Global Societies Journal

This essay seeks to analyze some political complexities of the country of Lebanon in light of popular literature concerned with global governance. By particularly considering some of Lebanon's demographic complexities in light of John Ikenberry's Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order, James Mittelman's Hyperconflict: Globalization & Insecurity, Mary Kaldor's New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era and Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries, conflict in Lebanon can be contextualized within a sort of global governance framework. Or rather, a global governance framework can offer an approach for explaining some complexities of conflict and the distribution of power in Lebanon. Such a framework can be extracted from the above mentioned literature, by understanding how multiple modernities bound under hegemonic power can become the fault lines for conflict and competition when hegemonic order fails and disintegrates into hyperconflict and asymmetrical warfare. This can be applied to the Lebanese context by recognizing how demographic complexities in the country fostered the construction of multiple modernities and political futures tethered to differing communitarian identities. In the face of a weak state system and failures of the government to maintain order between Lebanon's competing communities, the battle lines of the Lebanese Civil War and ongoing political conflicts today have been drawn along these confessional and communitarian lines. Such conflict has been especially asymmetrical in nature as no one faction or external actor has been able to reestablish hegemonic order in the country. Leaving Lebanon in a sort of indefinite deterritorialized global conflict.