Revolutions and popular protests have many interpretations and can be approached differently. For the most part, a revolution seems to be an ideal moment for researchers in the field of social and human sciences aiming to establish the plausibility of some theories or research approaches, or even an ideal moment for the fulfillment of activists’ demands and turning them into public issues. In Lebanon, people working on public spaces, for instance, see in the October 17 Revolution a moment when public spaces are reclaimed. Those who believe in class struggle perceive the revolution as an expression of a class struggle between those who have wealth and those who do not. Those who are fighting for the independence of the judiciary see in popular protests a valuable opportunity to highlight the importance of an independent judiciary in fulfilling the demands put forward in the revolution.
How do we understand citizenship during the popular protests in Lebanon?
Imperfect citizenship
In Lebanon we often praise freedom of expression. Some consider that Lebanon, in comparison with many Arab countries, ranks high regarding freedom of expression. These people go so far as to maintain that the sectarian system, that is, pluralism and sectarian representation in the government, has prevented Lebanon from slipping into a dictatorship and the one-party system. Of course, in comparison with other Arab regimes’ handling of revolutions, the Lebanese regime, despite resorting to repression, appears less violent. Others see sectarianism as the main obstacle to the emergence of free and fair citizenship based on equality before the law. Therefore, citizenship appears in such literature as antithetical to sectarianism. In other words, sectarianism and citizenship are irreconcilable.
In this connection, it should be highlighted that citizenship is usually linked to rights and equality. According to British sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall (1893-1981), who is one of the most important theorists of the concept of citizenship and its development, it is based on three integral components, achieved one after the other along an upward trajectory: civil citizenship (i.e. individual liberties and equality before the law), political citizenship (i.e. all that is related to voting and running for election) and social citizenship (i.e. the provision of minimal social, economic and cultural welfare). Although there are many critics of this theory, the most important of which claiming that it examines the development of citizenship in the context of Britain, which does not necessarily apply to other countries, or that it overlooked the role of marginalized women in developing the definition of citizenship, yet, it serves as a general framework to understand citizenship as a package of civil, political, and social rights. All of these components are certainly associated with the law.
In a country like Lebanon, we are far from meeting these requirements of citizenship. As it is known, there is a lack of civil laws on personal status that would promote equality between individuals, be they women, men, or children, as well as a lack of election and democratic laws that contribute to political equality and fair representation, and a lack of social services provision to all citizens, or even residents of different nationalities. Therefore, citizen is imperfect by all standards. But it is necessary in this respect to step back in order to shed light on the fact that citizenship does not simply consist of a package of laws guaranteeing rights and duties. In fact, another approach to understanding citizenship is grassroots citizenship as a daily practice performed by individuals.
Desired citizenship
The revolution is not a moment of totalitarianism, assuming that all male and female citizens are constituent parts. The revolution is a moment of negotiation between different intellectual currents and several political trends that might be conflicting. Simply put, this can certainly divide society between those who support the revolution and those who oppose it. But the revolution occurring somewhere cannot be reduced to a moment in which socio-economic and environmental grievances and judicial complaints are expressed, but it is especially an opportunity to present an alternative imagination of a specific reality. In this context, the October 17 moment provided a space to exercise alternative grassroots citizenship and the rewriting of an imagined social contract, so far utopian, between the state and society. In other words, politics, and along with it citizenship, cannot be exclusively framed in the context of constitutional and public institutions. Politics, i.e. grassroots politics, rather runs its course in informal institutions. According to political sociologist Asef Bayat, individuals produce, through their regular daily activities, a political act whereby they take the initiative independently to impose a certain political reality as an alternative to the one imposed on them by public institutions.
From this perspective, Lebanese men and women of all ages exercised grassroots citizenship in various Lebanese areas during the October protests. This exercise took on many aspects, whether in claiming civil, economic, social and environmental rights, or in the participatory exercise in public spaces seeking the prevalence of the public good over private interests. Actually, when Lebanese men and women demanded social justice, organized themselves into groups to sort waste, gathered in tents and initiated debates on rights, public space, and other issues, they transformed themselves into political actors, regardless of their legal status, degree of equality, or representation in constitutional institutions. This approach rests on the idea that Lebanese men and women do not just exercise alternative citizenship, but they also imagine a different version of patriotism which is antithetical to traditional Lebanese patriotism based on “consensus and coexistence between Islam and Christianity.” It is rather right and duty based patriotism that establishes full equality before the law. The former presumes that the social contract is grounded in inter-communal coexistence and power-sharing according to sectarian affiliation. The latter, in contrast, imagines a social contract grounded in the equality of individuals.
Certainly, such grassroots citizenship is still marginal, and it is a utopian moment in which those who participated in its making imagined a better world. However, the grass roots struggle is not just are action to a specific reality, namely flawed citizenship, it can rather be a key element in the path of change, or even a first step in challenging the existing sectarian based social contract.