Tripoli Scene Lebanon Elections 2018 A Wake Up call

The Abd al-Hamid Karameh plaza, Tripoli, Lebanon Second largest city in Lebanon, Tripoli has gained a reputation for being a center of protest to government policies and turmoil since the Lebanese independence. The gradual relegation of the Sunni capital of Lebanon, from a province capital during the Ottoman era to a second rank city in an new modern-state entity, combined with a more and more impoverished and idle population are but the most symbolic elements of Tripoli's unsolved historical crisis. Furthermore, from the eruption of the Civil War in 1975 to the current day, the spiral of violence has kept the city under a halo of instability characterized by its Islamic flavor. After a first empirical approach to these problems, a leap into the past to analyze the subtle interrelation between the population of Tripoli and its urban network will prove more than useful in understanding the underlying roots of a long and lasting opposition movement that has taken many shapes through time.

Public opinion in Lebanon demands that a thorough investigation be carried out into the explosion that occurred at the Port of Beirut in August 2020 and that the culprits be apprehended and brought to justice. The preoccupation with the explosion and related corruption has not completely disappeared from the current Lebanese election campaign. However, dealing with the explosion is marginal, mainly among the political parties which are unlikely to have any real influence or seats in parliament.

The paper discusses the dynamics behind the recent (May, 2016) municipal elections in Lebanon, with a particular focus on the local elections to affect the capital, Beirut, where a group of volunteer non-sectarian activists used municipal issues to effectively challenge the confessional quota system which has hitherto defined politics in Lebanon. As with all work here, this was not written by me but rather published by the ACRPS English website. The authors, including Jad Chaaban of Lebanon's AUB and his associates, are all credited in the text.

TRT World Research Centre, 2022

Over the past few years, Lebanon has seen a convergence of unprecedented political, humanitarian, financial, and socioeconomic crises. In October 2019, citizens rose up to demand accountability and push for reforms to end decades of impunity and corruption. On May 15, Lebanon heads to the polls for the first parliamentary elections since the crisis began. This Policy Outlook examines key themes and questions leading up to the polls as well and explores local and regional implications of potential results.

2015

A city in North Lebanon with 320,310 inhabitants, Tripoli is one of the so-called “sensitive” zones where the Syrian war threatens to spread into Lebanon. While the Syrian army withdrew from North Lebanon in April 2005, Tripoli’s destiny remained intrinsically linked to Syria. This was because of the numerous historical, political, family, and economic ties linking the social space of north Lebanon to its Syrian hinterland. The demographic composition of the city resembles Syria. Tripoli’s population is in majority Sunni Muslim (80.9%) and includes, in addition to a Christian minority in decline, the largest Alawi community in Lebanon (8,9 %, or 28,525 persons) 1 . This paper analyses the consequences of the Syrian intervention and presence in Lebanon on political leadership in Tripoli. It shows how the Syrian presence created alliances, conflicts and divisions still present in Tripoli today. The main argument is that the Syrian presence in Tripoli destructured Sunni leadership in N...

Digest of Middle East Studies, 2018

T he political eruption engulfing the Middle East since late 2010, known as the Arab Spring spared, to a large part, and up to now (December 2017), a country whose history, stretching for centuries, has been characterized by frequent bloodshed, large-scale violence, and terrible civil wars. This is Lebanon. It is arguably the case that predictions of many pundits and experts, including many Lebanese, were that the eruption would strike Lebanon like an unstoppable hurricane, but that did not happen, and the analysis of why it did not is out of the scope of this review. What is not out of this review's scope is the fact that the prospect of Lebanon's being engulfed in yet another round of mayhem is still very tangible; and this is, in fact, the underlying assumption of the book-that such a scenario is nearly inevitable. This book is an important and valuable contribution to our understanding of this turbulent country. Most importantly, it is so because, unlike much of the literature about Lebanon, it does not attempt to beautify, or even romanticize the Lebanese situation, by portraying a picture much rosier and more optimistic than what the actual situation is. The central thesis is simple, and it is, that the Lebanese themselves are living in the shadow of the grim realization, that "something" is imminent, and "something" means bad news. It does not mean a political misunderstanding between different factions, it means war, because political differences in Lebanon usually are being contested and resolved through bloodshed. The book covers three years of research, 2006-2009, but the writer, being connected to Lebanon, tells us, that "every year since [2009], however, I have returned for several months in summer and again in winter. Invariably, with