ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the structural dimensions of the institutional ambiguity that determines Lebanon’s governance of refugees by critically interrogating the conceptual and empirical dimensions of the Lebanese state. It analyzes Lebanon as a hybrid order in which political parties that institutionally represent much wider sectarian, communal, and economic fields operate as twilight institutions that are simultaneously part of the official state system and operating parallel to it. Lebanon’s twilight institutions produce a form of mediated stateness in which overlap among various amalgamated public, private, and civil networks of power is the defining feature. This hybridity produces informality, liminality, and exceptionalism, which allows for the evasion of accountability that keeps elites in power. By synthesizing the notions of hybridity and ambiguity, this contextual chapter sets the scene for the book’s case-study chapters. It explains how the more agential dimensions of Lebanon’s governance of Syrian and Palestinian refugees are entrenched and incentivized by the workings of Lebanon’s hybrid order.