Download or read book The Social Structure of Lebanon written by Safia Antoun Saadeh and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Democratic Transitions in the Arab World written by Ibrahim Elbadawi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-05 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cross-country examination of authoritarianism and democracy in North Africa and the Middle East.
Download or read book The Government and Politics of Lebanon written by Imad Salamey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aiming to contribute to the reader’s greater understanding of Lebanese government and politics, this book provides a comprehensive examination of the origin, development, and institutionalization of sectarian consociationalism in Lebanon. A recurrent proposition advanced in this book is that Lebanese sectarian consociationalism has been both a cure and a curse in the formulation of political settlements and institution building. On the one hand, and in contrast to many surrounding Arab regimes, consociational arrangements have provided the country with a relative democratic political life. A limited government with a strong confessional division of power and a built-in checks and balance mechanism prevented the emergence of dictatorship or monarchy. On the other hand, a chronic weak state has complicated efforts for nation building in favour of sectarian fragmentation, external interventions, and strong polarization that periodically brought the country to the verge of total collapse and civil war. While examining Lebanese sectarian politics of conflict and concession during different historic junctures many revelations are made that underlie the role of domestic and international forces shaping the country’s future. Presenting an implicit description of the power and functions of the various branches of government within the context of sectarian consociationalism, this book is an important introductory text for students of Lebanese Politics and Middle Eastern politics more broadly.
Download or read book Shi ite Lebanon written by Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation By providing a new framework for understanding Shi'ite national politics in Lebanon, Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr recasts the relationship between religion and nationalism in the Middle East
Download or read book Democracy in Lebanon written by Abbas Assi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'Cedar Revolution' in Lebanon, which was sparked by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri on 14 February 2005, was seen by many as an opportunity for Lebanon's fragile political system to move towards a more stable form of democracy. But contrary to these expectations, in the years since Syrian military withdrawal in April 2005, Lebanon has been plagued with sectarian and political unrest and conflict. Abbas Assi here explores the obstacles that impeded the democratic transition process and how subsequent events since 2005 (such as the passing of UNSCR 1559, the 2006 Hizbullah-Israel war and the Syrian conflict) have bolstered this trend. By looking at these, Assi examines how the intersection of the influence of external factors and powers with domestic conflicts has shaped the behaviour of political parties and has had implications on their ability to reach compromises and initiate democratic reforms. By analysing the impact of the intersection of domestic and external factors on democracy, this book is a vital reference for those studying politics of Lebanon and the Middle East more broadly.
Download or read book Reproducing Sectarianism written by Paul W. T. Kingston and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2013-06-20 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere has highlighted the growing importance of the politics of civil society in the contemporary Middle East. In Reproducing Sectarianism, Paul W. T. Kingston examines rights-oriented advocacy networks within Lebanon's postwar civil society, focusing on movements and political campaigns based on gender relations, the environment, and disability. Set within Lebanon's postwar sectarian democracy, whose factionalizing dynamics have long penetrated the country's civil society, Kingston's fascinating study provides an in-depth analysis of the successes and challenges that ensued in promoting rights-oriented social policies. Drawing on extensive field research, including interviews and a wealth of primary documents, Kingston has produced a groundbreaking work that will be of interest to Middle East experts and nonexperts alike.
Download or read book Civil Military Relations in Lebanon written by Are John Knudsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines Lebanon’s post-2011 security dilemmas and the tenuous civil-military relations. The Syrian civil war has strained the Lebanese Armed Forces’ (LAF) cohesion and threatens its neutrality – its most valued assets in a divided society. The spill-over from the Syrian civil war and Hezbollah’s military engagement has magnified the security challenges facing the Army, making it a target. Massive foreign grants have sought to strengthen its military capability, stabilize the country and contain the Syria crisis. However, as this volume demonstrates, the real weakness of the LAF is not its lack of sophisticated armoury, but the fragile civil–military relations that compromise its fighting power, cripple its neutrality and expose it to accusations of partisanship and political bias. This testifies to both the importance of and the challenges facing multi-confessional armies in deeply divided countries.
Download or read book Democracy in the Arab World written by Ibrahim Elbadawi and published by IDRC. This book was released on 2011 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite notable socio-economic development in the Arab region, a deficit in democracy and political rights has continued to prevail. This book examines the major reasons underlying the persistence of this democracy deficit over the past decades, drawing on case studies from across the Arab world to explore economic development, political institutions and social factors, and the impact of oil wealth and regional wars.
Download or read book Faith in Numbers written by Michael Hoffman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does religion sometimes increase support for democracy and sometimes do just the opposite? In Faith in Numbers, political scientist Michael Hoffman presents a theory of religion, group interest, and democracy. Focusing on communal religion, he demonstrates that the effect of communal prayer on support for democracy depends on the interests of the religious group in question. For members of groups who would benefit from democracy, communal prayer increases support for democratic institutions; for citizens whose groups would lose privileges in the event of democratic reforms, the opposite effect is present. Using a variety of data sources, Hoffman illustrates these claims in multiple contexts. He places particular emphasis on his study of Lebanon and Iraq, two countries in which sectarian divisions have played a major role in political development, by utilizing both existing and original surveys. By examining religious and political preferences among both Muslims and non-Muslims in several religiously diverse settings, Faith in Numbers shows that theological explanations of religion and democracy are inadequate. Rather, it demonstrates that religious identities and sectarian interests play a major part in determining regime preferences and illustrates how Islam in particular can be mobilized for both pro- and anti-democratic purposes. It finds that Muslim religious practice is not necessarily anti-democratic; in fact, in a number of settings, practicing Muslims are considerably more supportive of democracy than their secular counterparts. Theological differences alone do not determine whether members of religious groups tend to support or oppose democracy; rather, their participation in communal worship motivates them to view democracy through a sectarian lens.
Download or read book Blind Spot written by Khaled Elgindy and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical examination of the history of US-Palestinian relations The United States has invested billions of dollars and countless diplomatic hours in the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace and a two-state solution. Yet American attempts to broker an end to the conflict have repeatedly come up short. At the center of these failures lay two critical factors: Israeli power and Palestinian politics. While both Israelis and Palestinians undoubtedly share much of the blame, one also cannot escape the role of the United States, as the sole mediator in the process, in these repeated failures. American peacemaking efforts ultimately ran aground as a result of Washington’s unwillingness to confront Israel’s ever-deepening occupation or to come to grips with the realities of internal Palestinian politics. In particular, the book looks at the interplay between the U.S.-led peace process and internal Palestinian politics—namely, how a badly flawed peace process helped to weaken Palestinian leaders and institutions and how an increasingly dysfunctional Palestinian leadership, in turn, hindered prospects for a diplomatic resolution. Thus, while the peace process was not necessarily doomed to fail, Washington’s management of the process, with its built-in blind spot to Israeli power and Palestinian politics, made failure far more likely than a negotiated breakthrough. Shaped by the pressures of American domestic politics and the special relationship with Israel, Washington’s distinctive “blind spot” to Israeli power and Palestinian politics has deep historical roots, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate. The size of the blind spot has varied over the years and from one administration to another, but it is always present.
Download or read book Spheres of Intervention written by James R. Stocker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Spheres of Intervention, James R. Stocker examines the history of diplomatic relations between the United States and Lebanon during a transformational period for Lebanon and a time of dynamic changes in US policy toward the Middle East. Drawing on tens of thousands of pages of declassified materials from US archives and a variety of Arabic and other non-English sources, Stocker provides a new interpretation of Lebanon's slide into civil war, as well as insight into the strategy behind US diplomatic initiatives toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. During this period, Stocker argues, Lebanon was often a pawn in the games of larger powers. The stability of Lebanon was an aim of US policy at a time when Israel’s borders with Egypt and Jordan were in active contention. Following the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the internal political situation in Lebanon became increasingly unstable due to the regional military and political stalemate, the radicalization of the country’s domestic politics, and the appearance of Palestinian militias on Lebanese territory. US officials were more deeply involved in Lebanese affairs than most outside the region realized. After a series of internal crises in 1969, 1970, and 1973, civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. The conflict reached a temporary halt after a Syrian military intervention the following year, but this was only an end to the first stage of what would be a sixteen-year civil war. During these crises, the US sought to help the Lebanese government in a variety of ways, including providing military aid to the Lebanese military, convincing Arab countries to take measures to help the Lebanese government, mediating Lebanon’s relations with Israel, and even supporting certain militias.
Download or read book The Rise of Digital Repression written by Steven Feldstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is undergoing a profound set of digital disruptions that are changing the nature of how governments counter dissent and assert control over their countries. While increasing numbers of people rely primarily or exclusively on online platforms, authoritarian regimes have concurrently developed a formidable array of technological capabilities to constrain and repress their citizens. In The Rise of Digital Repression, Steven Feldstein documents how the emergence of advanced digital tools bring new dimensions to political repression. Presenting new field research from Thailand, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, he investigates the goals, motivations, and drivers of these digital tactics. Feldstein further highlights how governments pursue digital strategies based on a range of factors: ongoing levels of repression, political leadership, state capacity, and technological development. The international community, he argues, is already seeing glimpses of what the frontiers of repression look like. For instance, Chinese authorities have brought together mass surveillance, censorship, DNA collection, and artificial intelligence to enforce their directives in Xinjiang. As many of these trends go global, Feldstein shows how this has major implications for democracies and civil society activists around the world. A compelling synthesis of how anti-democratic leaders harness powerful technology to advance their political objectives, The Rise of Digital Repression concludes by laying out innovative ideas and strategies for civil society and opposition movements to respond to the digital autocratic wave.
Download or read book Lebanon after the Syrian Withdrawal written by Ohannes Geukjian and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lebanon experienced serious instability and ethno-national conflict following the Syrian withdrawal in 2005, compounded by the Arab Spring, which led to regional instability and civil war in Iraq and Syria. Why did consociational democracy fail? Was failure inevitable? What impact could external powers play in creating an environment where consociationalism might be successfully implemented? This book addresses these key questions and provides a comprehensive analysis of how internal and external elite relations influence the chances of a successful regulation of ethno-national conflict through power-sharing. Exploring the roles played by Syria, Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United States and France, it argues that external actors in the Lebanese conflict largely determined whether power-sharing was successfully established and shows that the consociational democratic model cannot provide long-term conflict regulation in their absence. The author argues that relationships between internal and external actors determine the prospects for successful conflict regulation and pinpoints the crucial role of the external forces in the creation of power-sharing agreements in Lebanon concluding that future success is dependent on the maintenance of positive, exogenous pressures. This book will be of key interest to students and scholars studying politics, international relations, and Middle East studies.
Download or read book Democracy Islam Secularism in Turkey written by Ahmet Kuru and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Turkey has grown as a world power, promoting the image of a progressive and stable nation, several policy choices have strained its relationship with the East and the West. Providing social, historical, and religious context for Turkey's singular behavior, the essays in Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey examine issues relevant to Turkish debates and global concerns, from the state's position on religion and diversity to its involvement in the European Union. Written by experts in a range of disciplines, the chapters explore the Ottoman toleration of diversity during its classical period; the erosion of ethno-religious diversity in modern, pre-democratic times; Kemalism and its role in modernization and nation building; the changing political strategies of the military; and the effect of possible EU membership on domestic reforms. They also conduct a cross-Continental comparison of "multiple secularisms" as well as political parties, considering the Justice and Development Party in Turkey in relation to Christian Democratic parties in Europe. The contributors tackle central research questions, such as what is the legacy of the Ottoman Empire's ethno-religious plurality and how can Turkey's assertive secularism be softened to allow greater space for religious actors. They address the military's "guardian" role in Turkey's secularism, the implications of recent constitutional amendments for democratization, and the consequences and benefits of Islamic activism's presence within a democratic system. No other collection confronts Turkey's contemporary evolution so vividly and thoroughly or offers such expert analysis of its crucial social and political systems.
Download or read book Impacts of Political Instability on Economics in the MENA Region written by Philippe Zgheib and published by Information Science Reference. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political instability can harm economic performance and is likely to shorten policymakers' horizons, leading to sub-optimal short-term macroeconomic policies. This instability can also lead to a more frequent switch of policies, creating volatility and negatively affecting macroeconomic performance. Impacts of Political Instability on Economics in the MENA Region explores the results of financing challenges and strategies surrounding political unrest that center around the MENA region, as well as opportunities these challenges create for businesses and governments. Featuring research on topics such as debt, macroeconomics, and economic reform, this book is ideally designed for economists, investors, managers, multinational companies, policymakers, government officials, academicians, researchers, and advanced-level students furthering their research exposure to economic instability in the world today.
Download or read book Lebanon written by Michael Kerr and published by Hurst & Company. This book was released on 2012 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the changes that recent events have brought to Lebanon, whether lasting or ephemeral, and the challenges they represent for a state, which despite the resilience of its power-sharing system of government remains hotly contested and unconsolidated.
Download or read book Politics in Lebanon written by Leonard Binder and published by New York, Wiley. This book was released on 1966 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lebanon. Series of articles on politics. Studies Lebanese society, economy and economic development. Impact of the maronite Church on the political system. Political leadership. Social structure. Government and political parties. Public administration. International relations. Political problems and change. Partly historical. References.
