A House of Many Mansions by Kamal Salibi

Guilain Denoeux and Samir Khalaf, Lebanon’s Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).Ĭharles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back in ( Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1985 ), pp. Guilain Denoeux, Urban Unrest in the Middle East: A Comparative Study of Informal Networks in Egypt, Iran, and Lebanon ( Albany: SUNY Press, 1993 ).

Michael Johnson, Class and Client in Beirut: The Sunni Muslim Community and the Lebanese State, 1840–1985 ( New York: Ithaca Press, 1985 ). Michael Johnson, All Honourable Men: The Social Origins of War in Lebanon ( London: I.B. Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 ), p. Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990 ). Michael Hudson, “The Problem of Authoritative Power in Lebanese Politics: Why Consociationalism Failed,” in Nadim Shehadi and Dana Haffar Mills, eds., Lebanon: A History of Conflict and Consensus ( London: The Centre for Lebanese Studies, I.B. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Indeed, there exists a dialectical relationship between Lebanon’s various political communities and the state-supported though not determined by international juridical norms-that pushes them toward coexistence rather than dissolution. Yet, Lebanon is also a country whose subsidiary political units, however state-like they may have appeared during the war, were never able to exist separately from the loosely knit Lebanese collectivity. It is a country that has been described as “extremely plural” 2 it is a country whose state has always been “weak,” debilitated by a confessional power-sharing agreement that has periodically kept the peace but which has never allowed for a concentration of political power at the center and it is a country that, during its 16-year-long civil war, effectively broke up into several distinct and self-functioning cantons.

Lebanon provides a good opportunity to consider both the characteristics and trajectories of the concept of state-within-states.

A House of Many Mansions by Kamal Salibi