Party Practices in the Context of Lebanon’s Sectarian Political System: Explaining the Unachieved Goals of the Free Patriotic Movement

Abstract

This article explores why Lebanon’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) shifted from opposing the dominant political practices in the country after the 1975-90 civil war – bargaining, power-sharing, narrow parochial discourse, and patronclient relations – to adopting them upon its transformation to a political party in 2005. While FPM leaders Michel Aoun and Gebran Bassil bear some blame for the party’s embrace of the sectarian political system, this article looks at this transformation through the lens of sociologist Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration. This framework reveals the role of social practices and the reproduction of systems and structures in the FPM’s sectarian transformation.