An analysis of Lebanon’s parallel state crisis, clarifying distorted political concepts surrounding sovereignty, institutions, legitimacy, governance, and national unity today.
What do state, regime, and institutions mean?
There is a need to explain terms that have been polluted in the discourse of the public sphere, generalized by parrot-like legal experts, constitutionalists, and intellectuals, and exploited for deception and the distortion of minds and public life. In Lebanon, there is no armed force or militia in the pattern of the wars of 1975-1990, nor is the issue merely one of surrendering weapons, nor is it comparable to militias previously seen in Colombia or Ireland. What exists in Lebanon is a parallel state with its own army and diplomacy. The essence of the issue is the restoration of the state, for the benefit of all. It is an institutional and cultural issue.
With unparalleled superficiality and simplistic diagrams, some engage in debates about the “regime,” federalism, and “sectarianism” during televised discussions, while completely ignoring the reality of all sects in Lebanon today (except for a political Shiism that does not encompass all Shiites) and the impossibility of any federalism without, fundamentally, a central state that alone monopolizes organized force and diplomatic relations. Without the centrality and unity of the state, the Lebanese would live in conflicts similar to those of the former Italian provinces and what Machiavelli sought to confront.
What is happening in Lebanon amid the reality of an ongoing catastrophe cannot be reduced to merely strategic, diplomatic, international relations, constitutional, or legal analyses. It requires delving into diagnosis and remedies along another trajectory involving clinical psychology, culture, education, mentalities, and behaviors. Politics is not confined to superstructures in the state, regime, and institutions-structures that cannot fundamentally function in a democratic system without legitimacy derived from people’s conviction and support.
The roots of the assassination of the state in Lebanon (Etatcide) by a parallel state in Lebanon, especially since a renewed Cairo Agreement on 6 February 2006, lie in a pathological Lebanese condition among a Lebanese and regional political Shiism, and among a Lebanese political Maronitism of the past. We are absolutely not referring to the great Shiite and Maronite figures, nor to all sects. This stems from a pre-pre-tribal psychological condition within Lebanese and Arab historical psychology. We do not say “tribal,” because tribes, contrary to common perception, relied on standards and values that enabled them to organize themselves historically toward the centrality and unity of the state:
Norbert Elias, La dynamique de l’Occident, 1939, Calmann-Lévy, Pocket, no. 80, 1975, 320 p.
An Arab and Islamic debate over the characterization of the state (whether national, nationalist, civil, or secular) has become mired in confusion, whereas the state in its essence is described only through itself in se and through its sovereign functions. This is evident in studies where concepts are mixed without distinction and terminology becomes polluted (The Arab State after the Uprisings, Arab Policies, issue 78, January 2026).
What is taking place in Lebanon with the existence of a parallel state is what Ibn Khaldun described in his Muqaddimah and what Ibrahim Shamseddine mentions. Arab and Islamic heritage has not been read from this perspective, which explains the disorder in Arab political culture and what we witness particularly among the Syrian people today, who seek to restore their unity through the centrality of the state in the face of local centrifugal forces. Ibn Khaldun states in his Muqaddimah:
“A stable state begins to decline and diminish when governors in distant regions become independent as its shadow recedes from them. Each of them then establishes a state for his own people, and whatever settles within his allotted share is inherited by his sons or clients… as occurred with the Umayyad state in al-Andalus, whose rule fragmented into taifa kingdoms ruled by those who had been its governors in the provinces (that is, officials entrusted and empowered by it and within it, who then betrayed that trust from within as well), dividing into states and kingdoms inherited thereafter by their relatives or clients…”
(Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, p. 298, quoted in Ibrahim Shamseddine and his commentary, “The State between Disintegration and Dissolution: Is There a Resurrection?” in The Dangers Threatening the Lebanese State and Means of Confronting Them, Cultural Movement – Antelias and Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 2015, pp. 45–48, p. 180).
What does “state” mean?
In the anthropology of history and sociology, the state is the central authority characterized by four sovereign functions designated as rex, regis, roi: the monopoly over organized force (that is, one army; the monopoly over diplomatic relations) that is, one diplomacy; the administration of public finances through taxation and tax collection; and the management of public policies. The state is described only through itself, through its centrality and unity, in contrast to feudal domains, emirates, and traditional leaderships. The state is not fundamentally a legal concept, but rather a social and political one in its emergence and in the accession of peripheral groups to its centrality and unity through a social contract. The constitution and political regime fall within a legal framework that comes after the emergence of the state, often after a long process aimed at subjecting the state to the rule of law. Foundational works state with utmost clarity: “The state is fundamentally a reality linked to political will and not to purely legal criteria.”
Georges Burdeau, Le pouvoir politique et l’Etat, LGDJ, 1943, 490 p.; and Julien Freund, L’essence du politique, Sirey, 1965, 770 p., p. 557.
What does “regime” mean?
A regime may be democratic, liberal, socialist, communist, secular, and so on. The regime encompasses the constitution and governance through the judiciary, public administrations, elections, political parties, and a collective perception concerning the legitimacy (légitimité) of rule. When some repeatedly raise the issue of the “regime” in Lebanon, what exactly do they mean? The constitutional text? Political practice? The prevailing discourse in the public sphere? Samir Atallah says: “The Lebanese are deeply divided over many orientations and convictions, all of which they summarize in an elastic and highly ambiguous term: the regime” (Annahar, 9 October 2024).
What do “institutions” mean?
The concept of a “state of institutions” has become generalized in Lebanon within a mental garbage dump. The concept includes the executive administrations involved in the exercise of governance: the army, diplomacy, public administrations, the judiciary, municipalities, and so forth.
The concept of the state, in its unity and centrality, is absent from Lebanese consciousness. When the rule of law is raised, legal experts drift into debates about law itself, whereas the state is the entity entrusted with the implementation of law (mise en oeuvre du droit). Recently, the lie of the “absence of the state” emerged, instead of speaking about the deliberate sidelining of the state. This is profoundly dismantled by Elie Elias (“The Lie of the Absence of the State That Killed the State,” Nida Al Watan, 7 April 2026).
There can be no secure future for Lebanon and the Lebanese so long as gamblers and adventurers continue, roughly every fifteen years, to seek internal domination and overturn Lebanese values, constants, and solid balances through diplomatic prostitution and reliance on external patrons, while engaging in bidding wars of hostility toward Israel. The memoirs of Joseph Abu Khalil and the wars of 1975-1990 in general require another Lebanese reading aimed at building Lebanese resilience and the resilience of the Lebanese people (Memoirs of Joseph Abu Khalil, Nida Al Watan, 27 March 2026).
