tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13433228.post116100287292473960..comments2023-12-29T15:17:14.941+01:00Comments on the human province: Update on grenade attacksseanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01692290924543236943noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13433228.post-1161149457372793252006-10-18T07:30:00.000+02:002006-10-18T07:30:00.000+02:00Civil society under destabilized political conditi...Civil society under destabilized political conditions often develops anti-state-antagonists. As I've mentioned earlier, the international effort should focus on helping Lebanon build a strong state, and not a flimsy one - this is the very route that the new SG, Ban Ki-Moon will emphasize (http://www.icasinc.org/2006/2006l/2006lkmb.html) -, but one which plays the shaky ground of not attempting to interfere with Lebanon's internal political proccesses. The big problem, as pointed out by numerous state-based scholars (Tilly, Habermas, A. Marx, in particular), is that post civil war conditions often require a comprehensive process of "othering" a target group in order to promote national solidarity. Hence, we have here the case that contentious actors that run amok and promote shaky alliances throughout and throughout. In the larger historical scheme, post civil-war Lebanon found a good way to diffuse the accountability of violence at a defined enemy, *outside* of its own national borders - Israel -, and hence was the violence checked within national borders. <BR/><BR/>Now, we're back to stage one where the borderlands are monitored by an international regulatory force. We worried about Hizbullah over the summer, but now we're on our toes thinking about something even *worse* about to come out of the woods. And like I mentioned during the brief Israeli air strikes, I said that emphasis should be focused on the *social* and *economic* reconstruction of Lebanon, an area which Hizbullah seems to be heavily capitolizing upon. In order to build a strong state in Lebanon and ensure regional stability, the international community MUST out-do all of these rotten apple religious militants in the arena of strong social and economic institution building, and in this way, Lebanon would do good as a viable state actor in the international stage. As far as I see it at this point, the state-of-Lebanon must play a fine-line game by juggling all of these actors in and around it, but by no means should it ever again surrender its sovereignty to such anti-state or foreign contentious actors, be it Syria, Hizbullah, or some random fundemantalist organization which I don't even want to know about.<BR/><BR/>From what I've heard and read, it seems that Hizbullah alone is badly outdoing everyone in social service capacity. They are, indeed, the world's greatest NGO. <BR/><BR/>-kmAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com