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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.
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.
Tripoli, Lebanon's 'Sunni City' is often presented as an Islamist
or even Jihadi city. However, this misleading label conceals a much
deeper history of resistance and collaboration with the state and
the wider region. Based on more than a decade of fieldwork and
using a broad array of primary sources, Tine Gade analyses the
modern history of Tripoli, exploring the city's contentious
politics, its fluid political identity, and the relations between
Islamist and sectarian groups. Offering an alternative explanation
for Tripoli's decades of political troubles - rather than
emphasizing Islamic radicalism as the principal explanation - she
argues that it is Lebanese clientelism and the decay of the state
that produced the rise of violent Islamist movements in Tripoli. By
providing a corrective to previous assumptions, this book not only
expands our understanding of Lebanese politics, but of the wider
religious and political dynamics in the Middle East.
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