tentacles of the sectarian system reach deep into Lebanese society, and operate to reproduce sectarian identities, loyalties, and forms of subjectification. They collectively manufacture disciplined sectarian subjects who embrace what is otherwise a very modern and historically constructed "culture of sectarianism" as their primary and primordial identity. These tentacles stretch across the different public and private spheres of Lebanese life.

Instead of championing its own vision of an inclusive, polyphonic, and trans-sectarian democratic citizenship, the institutionally weak Lebanese state "assimilated the logic of kinship as an institution of governance" In turn, the sectarian elite's deployment of kinship as a tool of political control "reinforced the utility of kinship in the lives of ordinary citizens and underwritten the civic myth of sectarian pluralism that has glossed it." This has served to buttress the sectarian system's clientelist and patronage raison d'etre which, consequently, hardens sectarian modes of political subjectification. As mentioned, the result is a distorted incentive structure whereby "there has been little public morality to make leaders accountable to the general public or to make the state accountable to its general citizenry or to make citizens loyal and accountable to the state, beyond the morality of the highly personal relationships legitimated by kin moralities." Personal status laws, the educational curricula of private schools, recreational and sports clubs, the print and audio-visual media, political parties, and electoral laws operate contrapuntally to harden sectarian loyalties and reproduce sectarian modes of subjectification. Even public space is securitized and divided into separate sectarian zones with their own security apparatus and their own definition of what constitutes a threat or the enemy. As the following chapters demonstrate, the hegemony of sectarian forms of subjectification is not the product of an imagined "essential" Lebanese identity; it is rather the result of the operation of an ensemble of institutional, clientelist, and discursive practices at different levels. The disciplinary tentacles of the sectarian system also shape its own political economy.

The late Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri's postwar reconstruction plan and neoliberal economic policies created a deeper integration among the country's sectarian/political and economic elite at the expense of sound fiscal and monetary policies and the accountability and transparency of state institutions. The postwar economy was managed as an enterprise controlled by an alliance of political and business partners. Whole sectors of the economy — especially the electricity sector, telecommunications, health care, waste management, customs and port facilities, stone quarries, and the reconstruction of the Beirut Central District (BCD) — operated in a non-competitive and non-transparent manner. The lion's share of postwar state expenditures and debts were accumulated on kickbacks and wasteful spending, excessive interest payments on Lebanese Treasury bills (T-bills) and their derivative financial transfers to the banking sector, rents siphoned out of the country by Syrian officials, public employment expenditures, and, finally, regional and sectarian redistributional strategies — such as those by the Council of the South and the Fund for the Displaced — that aimed at recalibrating the pre-war bias in government spending in favor of Beirut and Mount Lebanon or financially compensating wartime refugees and the displaced. Sectarian considerations regulated the competition over state resources, contracts, and commissions. Government spending and public employment policies were placed at the service of the personal interests and the clientelist calculations of the sectarian/political elite and their partners in private business. The corruption of the public sector served as a disguised patronage and clientelist system binding sectarian clients to their political patrons. As Reinoud Leenders demonstrates persuasively, "by turning [public] institutions into bastions of privilege for their supporters, political elites tried to compensate for the weak support of their constituencies." Finally, postwar fiscal policy led to substantial "distributive and rent seeking predatory activities" by the sectarian/political elite. Justified by the political elite as the price of the postwar peace, and blamed in great part on the era of Pax Syriana (1990-2005), these practices consecrated a very sectarian postwar political economy with its attendant clientelist and patronage networks. This political economy of sectarianism shaping postwar fiscal and monetary policies consolidated the sectarian system's clientelist and patronage networks and, consequently, prevented the emergence of a sense of trans-sectarian inclusive citizenship among the Lebanese.

Perpetuating a pre-war pattern of the tertiarization and deindustrialization of the Lebanese economy, postwar economic planning continued to favor the commercial, financial, and services sectors at the expense of the agricultural and industrial sectors. Capital inflows, remittances by Lebanese living abroad, overseas development assistance funds and Arab deposits, interest payments on bank deposits, and high-interest T-bills created a postwar finance-biased model of development and a rentier economy that suffocated the industrial sector and "shifted the economy towards commerce and the production of nontradeables." Although the monopolistic structure of the Lebanese economy is a pre-war phenomenon, the postwar fiscal and monetary policies intensified this trend. The recycled and reinvented postwar "merchant republic" composed of an alliance between the sectarian/political elite and their business partners in the financial, commercial, and tertiary sectors managed the economy as an archipelago of cartels monopolizing a range of industries and exclusive import licenses beyond any semblance of accountability. For example, the supply of pharmaceuticals, cement, energy products, gas, and asphalt is concentrated in a handful of companies: five companies control 50 percent of the market for pharmaceutical imports; seven companies control some 60 percent of fuel products' imports; one company controls 95 percent of gas imports; four companies control the import of asphalt; and, finally, three companies monopolize the supply of cement in the country. Moreover, 2004 statistics suggest that only 1,000 of a total of 250,000 importers control some 90 percent of the import market.

Postwar fiscal and monetary policies maintained and even deepened the sectoral imbalances and income disparities that had shaped a pre-war economy serving primarily the private interests of an "externally oriented mercantile-financial bourgeoisie." In the early 1960s, the celebrated IRFED (Institut International de Recherche et de Formation en vue du Développement Harmonisé) mission had estimated that "the richest 4 per cent of Lebanese received 33 per cent of national income, while half of the population which was characterized as poor secured only 18 per cent of national income." Postwar indicators are even more staggering. In 2013 the Banque du Liban, Lebanon's central bank, estimated that half of all accumulated 2012 bank deposits were concentrated in 0.8 percent of all bank accounts, in other words, less than 500 depositors controlled some US$62 billion of a total of US$151 billion worth of bank deposits and commercial banks' assets. Another 2013 report estimated that "half a percent of Lebanese adults," or a mere 8,900 adults, "own half the country's wealth," and that the country's six billionaires control some 15 percent of all private wealth in the country. The monopolistic and lopsided features of the postwar economy surpassed those of the pre-war one. The synergy between the overlapping sectarian/political and economic elite created a postwar political economy that plays an instrumental role in the reproduction of sectarian modes of subjectification and mobilization and, concomitantly, in sabotaging the emergence of alternative, trans-sectarian or non-sectarian, types of identities.