Department(s)
International Studies and Languages
Document Type
Article
Version Deposited
Published version
Publication Date
2024
Abstract
Uneven democratization is a common yet poorly understood legacy of civil war. In the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), wartime processes of displacement interacted with Syria's intervention to transform local postwar political orders. In Beirut's suburbs, the bonds built between armed actors and displaced populations created opportunities for displaced people to extract responsiveness from local institutions, despite their vulnerability. But the power of displaced populations in their host community hinges on the fate of the locally dominant armed actor. If the armed actor is an ally of the intervening power, it can maintain political control over its strongholds, marginalizing traditional local elites while empowering its core constituents, displaced people. By contrast, if an armed actor is repressed by the intervening power, the ensuing power vacuum creates an opportunity for pluralistic party politics to emerge. Traditional prewar elites reassert their role in local political life, empowering their core constituents, the prewar residents. Drawing on dozens of in-depth interviews with key informants in the suburbs of postwar Beirut, the findings show how displacement transformed localities in ways that transcend religious identity. Over 80,000 people have been displaced from southern Lebanon because of fighting since October 7, 2023. If Hezbollah provides services and security to these displaced persons, the current conflict will strengthen Hezbollah's grip on the south of Lebanon when the displaced populations return, or further consolidate its influence in those localities in south Lebanon where displaced populations settle.
In the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, Hezbollah is the dominant party. It faces little competition from challengers and has virtually complete control of local government—a local version of authoritarianism. It is for good reason that the southern suburbs of Beirut are known as the group's stronghold. And yet, only a few miles down the road, in the eastern suburbs of Beirut, the story is quite different. Multiple political parties compete for the support and attention of local voters and local elites. In these neighborhoods, local family-based elites are powerful, and local politics reflect the complex negotiations between these elites and several parties. These two neighborhood clusters, even though just a fifteen-minute drive apart, operate under fundamentally different postwar political orders.
This kind of uneven political development is not unique to Beirut or Lebanon. Scholars identify subnational authoritarianism and uneven democratization as key features of local politics in Latin America and Russia. They point to a combination of institutional and electoral structures,1 local-level rentierism,2 control over the local economy,3 and elite strategies of boundary control that isolate challengers from national allies as ways that political actors maintain control over authoritarian enclaves.4 This subnational authoritarianism literature rarely examines postwar contexts,5 however, even though this pattern of subnational authoritarianism is common in the wake of civil wars. Perhaps the most vivid example is the American South after the Civil War, but modern examples such as Bosnia and Iraq abound.
I argue that military intervention by foreign powers to end wars is a significant part of the story. Although United Nations peacekeeping missions or liberal international interventions may be the most studied and discussed type of military intervention, many military interventions to end conflicts and broker peace are undertaken by biased and invested foreign powers—usually neighbors, sometimes great powers.6 Little is known about the long-term effects of military interventions, and even less is known about their local effects. In this article, I demonstrate how military intervention can create differential local effects, interacting with the facts on the ground, particularly the wartime networks forged by processes such as population displacement and armed group governance, to shape the postwar political order at the local level.
Civil wars inevitably set in motion numerous social and political changes. One of the most significant is internal displacement, a process that fundamentally reorganizes communities. In this context, military intervention to end a civil war is a critical juncture, one that is essential to understanding whether and how wartime population displacement and the accompanying changes in social and political networks will shape local politics in the postwar era.
Using an inductive theory-building approach supported by evidence from five months of fieldwork in Lebanon, this study yields three main findings. First, wartime displacement systematically alters social and political networks. Populations internally displaced during civil war develop stronger ties to armed actors that may have provided them safe haven than populations that do not experience displacement. The latter group tends to remain more connected to prewar traditional local elites. These relationships can be critical in understanding postwar politics. Counterintuitively, relationships between displaced persons and armed actors are not simply exploitative. My findings indicate that in the postwar era, displaced persons can leverage their relationships with armed actors to exercise their political voice, to put non-electoral pressure on local government, and to extract responsiveness, even when they lack the right to vote in their new host communities.
Second, external military intervention, particularly when it shapes the war's final settlement, does more than simply determine winners and losers at the national level. External intervention affects local politics by empowering the intervener's allies with resources and freedom both to maintain their local wartime networks and to exert control over local governments in their wartime strongholds. In regions controlled by armed actors allied with the intervener, local dominant party systems emerge in the postwar era and prewar traditional local leaders are sidelined. In contrast, in regions where the intervener represses and politically marginalizes local armed actors, the power vacuum enables local pluralism and competitive party politics to emerge. Part of this pluralism includes traditional local elites reestablishing their role in local politics, which permits some political continuities with the prewar era.
Together, these two findings generate a third insight—whether displaced people can use their wartime political networks to extract responsiveness hinges on the fate and relative power of the armed actor to which they are connected. In localities controlled by the external intervener's allies, displaced people are embedded in political networks that are strengthened by the war's settlement, and as a result, they have real postwar power. In contrast, when armed groups that are enemies of the external intervener are repressed, their networks atrophy and weaken in the postwar period. The displaced people among their constituents lack the power to demand the same level of responsiveness from the local government.
The article draws on a comparison of the densely populated southern and eastern suburbs of postwar Beirut. The two suburban areas share similar prewar characteristics, went through multiple phases of armed group control during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), and became refuges for displaced populations, particularly during periods of wartime sectarian sorting and cleansing. Displaced populations developed stronger ties to armed actors, whereas residents who did not experience displacement remained embedded in their prewar communities and more closely linked to prewar local elites.
Despite these similar paths, decisive military action by neighboring Syria in 1990 to end the war affected the two suburbs differently. Hezbollah, the armed actor in control of the southern suburbs at the end of the war, was allied with Syria, the enforcer of the postwar peace in Lebanon. Being a beneficiary of the war's final settlement allowed Hezbollah to monopolize political power in its localities and empower its core constituents, displaced people. The Aounist faction of the Lebanese Army, the armed actor in control of the eastern suburbs at the end of the war, was militarily defeated by Syria and politically marginalized. The war's end created a political power vacuum in Aounist localities and produced a competitive and pluralistic postwar political environment. Prewar elites reasserted their role in local politics and empowered their constituents, the prewar residents.
Although it focuses on the dynamics within a handful of urban neighborhoods in greater Beirut, this study makes several contributions to the literatures on international intervention and on wartime displacement. It also has policy relevance beyond the Lebanese case. Classic research on postwar politics tends to focus on the macro level—the interventions, settlements, and peace deals that end wars and shape a country's future at the national level. More recent civil war scholarship focuses on microlevel developments during a war. Both lenses are important. This study demonstrates how the national-level outcome of a war interacts with local networks to produce systematic differences in local political orders, local leadership, and the relative power of displaced people in different neighborhoods.
More practically, uneven political development occurs in many countries, but particularly in postwar environments. International intervention to structure the outcome of the war and to create winners and losers is a main contributor to this local variation. International intervention creates authoritarian strongholds in some places and more pluralism in others. Furthermore, in relatively authoritarian postwar environments, military interventions that empower armed actors with strong networks among displaced people can counterintuitively provide these generally vulnerable populations with ways to elicit local responsiveness. This dynamic can occur even when giving voice to the marginalized was never an objective of the intervention.
This study also advances the understanding of the long-term political consequences of displacement. While internally displaced people often receive less attention than international refugees, they form the majority of forcibly displaced persons globally. The Lebanese case of displaced populations settling permanently in urban areas is becoming the norm worldwide. By the end of 2021, an unprecedented fifty-five million internally displaced persons were living in Afghanistan, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen.7 These are among the most vulnerable people in the world, precisely because they are still in their own countries and may still be subject to violence and threats by the regimes and armed actors that caused their displacement. Policymakers and analysts often focus on return as the most durable and preferrable solution to the plight of internally displaced people.8 But recent trends indicate an increasing number of displaced persons, fewer of whom are returning home and more of whom are settling in cities rather than camps.9 Urban resettlement introduces new relationships with host communities, as scarce resources catalyze social tensions between new and old inhabitants.10
Practitioners in humanitarian and development agencies already recognize that aid targeting forcibly displaced people must start to adopt a “people-in-place” approach.11 Instead of focusing on service delivery to discrete individuals, organizations must incorporate a deeper understanding of the urban contexts in which displaced people reside. In practice, this holistic relief effort means addressing the infrastructural needs of an urban neighborhood as well as the economic, social, security, and human development needs of both displaced people and their host communities.12 This study's exploration of the political dynamics and tensions between displaced residents and prewar residents and between political parties with histories as wartime armed groups and prewar local elites sheds light on both the obstacles that development organizations may face and the potential partnerships they may forge as they seek to serve these communities effectively. In host cities for internally displaced people, such as Mosul (Iraq), Maidaguri (Nigeria), Mogadishu (Somalia), and Idlib (Syria), it is essential to map out the local political landscape to understand the complex web of networks and loyalties that will impede or facilitate the international community's ability to help the most vulnerable.
This article proceeds as follows. After a review of the relevant civil war literature, the second section presents an inductive theory of how internal displacement reshapes political networks and interacts with the outcome of the war to influence patterns of local control after the war. The third section provides a description of the comparative case study research design and data collection process. Next, the article addresses the common process of forced displacement and network transformation that took place in the southern and eastern suburbs of Beirut. Section five examines the postwar contrasts between the southern and eastern suburbs, demonstrating how Syria's intervention produced divergent local political orders. The penultimate section considers alternative explanations, and the conclusion discusses both the limits of foreign intervention and its potential to reshape local political life and empower displaced populations when interveners ally with legitimate local actors.
Publication Title
International Security
Volume
48
Issue
3
First Page
86
Last Page
128
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00478
Recommended Citation
Amanda Rizkallah; Foreign Intervention and Internal Displacement: Urban Politics in Postwar Beirut. International Security 2024; 48 (3): 86–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00478
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Near and Middle Eastern Studies Commons, Political Science Commons, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons
Comments
Publication can be accessed at this link: https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00478