ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of arbitrariness and violence and their relation to law-in-practice. The locus is the semi-feudal society of North Lebanon and more widely the Lebanon as a whole. The interpenetration of order and disorder, determinacy and indeterminacy in the different dimensions of social life takes on a particular relevance when a society is in seeming anarchy, as is the contemporary Lebanon. The freedom of local manoeuvre was crucial as Ottoman land codes of 1858 came into force, enabling them to control the processes of registration and take over for all practical purposes the legal title to large tracts of land that became their personal estate domains. The impact of the French Mandate period was effectively, and ironically though by no means untypically, to consolidate this mode of domination in a new political context.
