From Political Protest to Sectarian Violence: A Sunni-Shiite Split in Lebanon?

From Political Protest to Sectarian Violence: A Sunni-Shiite split in Lebanon?

The year 2005 has been a turning point in the history of Lebanon. The assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in a car bomb on February 14^th, 2005 triggered the largest demonstrations in the history of the country. Hundreds of thousands went to the streets to either denounce the Syrian regime and accuse it of being behind the assassination, or to flag out their alliance with it and accuse the US and Israel of killing Hariri. In the following research I study how the political protests that followed the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri turned into sectarian violence that has been framed as “Sunnis versus Shiites”. More precisely, I look at the shift in the political salience and the re-modelling of political, confessional as well as national identities. I have used official records and newspaper archives in order to compiled a dataset of all protest movements and events of violence/clashes that have occurred in Beirut between 2000 and 2010. I analysed this dataset in order to depict the shift in political, as well as sectarian alliances. A meso-level analysis of coalition formations is carried out using social network research techniques. The empirical results show that the Hariri assassination was a “political earthquake” that shifted the attention of the Lebanese society from mainly pan-Arab concerns, to internal concerns and anti-Syrian activism. The analysis of our findings suggests that a change in political relations leads to sectarian tension when two main conditions are met: (a) the majority of the sectarian group follows one leader and; (b) when the two opposing communities are equal in size and in power.