Download or read book The Merchant Republic of Lebanon written by Carolyn Gates and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 1998-12-31 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the economic agents, institutions, incentives, competences and other forces that forged a Lebanese economic model known as the "Merchant Republic" in the aftermath of World War II. The author identifies the broad concept of outward-orientation to describe the Lebanese economy. Dominant economic and political agents sought to develop the economy on the basis of its intermediary role, regional comparative advantage and competitive position in offshore service operations - all of which were viewed as essential to the viability of the small Lebanese state. Supporting an open and tertiary-oriented economy that serviced rapidly-growing Middle East economies, these forces shaped Lebanon's economic order until 1958; and in a modified form, they influenced it's political economy until 1975. Lebanon's model of outward-orientation, however, can be usefully contrasted with the explorer-oriented industrialization model followed in East Asia. This book integrates a theoretical and empirical examination of the Lebanese model and provides data and analysis about its effect on economic growth and structural change during its golden age.
Download or read book Lebanon written by William W. Harris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores the affairs of Mount Lebanon and its surrounds through fourteen centuries, beginning with the emergence of its Christian, Muslim and Islamic-derived communities between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Against this backdrop, it interprets the modern republic of Lebanon from Ottoman antecedents to present day crises.
Download or read book Lebanon written by Eyal Zisser and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2000-02-28 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first decade of independence (1943-1952) was crucial to the political history of Lebanon, following the creation of the state in 1920 and the subsequent years of French tutelage. This period is defined by the presidency of Bishara al-Khuri, the first elected president, a founding father who played a vital part in forming the distinctive character of the Lebanese state and in Lebanon's later history, both rich and successful and troubled and tragic. During this period the old order in Lebanon, shaped over centuries, clashed with a 'new order', transforming Lebanese politics and society. Khuri's task was to protect Lebanon's fragile independence and to try to ensure political stability among warring factions – strife which in 1975 erupted in civil war causing immense disruption and suffering in Lebanon and with deep and widespread national and international effect. This study draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources including official state papers and private collections from Britain, France, the USA, Lebanon and Israel. _Contents_: Introduction: The Birth of the Lebanese State; First Steps Along a New Road; The 1943 Elections; The National Pact; The November 1943 Crisis; Between East and West – Lebanon on the International and Regional Scene; Domestic Challenges – 1943–1947; At the Peak of Power; The 1948 War in Palestine; The Syrian Lebanese Crisis; The Confrontation with the PPS (1947–1949); Khuri and Sulh: a Parting of the Ways; Rift with the West; The Overthrow
Download or read book A History of Modern Lebanon written by Fawwaz Traboulsi and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the updated edition of the first comprehensive history of Lebanon in the modern period. Written by a leading Lebanese scholar, and based on previously inaccessible archives, it is a fascinating and beautifully-written account of one of the world's most fabled countries. Starting with the formation of Ottoman Lebanon in the 16th century, Traboulsi covers the growth of Beirut as a capital for trade and culture through the 19th century. The main part of the book concentrates on Lebanon's development in the 20th century and the conflicts that led up to the major wars in the 1970s and 1980s. This edition contains a new chapter and updates throughout the text. This is a rich history of Lebanon that brings to life its politics, its people, and the crucial role that it has always played in world affairs.
Download or read book Banking on the State written by Hicham Safieddine and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1943, Lebanon gained its formal political independence from France; only after two more decades did the country finally establish a national central bank. Inaugurated on April 1, 1964, the Banque du Liban (BDL) was billed by Lebanese authorities as the nation's primary symbol of economic sovereignty and as the last step towards full independence. In the local press, it was described as a means of projecting state power and enhancing national pride. Yet the history of its founding—stretching from its Ottoman origins in mid-nineteenth century up until the mid-twentieth—tells a different, more complex story. Banking on the State reveals how the financial foundations of Lebanon were shaped by the history of the standardization of economic practices and financial regimes within the decolonizing world. The system of central banking that emerged was the product of a complex interaction of war, economic policies, international financial regimes, post-colonial state-building, global currents of technocratic knowledge, and private business interests. It served rather than challenged the interests of an oligarchy of local bankers. As Hicham Safieddine shows, the set of arrangements that governed the central bank thus was dictated by dynamics of political power and financial profit more than market forces, national interest or economic sovereignty.
Download or read book Lebanon written by Tom Najem and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a time of great political change and unrest in the Middle East, this highly topical text offers a succinct account of the contemporary political environment in Lebanon. Tom Najem provides both a developed understanding of the pre-civil war system and an analysis of how circumstances resulting from the civil war combined with essential pre-war elements to define politics in Lebanon. Systematically exploring Lebanon’s history, society and politics, the author stresses the importance of the crucial role of external actors in the Lebanese system. The analysis encompasses: the formation of the state weaknesses and dynamics of the Lebanese state the civil war post-war government and change the Lebanese economy foreign policy. Written in a clear and accessible manner, this book fills a conspicuous gap in the existing academic literature on Lebanon. It will be of interest not only to students of international politics and Middle East studies, but also to anyone travelling in or wanting to learn more about the region.
Download or read book Lebanon written by Mark Farha and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles secularism in Lebanon up to the present day, presenting possible causes for its decline in the face of sectarianism.
Download or read book Beirut written by Samir Kassir and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beirut is a tour de force that takes the reader from the ancient to the modern world, offering a dazzling panorama of the city's Seleucid, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French incarnations. Kassir vividly describes Beirut's spectacular growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concentrating on its emergence after the Second World War as a cosmopolitan capital until its near destruction during the devastating Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. --from publisher description.
Download or read book Lebanon written by William Harris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-11 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this impressive synthesis, William Harris narrates the history of the sectarian communities of Mount Lebanon and its vicinity. He offers a fresh perspective on the antecedents of modern multi-communal Lebanon, tracing the consolidation of Lebanon's Christian, Muslim, and Islamic derived sects from their origins between the sixth and eleventh centuries. The identities of Maronite Christians, Twelver Shia Muslims, and Druze, the mountain communities, developed alongside assertions of local chiefs under external powers from the Umayyads to the Ottomans. The chiefs began interacting in a common arena when Druze lord Fakhr al-Din Ma'n achieved domination of the mountain within the Ottoman imperial framework in the early seventeenth century. Harris knits together the subsequent interplay of the elite under the Sunni Muslim Shihab relatives of the Ma'ns after 1697 with demographic instability as Maronites overtook Shia as the largest community and expanded into Druze districts. By the 1840s many Maronites conceived the common arena as their patrimony. Maronite/Druze conflict ensued. Modern Lebanon arose out of European and Ottoman intervention in the 1860s to secure sectarian peace in a special province. In 1920, after the Ottoman collapse, France and the Maronites enlarged the province into the modern country, with a pluralism of communal minorities headed by Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims. The book considers the flowering of this pluralism in the mid-twentieth century, and the strains of new demographic shifts and of social resentment in an open economy. External intrusions after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war rendered Lebanon's contradictions unmanageable and the country fell apart. Harris contends that Lebanon has not found a new equilibrium and has not transcended its sects. In the early twenty-first century there is an uneasy duality: Shia have largely recovered the weight they possessed in the sixteenth century, but Christians, Sunnis, and Druze are two-thirds of the country. This book offers readers a clear understanding of how modern Lebanon acquired its precarious social intricacy and its singular political character.
Download or read book Asfuriyyeh written by Joelle M Abi-Rached and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of psychiatry in the Middle East, viewed through the history of one of the first modern mental hospitals in the region. ʿAṣfūriyyeh (formally, the Lebanon Hospital for the Insane) was founded by a Swiss Quaker missionary in 1896, one of the first modern psychiatric hospitals in the Middle East. It closed its doors in 1982, a victim of Lebanon's brutal fifteen-year civil war. In this book, Joelle Abi-Rached uses the rise and fall of ʿAṣfūriyyeh as a lens through which to examine the development of modern psychiatric theory and practice in the region as well as the sociopolitical history of modern Lebanon. Abi-Rached shows how ʿAṣfūriyyeh's role shifted from a missionary enterprise to a national institution with wide regional influence. She offers a gripping chronicle of patients' and staff members' experiences during the Lebanese Civil War and analyzes the hospital's distinctive nonsectarian philosophy. When ʿAṣfūriyyeh closed down, health in general and mental health in particular became more visibly “sectarianized”—monopolized by various religious and political actors. Once hailed for its progressive approach to mental illness and its cosmopolitanism, ʿAṣfūriyyeh became a stigmatizing term, a byword for madness and deviance, ultimately epitomizing a failed project of modernity. Reflecting on the afterlife of this and other medical institutions, especially those affected by war, Abi-Rached calls for a new “ethics of memory,” more attuned to our global yet increasingly fragmented, unstable, and violent present.
Download or read book Women and Gender in a Lebanese Village written by Nancy W. Jabbra and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Women and Gender in a Lebanese Village: Generations of Change, Nancy W. Jabbra presents a detailed analysis of change in gender roles in a Christian community in rural Lebanon.
Download or read book Civil Society and Political Reform in Lebanon and Libya written by Carmen Geha and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lebanon and Libya have undergone critical political events in recent years. However, demands for reform from civic institutions during these transitions have not led to concrete political decisions. Civil Society and Political Reform in Lebanon and Libya reveals the deeply-entrenched historical patterns and elements of continuity that have led to path dependent outcomes in the political transitions of both countries. Motivated by personal experiences as an activist in Lebanon, the author draws together a wide range of data from participant observations, nation-wide surveys, interviews and focus groups in a careful analysis of these two civil society-led reform campaigns. The study demonstrates how the combination of weak states and power-sharing agreements marginalizes civic organisations and poses institutional constraints on the likelihood of reform. Written by an active participant in the political events discussed, this book offers new insight into two countries which present comparable and informative case studies. As such, it is a valuable resource for students, scholars and policymakers interested in civil society, politics and reform in the Middle East and North Africa.
Download or read book Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon Where to belong written by Dorothee Klaus and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The series Islamkundliche Untersuchungen was founded in 1969 by the Klaus Schwarz Verlag. Since then, it has become one of the most important venues for publications in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. Its more than 350 volumes cover a wide range of topics from the history, culture and societies of the Middle East and North Africa as well as neighboring regions in central, south and southeast Asia.
Download or read book Triadic Coercion written by Wendy Pearlman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the post–Cold War era, states increasingly find themselves in conflicts with nonstate actors. Finding it difficult to fight these opponents directly, many governments instead target states that harbor or aid nonstate actors, using threats and punishment to coerce host states into stopping those groups. Wendy Pearlman and Boaz Atzili investigate this strategy, which they term triadic coercion. They explain why states pursue triadic coercion, evaluate the conditions under which it succeeds, and demonstrate their arguments across seventy years of Israeli history. This rich analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict, supplemented with insights from India and Turkey, yields surprising findings. Traditional discussions of interstate conflict assume that the greater a state’s power compared to its opponent, the more successful its coercion. Turning that logic on its head, Pearlman and Atzili show that this strategy can be more effective against a strong host state than a weak one because host regimes need internal cohesion and institutional capacity to move against nonstate actors. If triadic coercion is thus likely to fail against weak regimes, why do states nevertheless employ it against them? Pearlman and Atzili’s investigation of Israeli decision-making points to the role of strategic culture. A state’s system of beliefs, values, and institutionalized practices can encourage coercion as a necessary response, even when that policy is prone to backfire. A significant contribution to scholarship on deterrence, asymmetric conflict, and strategic culture, Triadic Coercion illuminates an evolving feature of the international security landscape and interrogates assumptions that distort strategic thinking.
Download or read book Religion Education and Governance in the Middle East written by Sai Felicia Krishna-Hensel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle East is a key geopolitical strategic region in the international system but its distinctive cultural and political divisions present a mosaic of states that do not lend themselves to simplistic interpretations. A thoughtful analysis of the Middle East requires an understanding of the synergism between tradition and modernity in the region as it adapts to a globalizing world. Religious education and activism continue to remain a significant factor in the modernization process and the development of modern governance in the states of the Middle East. This interdisciplinary book explores the historical and contemporary role of religious tradition and education on political elites and governing agencies in several major states as well as generally in the region. The relationship between democracy and authority is examined to provide a better understanding of the complexity underlying the emergence of new power configurations. As the region continues to respond to the forces of change in the international system it remains an important and intriguing area for analysts.
Download or read book Reviving Phoenicia written by Asher Kaufman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviving Phoenicia follows the social, intellectual and political development of the Phoenician myth of origin in Lebanon from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Asher Kaufman demonstrates the role played by the lay, liberal Syrian-Lebanese who resided in Beirut, Alexandria and America towards the end of the nineteenth century in the birth and dissemination of this myth. Kaufman investigates the crucial place Phoenicianism occupied in the formation of Greater Lebanon in 1920. He also explores the way the Jesuit Order and the French authorities propagated this myth during the mandate years. The book also analyzes literary writings of different Lebanese who advocated this myth, and of others who opposed it. Finally, Reviving Phoenicia provides an overview of Phoenicianism from independence in 1943 to the present, demonstrating that despite the general objection to this myth, some aspects of it entered mainstream Lebanese national narratives. Kaufman's work will be vital reading for anyone interested in the birth of modern Lebanon as we know it today.
Download or read book Citizen Hariri written by Hannes Baumann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rafiq Hariri was Lebanon's Silvio Berlusconi: a 'self-made' billionaire who became prime minister and shaped postwar reconstruction. His assassination in February 2005 almost tipped the country into civil strife. Yet Hariri was neither a militia leader nor from a traditional political family. How did this outsider rise to wield such immense political and economic power? Citizen Hariri shows how the billionaire converted his wealth and close ties to the Saudi monarchy into political power. Hariri is used as a prism to examine how changes in global neoliberalism reshaped Lebanese politics. He initiated urban megaprojects and inflated the banking sector. And having grown rich as a contractor in the Gulf, he turned Lebanon into an outlet for Gulf capital. The concentration of wealth and the restructuring of the postwar Lebanese state were comparable to the effects of neoliberalism elsewhere. But at the same time, Hariri was a deeply Lebanese figure. He had to fend against militia leaders and a hostile Syrian regime. The billionaire outsider eventually came to behave like a traditional Lebanese political patron. Hannes Baumann assesses not only the personal legacy of the man dubbed 'Mr Lebanon' but charts the wider social and economic transformations his rise represented.
