The Manufacture of Fear, the State of Exception, and Human Life Laid Bare in Lebanon

Since the Ain al-Rummaneh bus incident in 1975, which served as the symbolic spark of the war, the Lebanese people have been caught in an unbroken cycle of organized fear, rather than occasional fear. This falls within what some thinkers call the “economy of fear” or the “politics of fear,” in which fear becomes something that is manufactured and managed, rather than merely a spontaneous emotion.

Fear performs three dangerous functions here:

First, it paralyzes collective action. When a society lives under the permanent threat of war, civil strife, collapse, or an external or internal enemy, its primary concern becomes individual survival rather than collective action. The possibility of organized resistance to any form of domination or occupation consequently begins to disintegrate.

Second, fear reproduces narrow communal loyalties, because it drives people to seek protection within their primary groups of belonging: their sect, their leader, their party. Fear thus becomes a mechanism for reproducing the very system that is supposedly responsible for the crisis.

Finally, under the sway of fear, everything becomes justifiable: weapons beyond the control of the state, the suspension of the law, repression, corruption, and even dependence on foreign powers, because “the circumstances are exceptional.” We thus enter a state of exception that never ends.

Our history bears witness to recurring stages in the manufacture of fear:

The civil war: fear of the sectarian other.

Successive occupations: fear of the external enemy.

The post-2005 period: fear of assassination and chaos.

Since 2019: fear of economic collapse.

Regional wars and wars of support: persistent fear and anxiety over existence itself.

The problem, then, does not lie in the existence of real dangers, for such dangers do indeed exist, but in transforming them into a permanent structure for managing society. Nor does it lie in the fact that the population has succumbed to fear, but rather in the fact that this fear has often been fabricated, amplified, or exploited in ways that prevent any genuine moment of emancipation.

The ultimate result is what might be described as a society living in a permanent state of psychological emergency.

If fear is produced as an instrument for controlling the political sphere, its deepest effect lies in the redefinition of the human being within that sphere itself, something Giorgio Agamben’s theses on “bare life” capture with particular precision. In the Lebanese context, this involves not merely spreading a climate of fear, but transforming the citizen into a biological being stripped of protection, living in a gray zone between law and non-law, where rights are suspended in the name of security or sectarian necessity.

In this sense, the “economy of fear” intersects with what Michel Foucault calls “biopower,” which does not merely control bodies, but reproduces them within systems of discipline and surveillance: the prison, the hospital, the school, the barracks… The Lebanese case, however, reveals a further shift: instead of life being managed with a view to improving it, as in classical models of biopower, fear is managed in order to keep life at its bare minimum, at the level of “survival” rather than “living.”

The Lebanese individual thus approaches the condition of “bare life,” in the Agambenian sense, constantly exposed to exceptional sovereign decisions and deprived of any prospect of legal and political stability. This convergence between the production of fear and the stripping of human beings of their political status gives rise to an invisible structure of governance, in which the social contract is replaced by the logic of permanent emergency and a “politics of neglect” prevails over the exercise of power itself. More than that, it becomes a management of deterioration: of the economy, healthcare, education, emigration, and even the Beirut port explosion…

If the “state of exception” provides the theoretical point of departure for understanding the transformation of sovereignty in the Lebanese context, it does not represent a mere temporary legal condition. Rather, it has established a permanent structure of governance within which the relationship between power and society is continually reshaped. In this sense, the “manufacture of fear” can be regarded as the practical extension of the state of exception, since the suspension of legal and institutional rules can only be sustained through the continuous production of a climate of threat.

In this context, the citizen ceases to be a political actor and instead becomes the object of emergency policies, governed by the logic of individual survival and severed from any shared contractual horizon. Dismantling this system therefore requires more than simply restoring the rule of law. It requires restoring the political meaning of life itself, that is, reintegrating the individual into the sphere of citizenship beyond the logic of exception and fear.

Fear thus becomes an invisible instrument of governance, reshaping collective mindsets and entrenching what might be called a “permanent psychological emergency,” in which anxiety is continually reproduced as a structural condition of precarious stability. This process does not rest solely on the existence of objective dangers. It also feeds on a social vulnerability rooted in deep divisions and the absence of a shared national narrative. Dismantling the economy of fear therefore entails not only exposing its mechanisms, but also rebuilding trust and institutions and producing an alternative collective meaning.

Hezbollah’s Role

In this context, the mechanisms of domination cannot be understood without addressing the role of Hezbollah and the policies it has imposed on Lebanon, in conjunction with the ruling establishment and with the support of the Syrian regime and Iran, particularly during the period when this axis exercised absolute dominance, a dominance that is now visibly receding, especially since the fall of Assad.

A crucial philosophical and legal distinction arises here. A rigorous distinction must be drawn between a “state of emergency,” which derives from the law and is regulated by constitutions within clearly defined limits and conditions, and a “pre-legal state of exception,” imposed by this axis as an open-ended fait accompli, without limits or safeguards. In the latter case, laws and boundaries were swept aside and rights stripped away, entirely transforming the role of Lebanon’s Constitution and institutions. Instead of serving as a shield to protect society, under the weight of this domination they were reduced to little more than an official and legal cover for the abuse of power and the entrenchment of authoritarianism.

The parallel sovereignty exercised by Hezbollah did not stop at the legal control of individuals. It penetrated, insidiously, into “bare life” itself, stripping it of value and exposing it to the violence of arbitrary sovereign decisions. Consequently, this “bare life,” viewed through the prism of the “exception,” became the vital fuel sustaining Hezbollah’s exercise of sovereign power, which perpetuates itself through the continuous production of a repressed and domesticated “biopolitical body,” subjected to absolute control under the cover of law and a false sovereignty designed to prevent any form of dissent.

This logic has manifested itself concretely in the assassination of intellectual and political activist Lokman Slim in an area under Hezbollah’s control; in the events of May 7, 2008, when weapons were used domestically to impose political equations through the force of a fait accompli; and in the obstruction of the judicial investigation into the Beirut port explosion and the open threats made against judges. Such practices have entrenched a principle of total impunity and effectively nullified the sovereignty of the Lebanese judiciary.

Through this systematically engineered fear, human beings in Lebanon have been reduced to the condition of “bare life.” Political opponents are exposed to physical elimination, accusations of treason, or symbolic forms of condemnation that effectively strip them of protection. Meanwhile, citizens from Hezbollah’s own support base are themselves exposed by being thrust into cross-border regional wars, whether through military intervention in Syria or the unilateral opening of fronts of attrition, without authorization or cover from their state, reducing them to mere biological fuel for a transnational project.

This exposure has not been confined to individuals. It has also extended to the very structure of the Lebanese state and to neighboring states, whose sovereignty has been violated through the legitimization of illicit smuggling routes, the usurpation of the decision over war and peace, and the transformation of borders, along with the usurped sovereign decision itself, into open arenas for advancing military and security agendas entirely outside the frameworks of international law and the political contract. State and society alike have thus been left at the mercy of an exceptional sovereignty that feeds on the eclipse of law and the perpetuation of fear.

Ultimately, the visible and continuing decline of this axis, both regional and domestic, is opening a breach in the wall of the permanent “state of exception” and providing an unprecedented historic opportunity to free human beings in Lebanon from a condition in which they are left defenseless before arbitrary power and restore them to the protection of the law. Yet the military and political decline of the militia and the Iranian project does not automatically entail the immediate restoration of state sovereignty. Such a restoration faces another formidable barrier within the political establishment itself: the structure of Lebanon’s “deep state.”

This “deep state,” sustained by networks of sectarian interests, factional power-sharing, and systemic institutional corruption, constitutes the hidden bureaucratic and financial extension that originally enabled militia domination to emerge and endure. It is this structure that now refuses to relinquish its gains and forcefully obstructs the effective implementation of judicial accountability mechanisms, structural reform, and the building of genuinely legitimate institutions.

Accordingly, the future of the Lebanese state and the restoration of its full sovereignty cannot be achieved merely through the retreat of parallel arms or the weakening of their regional sponsors. They depend on a deeper and more complex battle: dismantling the deep state’s clientelist system.

Putting an end to the exposure of human beings and the nation to arbitrary power requires moving from the realm of “terror and military salvation” to that of “citizenship, law, and the cleansing of public administration.” Without dismantling this infrastructure of disguised authoritarianism, sovereignty will remain little more than a deferred promise, while Lebanon’s future will remain caught between a weakening armed power and a deep state that refuses to be born anew.