Articles

We could have mourned her passing as one mourns a beloved friend, and suffered as one suffers when death severs a part of a shared life: a friendship, a brotherhood, a family. She might also — and perhaps it would have been the easier path — have spent her life in sheltered comfort, protected from the hardships of origin and the harshness of destiny. She was the daughter of a noble and prosperous household, heir to a legacy that allowed her to lean upon inherited security and remain beneath the shade of a family untouched by either disgrace or deprivation. But she was not “just any woman.” She was Leila Shahid.

There are moments when a sentence cast into the media storm reveals more than entire treatises of doctrine. When the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, declared a few days ago that “it would be acceptable if they took it all,” invoking the notion of an Israel extending, in a biblical reading, from the Nile to the Euphrates, before adding that “Area C is Israel,” he was not merely departing from diplomatic reserve—though that goes without saying—but displaying a political partiality which, if unsurprising given Washington’s near-unconditional alignment with the Hebrew State, remains intolerable in its gravity.

With every rise in tensions between the United States and Iran, the same question hangs over Beirut: are we facing a delayed war or an inevitable confrontation? Will Lebanon be the battlefield or simply an anxious spectator, witnessing the events? The reality is that the region has been living for years in a state of 'neither war nor peace'. Calculated escalations, localized strikes, inflammatory statements, and movements of military assets by sea and air provoke responses through indirect negotiations and regional and international mediations. This is a delicate strategy of managing relations, taking one step forward and two steps back, but the situation has not yet degenerated into open warfare.

Since the Arab Spring of 2011, Libya has not been undergoing any unfinished transition, but has settled into a durable state of political dissolution. Far from paving the way for a reconstruction process, the brutal disappearance of Muammar Gaddafi's regime, on the contrary, triggered a long sequence of fragmentation, where armed violence progressively replaced the State as the principle of power organization, as in Sudan. This series offers a structural reading of the Libyan war as a stabilized and coherent system in itself, embedded in regional and international rivalries, and now capable of eliminating any political alternative that would not fit into its logic.

The administrative decentralization project is provided for in the Taëf Agreement (1989) but has not yet been implemented. However, many studies have been carried out for this purpose, without success. A look back at a reform in waiting. The concrete implementation of administrative decentralization in Lebanon relies on strengthening local councils, particularly at the caza level, which constitute the second tier after municipalities. According to Rayanne Assaf, doctor of law and legal affairs officer at the presidency between 2008 and 2014, “the decentralization project stipulates that within each caza, citizens elect, under a majority system, a general committee composed of representatives from all localities, even those without municipalities (to ensure the best geographical representation). This committee then elects the caza's board of directors according to a proportional system.”

In Lebanon, money opens almost every door. It speeds up decisions, simplifies procedures, brings down many resistances. Yet there is one door it cannot open: the door of dignity, the door of genuine respect, the kind that cannot be bought. He knows it, even if he prefers not to admit it. He succeeded quickly, very quickly. Too quickly. A newly rich man, fortune arriving before recognition, money sometimes opaque, sometimes plainly dubious. Despite the assets, the connections, and the outward signs, he lives with a persistent unease: something is missing. A legitimacy. A place. The feeling of existing as something other than the one who pays.