Lebanon: Consociationalism Between Immobilism and Reform

Despite long-lasting and widespread citizen protests against the political elite and sectarian system, Lebanon’s consociation has been marked by a high degree of immobilism and a profound resistance to change. Assessing the notion of consociational adaptability and drawing on interviews with women’s rights activists, we analyze the efforts and accomplishments of two different reform movements, one which met with some success in enacting change (the efforts to repeal ‘marry your rapist’ laws) and one which has not (the efforts to reform the nationality law, under which women cannot pass their nationality to their husbands or children). We argue that consociational adaptability is constrained not only by the immobilism and sluggishness of the power-sharing institutions themselves but also by any ‘symbolic weight’ those institutions carry, meaning political elites are more likely to resist reforms if they perceive those changes to threaten communal interests.