ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the various struggles, strategies, and policies that the Shia Muslim community put in place in order to challenge and, ultimately, alter the elite-driven structure of power of Lebanon, using the process of informal urbanization of Dahiye, the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut as an illustrative case. The chapter ultimately attempts to problematize the interpretation of informality either as emancipatory or as a result of political exclusion. Indeed, in the case of Beirut, informality developed on a continuum of requests, claims, and struggles that made of the southern suburbs of the city an alternative space for democratization and social participation of a previously marginalized and stigmatized community. In the case under scrutiny, the elite leading the nation-building process were characterized not only by common political and economic values, but also by common ethno-religious characteristics. Hence, the creation of the State reinforced and institutionalized a sectarian divide between the dominant Christian Maronite elite and the newly co-opted Sunni bourgeoisie, on one side, and the remaining ethno-religious groups, on the other. This process paved the way for the establishment of what we can call, using Yiftachel’s definition, an ethnocratic regime. From being a silent minority among the historically poorest and most marginalized of the country, the Shia community of Lebanon progressively assumed the role of a key national player, in part because Dahiye has been able to complicate the rigid core–periphery relation enshrined into the structure of the State and it represents today a semi-periphery able to question the legitimacy of the core.
