How "Political Workers" in Transsectarian Anti-Establishment Movements in Lebanon Advance an Alternative Common Sense

Research responding to the “structuralist” nature of Political Process Theory stresses the analytical importance of agency when assessing movement growth and outcomes, incorporating emotions, actions, and indigenous institutions. However, constructing a “theory of action” and accounting for impact have faced a number of methodological shortcomings, alongside difficulties acknowledging context, subjectivities, and biographies. A Gramscian reading of “political workers” as movement building-blocks helps us understand the implications of accumulated movement growth via their capacity to put forth an “alternative common sense”. Utilizing this theoretical model, this article examines ways in which non-sectarian movements in Lebanon impacted the decline of Hezbollah's cross-sectarian legitimacy. Top-down scholarship on Lebanon has forwarded reductionist analyses, assuming recurrent tribal and sectarian crises, with little empirical elaboration on movement labor and societal outcomes. After collecting data via in-depth interviewing, focus groups, movement archives, and searching news articles, the paper hypothesizes and argues for a number of bottom-up movement-building processes pursued by committed “political workers” engaging in protest activity, community build-up, and forms of electoral contestation was instrumental in constructing an alternative “common sense”. I hypothesize that such processual manifestations of “political will” further induced the electoral decline of Hezbollah’s cross-sectarian coalition in 2022, despite the increase in votes to the party itself.