Many international stakeholders in Iraq are aware that support for the post-2003 political settlement tacitly condones corruption. Indeed, they have launched various initiatives to reduce that corruption and its impact on society and, more recently, have funded dialogue-based initiatives that bring together citizens with elites, in an attempt to create a conversation that could forge new forms of accountability. They also encourage the development of the private sector as a solution to the problem of corruption in the public sector.
However, these initiatives have not dealt with the bigger, but less visible, violence which harms Iraqis every day – evident in Iraq’s consistently poor human development score. Due to international stakeholders’ fear of rekindling direct violence, their various initiatives have attempted to overcome the deadly consequences of the post-2003 political settlement without changing the nature of the underlying bargain – so the grey line above changes, but the other factors do not. For instance, on the issue of medicine unfit for consumption, policymakers still expressed concern that any intervention to combat this trade could ‘raise new instability risks within and across Iraq’s borders’. They asked, ‘what are the risk factors for resurgent conflict that arise from the exploitation of the pharma industry?’ Although many Iraqis struggled with everyday conflict because they could not receive adequate healthcare, many international policymakers viewed that harm as an unfortunate consequence of the necessary political settlement.
Due to international stakeholders’ fear of rekindling direct violence, their various initiatives have attempted to overcome the deadly consequences of the post-2003 political settlement without changing the nature of the underlying bargain.
In that view, the presence of a government represents stability – irrespective of any corruption. Former Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi claimed that the US supported his leadership not necessarily because they liked him, but because any incumbent was better than instability. In 2022, a Washington Post article on Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s anti-corruption programme reported that, although diplomats were made aware of human rights abuses, ‘the international community did little to follow up on the claims’. For many international statebuilders in Iraq, difficult questions about corruption or human rights abuses risk destabilizing the political system.
When protests erupted calling for an end to the political settlement, the Iraqi elite doubled down, killing hundreds and wounding tens of thousands to keep their hold on power – an outbreak of vertical-direct violence. International actors condemned this violence, but had few tools at their disposal except continuing to engage with the same elites that signed up to the settlement – which they viewed as the ultimate guarantor of relative stability.
Lebanon
Ethno-sectarian power sharing
A power-sharing agreement based on the allocation of political seats according to sectarian representation has been in place since the establishment of modern Lebanon in 1920. The rationale behind this system, first implemented when Lebanon was under a French mandate, was to guarantee political representation for Lebanon’s main religious communities in a country where no single religious group has a clear majority. Christians are a minority in the Middle East as a whole, but in 1920 they constituted around one-half of the Lebanese population. The National Pact of 1943 – an unwritten part of the Lebanese constitution – reserved the position of president for Maronite Christians, while allocating the position of prime minister to Sunni Muslims and that of speaker of parliament to Shia Muslims. Since then, the majority of political figures who have occupied those roles, as well as other prominent diplomatic and civil service positions, have hailed from elite families.
But this ethno-sectarian system failed to prevent violence from breaking out. Lebanon’s different elites and their factions either disagreed on the political path that the country should take regarding regional developments in the Middle East, such as the stance towards the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or towards Iran’s influence in the region; or they attempted to extend their own power at the expense of their rivals, whether the rivals were from the same or other religious communities. A short civil war in 1958 was followed by a much longer conflict, beginning in 1975 and ending with the Saudi-brokered Taif Agreement of 1989. The Taif Agreement was part of another elite pact that granted amnesty to the majority of warlords in Lebanon, and retained the pre-existing system of sectarian-based power-sharing.
However, the Taif Agreement stated that the political settlement included in it was intended to be temporary: that Lebanon would eventually replace the sectarian-based parliament with a secular parliament and create an upper house for the leaders of Lebanon’s main religious groups. The agreement included neither a date for when this clause would be implemented or a mechanism by which it could be implemented. Lebanon has therefore never implemented this clause of the Taif Agreement. The post-war political system still largely replicates the pre-war system. However, as an incentive to end direct violence, the post-war elite pact came with an allocation of resources which favoured all of Lebanon’s political elites. This allowed them to increase their personal wealth by syphoning state resources and profiteering with impunity.
The structural violence of the elite bargain
Although Lebanon has not witnessed large-scale direct violence among its elites since the end of the civil war, inter-elite bargaining has not prevented political violence from taking place. Since 2005, beginning with the killing of former prime minister Rafic Hariri, Lebanon has witnessed a series of assassinations of prominent figures who belonged to the political camp opposing Iranian influence.
The allocation of resources as part of the elite pact has also had a significantly harmful impact on the population. For example, the waste-processing company created after the civil war, Sukleen, had a board representing all of Lebanon’s elite political stakeholders. The company charged the Lebanese state the world’s highest rate per tonne for processing waste, and became a way for the country’s previously warring elites to access and acquire public money. When the contract between Sukleen and the Lebanese state expired in 2015, the elite stakeholders in the company disagreed among themselves regarding the terms of a potential renewal. This quickly led to refuse piling up in the streets, prompting a series of popular protests that escalated from demands for the restoration of basic waste collection services to calls for the government to resign. The protesters used the slogan ‘You Stink’ as a reference both to the waste-processing crisis and to the elite in a corrupt political system. In 2017, Human Rights Watch reported an increase in respiratory illnesses among residents of areas where waste was burned during the 2015 crisis.
Lebanon’s banking system became another route for elites to profit from the state. Many political leaders had stakes in Lebanese banks, which lent the state money at high interest rates. The Central Bank also facilitated access to low-interest mortgages for members of the elite. Such schemes – based on institutionalized corruption – drained state resources. By 2019, Lebanon had entered a period of financial collapse and, by 2022, 80 per cent of the country’s population was reported to be living in poverty.
Similarly, the Beirut port explosion of August 2020 can be attributed to the lack of checks and balances on activities in the port. This negligence was directly linked to the elite’s vested interests in the port, including being able to import goods without paying customs fees. The absence of oversight at the port contributed to the blast, as a result of which 219 people were killed and 250,000 people lost their homes.
New waves of protests against the political system began in 2019, and at the 2022 parliamentary elections a small number of independent, reform-oriented politicians secured parliamentary seats for the first time. However, many policymakers from the Global North dismissed these events as being insufficient to loosen the grip of the elites on power in Lebanon.
Foreign aid flowing into Lebanon is mainly directed towards humanitarian causes, such as food security, and the country’s military institutions. Comparatively little attention is given to the structural violence born of the elite pact that continues to rule the country. The stance taken by policymakers from the Global North towards Lebanon is primarily driven by their adoption of an understanding of peacebuilding as being based on averting direct violence, whether vertical or horizontal. Those policymakers regard Lebanon’s elite pact as an imperfect but functioning tool for stopping direct violence. While they acknowledge that vertical-structural violence is causing the protests, they believe that the status quo remains workable as a measure for protecting Lebanon from direct violence on a large scale.
Policy implications
As in Iraq, a series of national dialogues have been held in Lebanon over the years to try to resolve political tensions that periodically arise among the elites, including a prominent dialogue brokered by Qatar in 2008, which resulted in the agreement on a cabinet seat distribution that gives the pro-Iran camp veto power over cabinet decisions. But these national dialogues have always been a platform for the elite to revise the pact in such a way as to maintain the status quo rather than to reform the political system. External powers like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, backed by policymakers from the Global North, have only intervened diplomatically when Lebanon’s elite pact appeared to be at risk of collapse amid internal tensions, rather than when those outside of the pact challenged it. This understanding of stability based on direct violence, whether vertical or horizontal, mirrors that of policymakers from the Global North. Often, Global North governments approach elites in Lebanon as the country’s legitimate interlocutors, which the Lebanese elites in turn regard as a sign of Western acceptance of the status quo. In some cases, Lebanese elite figures even perceive themselves as clients of Western patrons like France or the US.
When international policymakers have intervened in Lebanon, such as when potential International Monetary Fund (IMF) assistance was offered post-2019, the elite pact has shown itself to be resistant to change. The IMF insisted that economic reforms be undertaken before it gave any loan to help alleviate Lebanon’s severe financial crisis. But the country’s elites have not rushed to act – and have shown no willingness to reform a system in which they are beneficiaries. In other words, the ruling elite do not have the political will to enact such a reform. That ordinary people will continue to suffer without reforms such as those demanded by the IMF has not changed the minds of those invested in the elite pact.
Figure 4 shows that direct violence in Lebanon has not reached the levels seen in Iraq or Libya since 2000. Yet periods of ‘stability’ have also failed to deliver improvements in terms of human development.
