by Ryan Saadeh
Introduction
Beirut is once again tasked with the monumental challenge of rebuilding, following the devastating explosion at the Beirut Port on August 4, 2020. The blast killed over 200 people, injured more than 6,500, displaced approximately 300,000, and damaged nearly 50,000 homes. The detonation of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate was one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history, an instance of spectacular violence that lays bare the structural violence of the Lebanese political system.
In the absence of a visible perpetrator, mounting evidence has pointed to the state as the guilty party. The catastrophe, coupled with the twin crises of the collapse of the Lebanese economy and the COVID-19 pandemic, reveals the underlying structural violence embedded within the Lebanese political system. This confessional political system, which distributes power between sectarian communities, prioritizes private gain at the expense of good governance, incentivizes and reproduces socioeconomic inequality, and excludes and marginalizes vulnerable communities.
Confessional-Rentier Political Economy
Endemic corruption is not just unfortunate; it is violent. For years, senior officials were aware of the hazardous storage of the chemicals in the port, yet political leaders within the confessional-rentier system failed to respond to the threat all while actively benefiting from networks of bribery and smuggling. The present system of corruption amongst the political ruling class first emerged during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), when a general amnesty allowed militiamen and warlords to transform into politicians. This lack of post-war justice and accountability institutionalized a system of clientelism among religious-political factions that set the country on a path of impunity and uneven underdevelopment.
Since the war, consecutive governments have spent vast amounts of money on public goods, with little results to show for it. In fact, the quality of the limited public goods has been deteriorating, and recent reviews have shown public funds spending is highly uncompetitive and concentrated, and that levels of investment vary by sectarian affiliation. Political and religious elites capture and redistribute significant resources through this system of clientelism and sectarian patronage networks. Income is extremely concentrated, with the top 10% of the adult population receiving 55% of the national income on average. At present, an estimated 55% of the population is in poverty, and the level of extreme poverty has increased to nearly 25% in 2020. The country is ranked 137/198 for corruption worldwide.
By distributing resources and services through sectarian networks, political and sectarian elites centralize and maintain their power at the expense of the impoverished lower and middle classes, as seen in the 2019 crash of the economic system.
These socio-economic and political horizontal inequalities subject everyday people both to the structural violence of poverty and the potential for future armed conflict spurred by inflamed communal divisions.
Marginalization and Exclusion of Foreign Nationals
The Lebanese political system’s reliance on patronage to distribute resources contributes to an embedded disinterest in providing basic rights or services to non-citizens. In the context of the compounding crises, low-income foreign nationals in Lebanon are pushed into extreme vulnerability. Among the most marginalized communities in Lebanon even prior to the blast, refugee and migrant communities are now particularly exposed to violence, as many were already living below the poverty line pre-blast, lacking formal employment, health care, and legal residency. While poverty rates among Syrian refugees were increasing prior to the blast, with 55% of Syrian refugees in 2019 unable to meet basic survival needs, since the blast Syrians have reported that it was becoming more difficult to access aid as local power structures discriminated against them for their status.
Furthermore, under Lebanon’s Kafala system (a coercive gendered and racialized “sponsorship” system that binds legal residency of migrant workers from the Global South to a contractual relationship with their employers) migrant workers are excluded from social protections and services and denied human rights. This manufactured vulnerability allows employers to coerce them into accepting exploitative working conditions—if a worker refuses these conditions and leaves the employer’s home without their consent, the worker risks losing residency status, detention, and deportation. As a result, they are subject to physical, emotional, gendered and racialized violence. Since the blast, numerous female migrant workers have been stranded by employers and the state alike, without means to recourse or justice, the cruel result of a deliberately exploitative system.
Dispossession & Re-construction
As another iteration of the multiple cycles of destruction and rebuilding Beirut has faced in recent decades, the blast will intensify the pre-existing urban trends of displacement and gentrification, while opening new possibilities to the risks of large-scale, centralized reconstruction projects, such as the heavily criticised and destructive reconstruction of the Beirut Central District (BCD) in the 1990s. In the wake of the civil war, authority to reconstruct the city centre was given to the private company Solidere, which, despite generous public subsidies and facilities, failed to (re)generate the urban life of the city or kick start the national economy. Instead, the capital-intensive intervention in the BCD consolidated the effects of the violence of the civil war.
Localised urban development, too, is implicated in recursive cycles of violence, which produces “patchworks of destruction and construction, lavishness and poverty, otherness and marginality.” Hiba Bou Akar calls this approach “planning without development,” wherein “development” is primarily negotiated by religious-political organizations to further control of their respective regions, a shift from ethics of socio-economic and spatial justice to one of sectarian conflict that has severe implications for increasing levels of poverty, segregation, violence, and environmental degradation.
Conclusion
Amidst the backdrop of COVID-19 and the collapse of the Lebanese economy, the Beirut blast is yet another violent disruption to life in the country. However, the explosion should not be seen as an isolated incident, but one that emerged from and exacerbated existing systems of corruption, inequality, and exclusion that are entrenched in the Lebanese political system. This system has proven incapable of building an inclusive and just society. The confessional system’s reliance on patron-client relationships has cemented the very vertical and horizontal inequalities that it was meant to overcome. In the absence of effective public agencies, post-disaster recovery must be people-centered and cognizant of the structures of violence embedded within the political system.
Academic References
Akar, H. B. (2018) For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers. Illustrated edition. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Dermitzaki, D. and Riewendt, S. (2020) ‘The Kafāla System: Gender and Migration in Contemporary Lebanon’, Middle East - Topics & Arguments, 14, pp. 89–102. doi: 10.17192/meta.2020.14.8255.
El Husseini, R. (2013) ‘State Elites and the Legacy of Corruption’, in Pax Syriana: Elite Politics in Postwar Lebanon. Syracuse University Press. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/756905 (Accessed: 27 November 2020).
Makdisi, S. and Marktanner, M. (2009) ‘Trapped By Consociationalism: The Case of Lebanon’, Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies, 11. Available at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/meea/119.
Salti, N. and Chaaban, J. (2010) ‘The Role of Sectarianism in the Allocation of Public Expenditure in Postwar Lebanon’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42(4), pp. 637–655.
Szekely, O. (2015) ‘The costs of avoiding transitional justice: lessons from Lebanon’, in Transitional Justice and the Arab Spring. 1st edn. London. doi: 10.4324/9780203431146-6.
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