This is a conversation with Julia Choucair Vizoso, an independent scholar trained as a political scientist as well as an editor and translator at The Public Source, a Beirut-based independent media organization which describes itself as such:

“dedicated to reporting on socioeconomic and environmental crises afflicting Lebanon since the onset of neoliberal governance in the 90s, and providing political commentary on events unfolding since October 17.”

She is also is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Arab Reform Initiative, collaborating on the Programme on Sustainable and Inclusive Environmental Policy in the MENA Region.

I wanted to talk to Julia because she’s well-placed to explain how the Lebanese oligarchy operates and how or if the October 17th revolution has threatened it. You can read part one and part two of her essay on The Public Source.

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This episode supports Egna Legna. You can support them here and listen to my interview with their founder Banchi Yimer here.

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Transcript prepared by Thomas Cugini and Antidote Zine:

Oligarchy as a system is the politics by which people who have extreme amounts of power defend their wealth. Oligarchy is not a system of government; it’s not a particular method of rule. It’s a material project rooted in the idea that wealth must be defended from being redistributed.

Julia Choucair Vizoso: My name is Julia Choucair Vizoso, I’m editor and translator of The Public Source, which is a new independent bilingual media organization based in Beirut that is dedicated to reporting on the socioeconomic and environmental conditions afflicting Lebanon since the end of the civil war. I am currently based in Madrid in Spain, and I will soon be teaching political science here, which is a discipline I am academically trained in. I’m also a fellow at the Arab Reform Initiative in Paris, helping work on the new program for sustainable and inclusive environmental policy.

Elia J. Ayoub: Awesome, thanks for having this conversation with me. 

JV: Thanks for having me. 

EA: Hopefully by the end of this episode, listeners will have a decent idea of how the oligarchic system in Lebanon works, and how it intersects with the media system in Lebanon. It would be unrealistic to expect that we will have a perfect, detailed understanding by the end of it; let’s consider this a general introduction. 

In your two–part series in The Public Source on the Lebanese oligarchy, you first explore the meaning of the term oligarchy, and then you explore its particular applications in the Lebanese context. Can you guide us through your arguments? What is an oligarchy, and how do these oligarchs in Lebanon get and maintain their power and wealth?

JV: Just for some background, the piece was motivated by something I observed in public discussions in Lebanon a few weeks after the October Uprising, which was this back-and-forth about whether the word oligarchy (oligarchiyya in Arabic) should be used to describe Lebanon’s system. We had seen this word on some protest banners, but really it was appearing much more on social media. I found it interesting that the discussion wasn’t focusing so much on what the concept meant or even if it was a correct description for the Lebanese system, but rather whether we should be using it at all. Some people were saying it was a “foreign concept.” Others were saying it was an elitist concept, an academic understanding that “lay people” wouldn’t understand. 

I thought it was an interesting example of two things. One is that often when we use concepts like oligarchy, which at its core is trying to draw attention to material conditions and economic inequality, we’re held to a higher standard than when we use concepts that don’t necessarily talk about material conditions—such as democracy, which is also a “foreign concept” to Lebanon in terms of not being originally an Arabic word.

That was one thing. The other was that oligarchy itself as a concept has been quite muddled. People who say that it’s not an apt description can be forgiven, because it has been muddled in the specialized literature. So I wanted to do a two-part series. The first part would go into this idea of how we understand oligarchy today in the social sciences, while being self-reflective about how we’ve muddled it over the past century, and then I’d turn to Lebanon. 

Also, it can be fun to talk about Lebanon without trying to mention the word “sect” a single time, so I was trying to do that. Of course, a lot of criticism can come from that because I do think you naturally miss a lot of nuance that way. So I tried to talk about oligarchy in this comparative framework, and to put Lebanon in a more comparative framework, which we also struggle to do sometimes. That was a motivation. 

In part one, I mostly talk about one particular book, written in 2011 by the political scientist Jeffrey Winters, called Oligarchy. I think it’s a critical intervention, because it reminds us of the original intent of the term oligarchy, which was a term that at its core talked about wealth. It was a term that Aristotle introduced. What Winters argues, and I agree with him, is that oligarchy as a term in the last century has been muddled because we started talking about it only as minority rule. It’s often described in the dictionary or in poli-sci 101 as rule of the few as opposed to rule by the many. 

But what does that really mean? Rule of the few. Does that mean any system that doesn’t have full participation by a population at all times is oligarchy? What does it mean when you say rule of the few versus ruling class, which is another concept we see a lot, or political class, or even elites? It doesn’t really get us very far to think about rule of the few, but if we return to what Aristotle was saying, it was that what really distinguishes oligarchy from democracy is not the number of rulers but their material position. 

I’ll read a quote from Aristotle: “The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth; whenever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is oligarchy, and where the poor rule that is democracy.”

Winters builds on these materialist origins of the concept, but his intervention is to really look at the concept of wealth defense. It’s the idea that what makes people oligarchs and worthy of study as a special set of actors, different from a ruling class, and different from the idea of elites, is the extreme concentration of one specific power resource, which is wealth. When we think of elites, we can think of a lot of different types of power: symbolic power, charismatic power, political power naturally, religious power. But wealth is a very specific power resource, and that is what defines oligarchs.

And oligarchs are actors who have massive concentrations of wealth in a society, and they can be politicians or not, that’s not part of the term. Of course, a politician is an oligarch when they have a lot of material power, but an oligarch is an oligarch even if they don’t govern personally. If that’s what oligarchs are, then oligarchy as a system is the politics by which people who have extreme amounts of power defend their wealth.

Oligarchy is not a system of government; it’s not a particular method of rule. It’s a material project rooted in the idea that wealth must be defended from being redistributed. And when you think about it that way, you end up with a way of dividing societies based on the type of wealth defense project that they happen to be subsumed in at any given time. In the book, Winters goes on to talk about four particular typologies; I’m not sure it’s necessary to get into them all right now, we can just get into the Lebanese case. But essentially what differentiates them is two types of questions. 

One is whether these oligarchs who have to defend their wealth—and by the way, defending your wealth is always a coercive project; there has to be the threat of coercion, otherwise you cannot hold on to your wealth. Do these oligarchs themselves hold that coercive power? Or do they rely on the state to do it for them? 

That’s one. The second one is: Is there a single individual oligarch that dominates? Or do you have multiple players who are working more or less in harmony? That’s what ends up giving you a typology of different types of oligarchies, which I go into a little bit in the first piece. But then in the second piece, I really talk about Lebanon.

EA: One of the things that I’m trying to do with these episodes on Lebanon is to try and assess where we are today, six months since the start of the uprising, and what the different effects are that it must have had on different issues related to Lebanon. It has failed on some things; it has succeeded on some things. For me, it’s much more interesting to see how the changes have occurred, or how it might be lacking for more change to happen in the future. 

Could we say that the October uprising Lebanon posed or continues to pose a threat to this oligarchic system? And does that question even make sense? If the answer is yes, how? And if not, why not?

JV: The question definitely makes sense. I believe Lebanon is a ruling oligarchy, which is one of the types, and I believe that many of the protesters demands articulated in October and since have really struck at the heart of oligarchy. What I mean by that is that many of the protesters are making demands about the redistribution of wealth in Lebanon, and about the impossible socio-economic stratification that they’ve been subjected to.That, at the heart of it, strikes at oligarchy and at the project by Lebanese oligarchs to defend their wealth. 

However, not everybody in the uprisings and not all the protesters have voiced these demands in these ways. So as with all popular struggles, there is a dissonance of demands; there are many. I’m very much simplifying here, but you can find a line of thinking that I would call a civic demand or a political reformist demand: many are prioritizing the idea that what we need in Lebanon is a more open political system, such as a new electoral law, more civil liberties or citizenship rights (especially for women, for refugees), an independent judiciary, freer and elections. These are all very, very worthy causes that would necessarily make life better for Lebanese citizens. Some are even calling for an abolition of political sectarianism altogether, which is obviously a very important fundamental demand. 

But what I was arguing in the piece is that all of these could still happen and we would still not make a dent in socio-economic stratification. All of these could happen and we would still be an oligarchy in Lebanon. The reason I say that is because if we look around the world, we find that democracies (and here I mean democracies the way we understand it today, which is regular free elections, not democracy the way Aristotle thought, which is explicitly different from oligarchy) are captured and dominated by oligarchs. What many mainstream social scientists believe today is that democracies have not made single a dent in social inequality. In fact, we are now more unequal, as human systems, than we have ever been. 

So there’s no inherent conflict between oligarchy, as extreme concentrated wealth, and democracy. If we understand that, if we understand the place we are, historically as well as comparatively for Lebanon, we have to understand that we could potentially secure all these positive changes I talked about in terms of political reform, and still be an oligarchy.

The only way we threaten oligarchy is if we disperse wealth, just by definition. A lot of protesters understand that, but the tension there can be is: How do we do that? Something else that history teaches us is that wealth dispersion has happened in the past, but it’s always happened as a consequence of war, or conquest, or revolution, but it has never been attempted successfully as a democratic decision. That fact should give us all pause when we argue that Maybe if we just have a more perfect electoral democracy we would have better socioeconomic equality. That is something that is necessary for the debate, on the side of people who are pushing for a change in the system: to understand that if we’re talking about socioeconomic equality, it’s not going to come through these civic-centered demands. 

On the other side, how the system has responded so far to the uprisings: I think what we’re seeing is at best a shift in the type of oligarchy. Lebanon has been a ruling oligarchy since it’s founding. What I mean by that is it’s a system in which all the oligarchs are directly engaged in governing. Political office is peppered with oligarchs. There are eight political families who control thirty-two percent of the commercial banking sector’s assets—very concentrated wealth among political families. They also choose to govern directly; they primarily rely on their material power for patronage networks; and once they’re in power, they obviously use that power to keep enhancing their wealth, so it’s a vicious circle. 

But something that we have been seeing, not just as the uprisings, but particularly since the uprisings, is that Lebanon is shifting a bit to the idea of a civil oligarchy. A civil oligarchy is one where oligarchs can increasingly rely on the state’s coercive apparatus to defend the wealth stratification. Oligarchs in Lebanon have their own private militias, private armies, private guards; they defend their own property privately; they defend public space that’s not theirs with their private coercive means. But we also have been seeing that more and more, the military is willing to defend wealth stratification in Lebanon. On the nights where we were witnessing the extreme violence perpetrated by the state on the protesters, it’s starting to look more like a system where the state services are doing the work of the oligarchs for them.

Another way that Lebanon might be becoming more of a civil oligarchy is obviously the technocratic government that was put in place. In civil oligarchies, oligarchs sometimes realize that they don’t need to engage in direct rule, that you can simply use your enormous resources to shape outcomes without being directly holding office. We’re seeing that in Lebanon: you can delegate to your favorite technocrats, and then say that you have a technocratic government (where every oligarch gets to appoint their technocrats).

EA: I definitely agree with that, obviously, that we are transitioning into a more civil oligarchy as you defined it. Would you say that the fact that, in the demands of protesters (and as you said, there has definitely been a dissonance and multiplicity of demands), it wasn’t as loud—isn’t part of how oligarchy maintains itself by limiting the imaginary of what is possible in the first place? In the context of Lebanon, the oligarchy concentrates such a massive amount of power and wealth, and at the same time, part of its strength is to say, You guys, you don’t actually have any alternatives! We are the best you got, so let’s work together.” 

JV: Something that we see in civil oligarchies around the world—again, I don’t think moving from a ruling oligarchy to a civil oligarchy is in any way an optimistic thing. I really don’t. I think maybe the civil term can denote that, but actually civil oligarchies are some of the most dangerous, because they’re the most stable and the most obfuscating. So the point you were just making about how rhetoric is used: that is used very successfully in civil oligarchies because in civil oligarchies, oligarchs also control media and they control public discourse in a way that is maybe less obvious than in ruling oligarchies but is still very pernicious. 

The case of the United States is a very good one, where most media that most people consume are owned by conglomerates, groups that really constrain the imagination of what is possible. It is a continuous project. In the case of the US we focus a lot obviously on Republicans and Trump, but actually the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton herself ran on a platform of This is as good as it gets. There is no option. There is no alternative. 

Now in Lebanon, for all of these who are trying to stay in power, it’s the same type of discourse. It’s that this is as good as it gets and we have no alternatives. That is a constant project of limiting the imagination. So I completely agree with you. 

EA: Speaking of the media, in Lebanon it’s definitely intimately tied to this oligarchic class. But for those who don’t know, can you give an overview of the main stations and their relationships to the sectarian parties, or more broadly, how these systems have come to dominate Lebanese life in the post-war era?

JV: Sure. I should start by saying that I don’t work on media studies or communications, and there are many people who work on this much better. But I can give a very broad overview, and also refer anyone listening to the Media Ownership Monitor in Lebanon, which is a project by Reporters Without Borders and the Samir Kassir Foundation. It’s the most comprehensive data project I have seen on the players involved in the media landscape in Lebanon, because it tries to render visible the underlying interest structures and connections.

Based on that report, I can just give a bit of a summary. They analyzed thirty-seven outlets which have the largest audience share in Lebanon. This was in 2018. They found that eighty percent of these outlets, twenty-nine out of the thirty-seven, are either directly controlled by the state or by former members or current members of parliament or the executive, or by political parties. And twelve of the most infamous family dynasties control about half of these. Five of these families are represented in more than one media sector—so across formats: TV, radio, etcetera. 

These reports have been done for a number of countries. At the tim, they had been done for sixteen, and Lebanon, out of all sixteen of these countries, had the highest rate of political affiliation in media. This included countries like Albania, Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, Ghana, Mexico, Mongolia, Peru, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, and Ukraine—Lebanon has highest rates of political affiliation in the media. And these politically affiliated outlets account for the entirety of TV viewership. If you’re watching TV in Lebanon today, you’re watching a politically affiliated channel.The number is ninety-four percent for print readership, which is enormously high. And eighty percent of radio listeners will be listening to a channel that either belongs to a political party or to a dynastic political family. 

Something else to mention about Lebanon: this report was done in 2018, and since then the media landscape has been hit by a significant drain of funds. There’s a mix of reasons. Some are specific to Lebanon: bad investment decisions by these dynastic families, or more broadly, the financial crisis. Some are about the region: there’s more funding going to satellite stations in the Gulf, as has been happening for the last fifteen years or so. But also there’s a generalized crisis in media around the world, because we know that advertisers have moved to other platforms for advertising, and we know the readers don’t want to pay for content when so much content is available. Since 2018, Lebanon has also been facing that. 

One more notable example is the case of Hariri’s family media ownership. Theirs was the one family with major shares in all four media sectors: print, online, radio, and TV, and they have shut down most if not all of their media productions, and they have yet to pay their employees for past work. It was interesting: just last week, in the middle of the Corona lockdown, former employees were protesting in front of Future TV for their salaries. 

Anyway, this all goes to show that this market, which is obviously not independent at all, is also in itself not sustainable.

EA: To segue from that to your own work: The Public Source was launched a few months ago. When did it launch exactly?

JV: The Public Source launched, in terms of going live online, two weeks after the protests started. It was originally conceived as a platform for in-depth, long-form journalism, accountability journalism that would be focusing on the material effects of all these hegemonic systems in Lebanon. And with the start of the uprising, we decided to pivot a little and change the publishing date, precipitate it, and launch “Dispatches,” which were not long-form investigative journalistic pieces but rather insider observations that were analytical and experiential, to try to convey the spirit of the day. So we opened it up to workers, organizers, activists, agitators, students, intellectuals, academics, artists, anybody who wanted to share ideas and collect their collective experiences of this critical moment. 

So we launched with Dispatches, which we’re still continuing and which are mostly in written form, but we’re also starting to experiment with sound and video production, and we’re still working on the original platform, which is to have longform investigative journalism, which is called “Chronicles of the Crisis.” Those will be launching hopefully very soon. There are other parts of the platform as well. We’re now doing “Comictern,” which is politically charged comics; we’re trying to feature different comic artists, struggling and emerging comic creators. We also have another platform which is for whistle-blowing called “Sarreb Ya Sha3bi,” which is a platform hosting secure and anonymous communication channels to encourage people to whistleblow. 

That’s where the plans are now. We were really thirsty for a different type of media in Lebanon, and we were daring to hope that there can be another way of doing media Lebanon, one that’s loyal only to editorial independence, and that is not afraid of exposing power, and that can focus unapologetically on processes that have enriched the few and dispossess the majority. We really have a clear editorial line in terms of the topics that we cover, and we thought that was sorely missing in Lebanon at the time.

EA: And as someone who is on the consuming end of this, I can say that we have seen a few pop up, especially after 2015. Megaphone is the best example of that. It is definitely true that there is a very obvious lack. The numbers that you cited speak for themselves. The reason I wanted to have this episode was to get the overview we just got, and I thank you a lot for this—but at the same time to urge folks to check the website. 

As someone who grew up in post-war Lebanon, born in ‘91, basically the entire post-war era is my life, we got used to not expecting that anything like this can even be possible, through this constraint of the imaginary that we mentioned before. As an undergrad student at AUB, it was more common among us fellow students to talk about what’s happening outside than inside of Lebanon, because we would have more information on what’s happening there than we would have on what’s happening in Lebanon due to this concentration of media and wealth. 

What oligarchy ultimately comes down to is power, but can you expand a bit on some ways that maybe power can become more visible? What I’m trying to ask is—part of how these big families control this much wealth is that they don’t necessarily flaunt it that much. It’s not out in the open all the time. Most people have some vague idea, they know who the rich people are, but it’s not in their face all the time. It’s The Emperor’s New Clothes: as protesters, as media workers, leftists, progressives, anyone who just wants things to change for the better, how can media, or The Public Source specifically, help make this wealth more naked for everyone to see?

JV: That’s exactly why The Public Source was originally conceived. We all have a sense that we’re being screwed by these political families. We all have a sense of that, and that was the driving reason for the creation of The Public Source: to uncover how oligarchic power affects our day-to-day, our health, the air we breathe, the price of medicines—really the most basic daily struggles of Lebanese citizens, and non-Lebanese, and anyone who resides in Lebanon. One way to do that is through investigative journalism, through serious, unabashed, unafraid journalism. 

However, I will also say: more information is one side of the coin, but to go back to your point about the imagination, I think that is the other side. Just knowing how bad things are gives us a lot of anger and it motivates us, but we also need to be able to imagine what things could be. That is what we’re also hoping to do in The Public Source through these more creative outlets: to imagine how things could be different, and not just theoretically, but also through doing. 

Something else that The Public Source is, which I haven’t discussed so far, is that it’s an experiment with a different way of working together as journalists, as scholars, as translators, as creators. Right now we’re bound by principles of non-hierarchy. There’s no CEO, there’s no boss, so to speak; it’s collectively owned; it’s a mutual aid network; and we’re very committed to non-alienation in our labor. We’re a diverse group of people—journalists, scholars, translators—and we have all been burned by our respective institutional affiliations. So we’re all trying to find a way of working together that might be different. 

This is very difficult, of course, and that’s why it’s an experiment. But it’s one that is beyond journalism. It’s one that is afflicting anybody trying to make a project that they believe in that they can also make a living out of. That’s also part of our mission.

EA: Awesome, thanks for your time. 

JV: Yeah, thank you.