Introduction

Lebanon's fraught history invites us to question the sources, character and necessity of legitimacy. It encourages us to open up legitimacy to more sociological analyses that move us beyond the potentially narrow confines of Newtonian links between the citizen, government and service delivery. While these transactional aspects of legitimacy are important, other issues such as heritage, identity and blunt power (sometimes force) play a significant role. This chapter seeks to unravel the complex ‘swirl’ that constitutes political legitimacy in Lebanon. It sees legitimacy as a hybrid construction that derives from a complex mix of identity and transactional politics. The chapter is influenced by Alex De Waal's concept of the political marketplace and uses a modified version of this to help explain the dynamism and trade-offs involved in constructing, maintaining, using and undermining legitimacy.

The chapter proceeds by first unpacking legitimacy as a concept and then introducing the concept of the political marketplace. It then applies the political marketplace concept to Lebanon. It identifies five aspects of de Waal's political marketplace that are relevant for an analysis of legitimate political authority in Lebanon: monetised transactional politics; highly personalised politics; the international and transnational integration of the political marketplace; the structured and regulated nature of the marketplace; and the masculine nature of politics. In its final substantive section, the chapter examines the legitimacy of international and transnational actors in Lebanon. Given that Lebanon is hugely penetrated by international organisations and international non-governmental organisations, it seems appropriate to examine their sources of legitimacy. The chapter draws on a number of interviews undertaken by the authors jointly and separately in 2013 and 2017. The 2013 interviews were with a cross section of the population. While there is no claim that these are scientifically representative of the Lebanese population (a difficult claim to verify given that the last census was in 1932), the authors are satisfied that opinions from the main identity groups were captured. The 2017 interviews were more targeted at opinion-formers and personnel from civil society and international organisations.

Legitimacy as a concept

Legitimacy is a fundamental aspect of state–citizen relationships and essentially all power relations. It thus lies at the core of the statebuilding agenda. Lebanon, it is argued in this chapter, is the site of unfinished and highly problematic statebuilding.