This is a conversation with Nadim El Kak. He’s a researcher at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies with a background in sociology and political science.
I wanted to have Nadim on after reading his Twitter thread on the second wave of the Lebanon protests, which you can find here.
Is Lebanon undergoing a second wave of protests? And how do they differ from the October 2019 ones?
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Further Readings:
- Lebanon’s new phase of uprising: Reflections on violence, clientelism, organizing – Nadim’s latest piece
- The Public Source
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
Neighborhood councils are essential, because we know that the political establishment is not going to meet the demands of the protesters outright, and it’s going to take a long while to be able to exert the pressure needed to overthrow a political class like that, that’s so attached to power and that has a lot to lose by relinquishing it.
Nadim El Kak: My name is Nadim El Kak. I’m a researcher at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, and I’m also a graduate fellow studying at the American University of Beirut; I have a masters in sociology. I initially trained in political science and Middle Eastern studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and I’m now based in Beirut. I’ve been here for almost a year.
Elia J. Ayoub: Just a couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with Timour Azhari, the Lebanese journalist for Al Jazeera, and it was an assessment of this half-year since the start of the uprisings. One of the things he said struck me: that this government hasn’t really had its big test yet, something that is really visible. But in the past few days we’ve been seeing that happening. We actually lost a protester, who was murdered by security forces; he died of his wounds overnight. The situation is what it is. All of us were expecting it.
It’s been very predictable that people are going to get out of their homes at some point because of the economic situation. Are we seeing a second wave of protests in Lebanon? If yes, what are some ways this is similar to the October ones? And what are some ways it might be different?
NK: You touched on a lot of issues that are relevant right now. Obviously we’ve seen an upsurge in protests this past week—and the center of it hasn’t been Beirut, but the two other largest cities in Lebanon: Tripoli in the north and Saida in the South. As for the second wave: a lot of people were anticipating it, waiting for it. With the global pandemic and the lockdown there’s been a hiatus, and now things are definitely resurging in a lot of different ways.
A lot is very similar to what we saw in October, but there are also a lot of distinguishing factors. The conditions or the symptoms that initially brought people to the streets are very similar, but they are worsening. The devaluation of the lira has further increased since the lockdown; the unemployment rate, poverty, inflation—all of these socioeconomic factors have worsened. But we’re seeing a shift also in revolutionary strategies. If we remember the end of the first wave of the uprising, there was a clear sense of that shift already starting to emerge: more violent means of expressing frustration and anger, mostly being directed at banks, and more riots happening all over the country. Now those protests have re-erupted, and they’re very similar to the kind that I just described. In the earlier phase of the initial uprising in October, in the first couple weeks, a lot of the squares had had a rather festive nature.
On the question of the government, the Hassan Diab cabinet: this cabinet was formed knowing very well that a second wave of the uprising was going to return. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they picked Mohammed Fahmi as minister of interior instead of Raya El Hassan. That was very calculated, knowing that they were going to engage in much more repressive strategies this time around.
EA: Can you expand a bit on that last part? What is the difference between these two?
NK: Mohammed Fahmi is associated closely with Jamil Al Sayyed, who is a close ally of the Bashar Al Assad regime in Syria; he comes from a military background. In past speeches that he’s given, it’s been very clear that he’s willing to take the strongman approach, to not back down to protesters. Whereas Raya El Hassan—though her stint as the minister of interior and the way she managed to deal with the first wave of the uprising definitely had a lot of instances of violence and repression, you felt like her conscience was somewhat weighing on her, and that she wasn’t very comfortable playing that role. So the establishment realized they needed someone who was more willing to engage in such repressive strategies, and not question those decisions twice before engaging in them. Mohammad Fahmi also is someone that the pro-Syrian-regime parties feel more comfortable with, compared to Raya El Hassan who was part of the Future Movement and very close to Saad Hariri.
EA: The tactics by protestors are definitely shifting. We’ve had two or three days of explicit targeting of government institutions and banks. We’ve seen this a lot, and in Tripoli, especially—that’s where the protester was killed.
Can you talk a bit about the reaction? You did touch on how this new guy might be more violent. You’ve listed five counter-revolutionary mechanisms being used by the government or ruling classes in Lebanon right now. I’ll just let you list them and expand on them a bit, if you don’t mind.
NK: We touched on one of them, which is repression. Repression can take on different forms. You can repress protesters physically, like we saw in the past couple of days. There can also be the repression of the press, and other forms of repression and state violence that manifest in different ways. But there are other things that we can think about, like the co-optation that some parties were engaged in in the first stage of the uprising. The Lebanese Forces, the Kataeb, and the Progressive Socialist Party (who belong to the bloc opposed to the Hezbollah and Amal Movement camp) have been very vocal in expressing their support to the uprising, trying to co-opt it in a way that benefits their political interests.
Part of this co-optation is a form of sectarianization, because it views protesters and frames movements as part of the March 14 camp (the more pro-Western camp) or the March 8 camp. Although that binary is questionable at times, it’s relevant to think about it like that because it’s still in very much in people’s psyches. But it starts stripping protesters of their agency: every time someone wants to mobilize, they have to justify that they’re not affiliated to the political class, and they’re not being asked to join in the streets by specific sectarian leader.
We see that a lot, especially in Tripoli: people constantly have to prove they’re protesting because of the living conditions that they’re facing, because they’re fighting for their survival, and they’re not actually backers of the Future Movement and Saad Hariri’s bid to return to the political arena as prime minister. There’s a constant need to validate. For a lot of people, this rhetoric and discourse resonates, and it’s effective in making them question the motives behind actions taking place. So that’s another tool that they’ve deployed throughout. It was more effective before October 2019; if we think of the 2015 garbage crisis movement, co-optation as a mechanism was a lot more effective then than when it was deployed this time around.
Then of course there’s fear-mongering: blaming protesters for the worsening economic conditions and for the health crisis, to remove the burden from the political and business establishment and put that burden on protesters who are already carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.
EA: It’s important that you mentioned how fear-mongering and scapegoating whole groups of people in Lebanon actually worked in 2015. It’s important for us to recognize this, because one of the things that we felt during the protests starting in October 2019 is that this technique—it’s not that it doesn’t work at all anymore, but it’s been a bit less efficient than it used to be. It is more explicit. On the first night or second night, there was this video that I shared on Twitter of protesters expressing cross-regional solidarity, which in Lebanon gets translated into a cross-sectarian even anti-sectarian politics due to how Lebanon is actually structured, how the regions are cut off from one another most of the time.
I’ll put it in a different way: my fear from early on in October was that sectarianization could be used in an explicit way because of the ruling parties, and that this would be very difficult for protesters who are anti-sectarian to counteract. There are structures in place. Sometimes I like to compare sectarianism in Lebanon with capitalism (and indeed they work together obviously) because it’s both invisible and omnipresent at the same time. It doesn’t necessarily have to show itself all the time. It doesn’t have to be a Shi’a person yelling at a Sunni person or vice versa, or a Christian or whatever. In fact, one of the good signs that it might not get to that point—and let’s hope that it doesn’t—is that whenever this does happen, like in that video of the Free Patriotic Movement guy insulting a random protester from Tripoli and using very explicitly sectarian language against him, there is a backlash against that the very next day.
This is why scapegoating, fear-mongering, and sectarianization work in the same way. Can we spend a bit of time talking about why it works in some ways, even if it’s to a more limited extent than it used to be? Why is Tripoli the city that is most focused on by these kinds of sectarian forces in Lebanon?
NK: Tripoli captures a lot of the precarity that has been driving a lot of Lebanese all over the country to protest. It’s a city that has probably the highest share of wealth inequality in the country. It’s known for having a lot of millionaires, whereas a large majority of that wealth doesn’t actually manifest in the living conditions of the people of Tripoli. There’s also the Islamist element, the more radical violent groups there that are involved. It’s a very contentious city because it’s not clearly the stronghold of any particular group.
Hariri won a lot of elections there, but we’ve seen his stronghold there being very much undermined. So these attempts at sectarianization should also be thought about within the symbolic capital and the intangible capital that different sectarian groups try to cultivate. By doing that, they try to exploit those precarious living conditions. Like you said, we can’t think of sectarian identity without thinking about socioeconomic identity, and these are two things that are often conflated.
People may claim that when people get poorer, they will revert back to their sectarian cultures or sectarian parties. But we need to be very careful in the type of terminology we use here. We just said that it was poverty driving people towards these parties, so it’s not an ingrained sectarian identity that’s doing that. Rather, it’s How do we guarantee that we are able to feed our kids or get medicine for our parents or pay for rent at the end of the month.
These two things, class and sect, are often conflated in very harmful and dangerous ways that reproduce a lot of Orientalist and regressive narratives about the country. When you do this over and over again, it gets absorbed and it ends up manifesting at the social level as well. So while it may come from the top and it might be systemic in nature, it ends up spreading throughout society and then there are other bottom-up mechanisms that emerge and make those discourses even more effective.
EA: And indeed, we’ve been seeing this online. We see a lot of these terminologies being used against protesters in Tripoli, calling them Islamists and ISIS supporters or whatever, which betrays this very blatant attempt to sectarianize the situation.
You identify clientelism, or wasta as we call it in Lebanon, as one of the ways the ruling classes in Lebanon will try to weaken the revolution. For those who don’t know, how does clientelism function in Lebanon, and what are some of the ways that you think the ruling classes might utilize it?
NK: If we want to talk about clientelism, we also have to talk about the role of the state. While capitalism has been at the core of the Lebanese state since its independence, if we look specifically at the postwar period, attempts at neoliberalization have been much stronger. In the 1990s, the labor union movement used to be a strong vehicle where class-based organizing would take place, but by the end of the 1990s, this movement was co-opted and repressed. And there was no social safety net that was developing although wealth was accumulating. Instead, because there wasn’t a state providing services along universal lines, there were clientelistic networks filling that gap, and those clientelistic networks operate largely along sectarian lines.
Certain parties may distribute services to people outside the sect they claim to represent—that depends on the strategy of each party. There’s a lot of literature on that topic, but generally speaking, clientelism is perceived as being distributed along sectarian lines. Clientelism can take on different forms: it can be in the form of accessing a job, or someone paying for education or healthcare, or even providing legal services, or having authorization or permits to open a shop in a certain area. All of these different types of wasta, or services that are being provided, can take on many different forms.
This material dependency that is created is very much deployed during electoral seasons; that’s when we see sectarian parties try to exploit it and make sure they maintain their bases through these services. That makes one question what type of supporters these parties have. Are these supporters that believe in the politics or the policies or the vision that these parties have outlined, or are they just doing that out of desperation? As the country’s economic conditions have worsened, it’s become more and more clear that the main tool that these parties hold in order to remain in power is clientelism.
Now that the economic crisis hit, and the health crisis hit, and conditions are worsening, a lot of fears are emerging because people are struggling so much that there are concerns about citizens having no other alternative but to turn to political parties to receive the basic necessities that they need to go on with their lives.
EA: Thank you for that. You’ve painted a decent picture of where we are now. Can you talk a bit about some of the things that you’ve been reflecting on in terms of how we need to be better organized? You write, “Neighborhood councils and alternative unions are key.” We’ve been seeing some of those alternative unions; they’re still relatively small, hopefully they’ll be coming in the months to come, especially as the need for them becomes much more apparent.
Can you talk a bit about what neighborhood councils look like? You can imagine it on the spot, that’s fine. We’re not expecting detailed plans or anything like this, these are very difficult things to think about in the first place. I appreciate anything you can think about with me.
NK: Those seeds were starting to emerge since October 17 when the uprising began. A lot of the organizing that was taking place was very organic. It was people who met in the squares or in their neighborhoods, who joined WhatsApp groups together, who would go to the streets together, block roads together—and then progressively the sense of solidarity and community was very much at the forefront of organizing efforts.
Then there were more organized initiatives like you mentioned, those alternative unions from different professions that started organizing. And there were other emerging political groups that had already been in the political arena but didn’t necessarily have the same amount of visibility that they were able to cultivate during the uprising. Going back to the neighborhood council aspect of it, I think this is essential because we know that the political establishment is not going to meet the demands of the protesters outright, and it’s going to take a long while to be able to exert the pressure needed to overthrow a political class like that, that’s so attached to power and that has a lot to lose by relinquishing it.
So one way to make sure that this movement is able to hold on and withstand the blows that it’s constantly facing from the range of counter-revolutionary mechanisms that we’ve discussed is cultivating this sense of community and this sense of solidarity. The best and most effective way of doing that is with the people around you, in your neighborhood, in your vicinity, or in your profession. The main population in the streets are youth, and a majority of youth are unemployed, so that also forces the question of how you organize all of those unemployed. Should there be a type of union that brings those people together?
Any forms of identity that move beyond sectarian identity towards other forms of self-identification that matter a lot more to people, and that are a lot more significant in shaping their daily realities—those things require a lot of effort and a lot of investment. Building those foundations has to start somewhere, and we’re starting to see that, but it needs to be scaled up, and the importance of doing that needs to be recognized and appreciated more. Otherwise cracks will begin emerging within the protesters’ ranks.
EA: One of my formative experiences, politically speaking, was reading Omar Aziz, the Syrian anarchist’s pamphlets and essays on the need to create local councils in Syria. In Syria, obviously, the situation is very different. It’s very difficult to compare two different countries even though they’re neighbors. We don’t have Bashar Al Assad, we don’t have that kind of structure. There is sectarianism, but as you mentioned as well, it’s more complicated than that in the day-to-day stuff.
A total victory is really unlikely; it’s very difficult in the context of Lebanon that we will be able to overthrow the system and have an alternative to sectarianism and even beyond that. I think it’s very unlikely, especially in the conditions that we’re finding ourselves in. But neighborhood councils and alternative unions, as you mentioned—these could be ways of creating progressive concessions.
Do you feel that the more we organize on that front, the more the need for progressive concessions will be made apparent? One of the things that I always worry about is that especially when we’re on the streets and enough momentum has passed, we feel like we can push things a bit further, and then we get the reality check that Well, no, you can’t push that far, you have to back up a bit. This is normal, this is part of any revolution, any protest movement, especially one that is as grassroots as the one that we are seeing right now in Lebanon. But you mentioned yourself that the only Arab-majority revolutions that were relatively successful were the one in Sudan and the one in Tunisia.
This is important. Putting aside the Libyan story and the Syrian story—and the Yemeni one for that matter, because the complications there are of a different scale, in my opinion—what distinguishes the situation in Sudan and Tunisia? You can use broad strokes, if you don’t want to get into the details of individual countries. What differentiates them from what is lacking in Lebanon, and how can we learn from them?
NK: The role of neighborhood councils and labor unions in those contexts had a much longer history of being present in those societies. Neighborhood councils in Sudan had been around for a while. The labor unions, while they were formal labor unions affiliated to the state, there were a lot of different currents within them, some that were more opposed to the Tunisian regime; once the uprising started, they began playing a more substantial role in organizing the ranks and pressuring the regime into meeting protesters’ demands. This historical backbone is somewhat missing.
It’s not only important in order to organize efforts, it’s also about the collective psyche. When you lack those class-based structures for so long, the sense of class solidarity needs to be cultivated and needs to re-emerge from scratch. In the case of Lebanon, people tend to think that society is primarily organized around sects, not recognizing that the clearer cleavage in society is the wealth cleavage, the one that exists in terms of socioeconomic identities. The main difference here is that we’re starting from behind; we’re having to rebuild something that was taken away from us.
Without having those organizational structures in place, there’s a huge generational gap. If you’re trying to organize along class identity, you have these old leftist men who very much believe in the class struggle, but exhibit a lot of patriarchal tendencies sometimes, and then you have the younger inexperienced youth who maybe knows about the importance of organizing along those lines, but still doesn’t know on a day-to-day basis how you go about and building such a movement and getting people to join the ranks of whatever initiative you’re coming up with.
What ends up happening is that a lot of times those emerging movements struggle from being very much middle-class oriented or being started by people who are more middle class. If that is your foundation, it’s very hard to avoid the elitist label and to actually be able to become a more inclusive movement. That’s what we’ve seen with the new labor unions and the emerging political groups. These have been the main populations and the main members of these groups. So it’s about asking ourselves how we can scale that up and be a more inclusive movement that doesn’t necessarily stand on these people reaching out to different communities and asking them to join, but rather encouraging different communities and different neighborhoods and different regions to take on this task by themselves. Then we can think about a more national, centralized representation for the uprising.
But it needs to start at the local level, at the grassroots level, and it can’t be led from a centralized new political party that claims to speak in the names of people like we’ve seen some try to do. Otherwise, those new initiatives are going to keep falling into the same issues where they’re stuck and not able to attract the masses necessary to wage an effective and credible battle against establishment.
EA: Absolutely. Either we learn how to organize right now or we will be forced to learn how to organize even faster. Either we do it now, or we’ll have to do it when things would be even more difficult than they are now, given the ongoing situation that we’re in. It doesn’t seem realistic to expect it to calm down on its own. If anything, we have every reason to believe that things can and will worsen, unless we find ways to resist through some of the mechanisms you mentioned.
Nadim, you’ve been very generous with your time. Is there anything that you feel like we could have expanded upon, but didn’t?
NK: We touched on a lot of issues. I think we’re good for now. If there’s anything else that’s worth another podcast episode, I’d be more than happy to join again.
EA: That would be amazing. Thank you for your time.
NK: Thank you, Elia, and good luck dealing with the quarantine and the accumulation of crises that we’re dealing with.
EA: Same to you. Thanks a lot.
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