ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore the evolution of Lebanon’s Hezbollah since its founding in the 1980s to the 2018 Parliamentary elections. It will argue that the changes in the movement’s ideology over this period, notably away from a focus on the creation of a Shi’a Islamic state in Lebanon, do not represent an abandonment of its core goals, but the triumph of one aspect of its founding ideology. Hezbollah was founded on an implicit balance between claims to both religious and nationalist/territorial legitimacy. In relation to the former, the movement’s founders emerged from the Najafi Shi’a school of thought in the late 1960s/early 1970s, heavily influenced by Khomeini’s ideas of Islamic revolution and the governance of the jurist (vilayet-e-faqih). In this, the movement promised liberation for Lebanon’s “disinherited” Shi’a through the creation of an Islamic state in Lebanon. In relation to the latter, the movement also drew directly from Marxist and post-colonial thought in seeking to broaden their appeal beyond the Shi’a community to all disadvantaged Lebanese. In both regards, the early movement sought the overthrow of Lebanon’s confessional political structure – critiqued as both un-Islamic and a tool of Western-backed imperialism. Since the end of the civil war in 1990 and the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000, the movement’s ideology has drifted away from these twin rationales for the removal of confessionalism toward open participation in the Lebanese political system. It is argued here that this represents an ideological shift in the movement not to something new, or a simple dilution of its goal for the creation of an Islamic state, but an emphasis on the nationalist/territorial elements that were core components of its ideology since the founding of the movement.
