The only Lebanese truth is that public misery and dread are not confined to Dahyeh, the South, and the Beqaa. Nor is it true that Lebanon’s cities—from the capital to those of the North and the Mountain—are indifferent, as if the country’s latest ordeal, and what preceded it and may follow it, merely passed them by. We are facing a peculiar phenomenon, born of absurd and non-absurd causes alike, that produced this mistaken notion of a Lebanon made up of many republics, an idea we must shed if we are to melt back into the fabric of Lebanese life. It is a sterility and paralysis deeper than politics, deeper than axis wars, Tom Barrack’s memos, Naim Qassem’s sermons, and the destruction and rubble surrounding us wherever we turn; it goes far beyond all that. It is a sterility that sinks deep with concentrated, violent effect, as if the latest ordeal—the war—served to expose it, strip it bare, and hold it up before us, naked and visible; as if the war were a finger pointing at the hulking elephant crouched in wait, and a decisive test of how we see ourselves and the world.

At this late hour in world history, after all that has happened and is happening globally—politically, economically, culturally—even thinking about change, let alone about rewriting a social contract, can feel like delirium or utopia. In Lebanon, where society is quick to resent and quick to resign, compounded doses of discouragement have made even imagining change on a tilted street seem surreal. Comparing our present to Lebanon’s first century has become a shabby paradox whose only yield is useless lament and paralyzing despair. One could say that absolute surrender to the “status quo”—as an active historical force weaving our social fabric—has produced a republic skilled at temporary stabilization, endlessly postponing its happy ending, and internalizing a damaged memory reenacted at every holiday and milestone. Within this idea and under its orbit, Lebanese today live in a state at once anxious and contradictory: a people impoverished and wary, surveilled and identity-shaken; angry yet at times puritanical and at times open; dual in nationality and allegiance; aspiring and despairing at once; corrupt and upright at the same time. Politics no longer looks like a public compact so much as navigation among islands of protection and loyalties.

A Suspended Time and a Fraying Contract: Between “Resistance” and the Absence of a Future

Since the end of the civil war and the Taif Agreement (1989), no modern social contract has been anchored on solid foundations. Core questions of power, rights, and representation were deferred to temporary settlements and flimsy “consociational” compromises. In that vacuum came the eras of Syrian occupation after Taif, followed by Iranian “patronage” through Hezbollah’s state. These were not merely arrangements of external influence; they were mechanisms for rewriting the social contract from within. Taif was transformed into a factory for a “protection contract” in which rights are swapped for passage through networks of loyalty; weapons rose from mere instruments of fighting to a founding narrative that orders meaning as it orders the distribution of rents and services, so that citizenship becomes membership in a network. Thus Taif was emptied of its contractual function, and the state reduced to low-grade administration under a higher security ceiling, while “legitimacy” was redefined by a sacred/security/service blend that trumps equality and law. The result was a political economy of domination that fuses service with war and perpetuates a suspended present.

On the face of the constitution, the Lebanese contract promises equality of rights (Article 7), freedoms of expression and assembly (Article 13), and a “charter principle” that “no authority contradicting coexistence is legitimate.” Taif translated these promises into an institutional formula that ended the war, drew new balances for sharing power, restrained weapons, and vested decisions of war and peace in the state. But what followed Taif never matured into a completed social contract: reconstruction preceded administrative reform; “the state provides” gave way to “the state rotates” and “parties fill the void.” Over time, institutions’ ability to monopolize legitimate violence and provide the public good atrophied, and parallel legitimacies and side corridors for security and services proliferated. This drift from the contract’s text to its reality is not reducible to fiscal or administrative dysfunction; it is, rather, a transformation in the structure of guarantees: rights are acquired by proximity to a network, not by abstract citizenship. With every major crisis—2006, then the entanglement in Syria, up to the latest waves of tension—this defect has grown starker: duality in security decision-making, contest over the very definition of the “national interest,” more conversion of services into reward and loyalty into an insurance policy.

A lens from contemporary mafia cinema may help here: in Gomorrah there are no epics and no anthems; “sovereignty” is sold by the piece, and “justice” as a private service precedes—and cancels—the public law. In theory, as Max Weber framed it, the modern state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory. The point is not that it “uses more violence,” but that there is a single gate to coercion, conditioned by public law. Any multiplicity of gates to violence diminishes the state and drags us back into a gray zone between public law and communal “laws.” Cast this lens on Lebanon and a grueling trajectory appears: every retreat in the state’s capacity to supply public goods—health, education, electricity, an impartial judiciary—opens wider space for parallel protection contracts, partisan, sectarian, local, and regional. Bit by bit, the vocabulary of the contract shifts: rights turn into “grace,” citizenship is traded for network membership, and the center of gravity moves from law to brokerage.

Analysts suggest that the dominant political forces in Lebanon—chief among them Hezbollah—are implicitly driven by a “hatred of the future,” or, more precisely, by the perpetual suspension of the present. Since 2000, following the liberation of the South, the logic of “permanent resistance” has prevented the closing of past files and the opening of a new political cycle. The state of exception has become a governing principle, locking the country in a state of constant mobilization against an ever-present enemy. This has crippled the possibility of imagining a shared vision for the future on which a renewed social contract could rest. Ironically, the narrative of “liberation and victory”—which should have laid the foundation for a unifying civic promise—has instead reproduced a permanent state of security exceptionalism that blocks the translation of that promise into reality.

This sustained condition of exception has weakened natural democratic discourse. The rhetoric of suspended “resistance,” on one hand, has entrenched loyalties that are immune to scrutiny or accountability, and on the other, it has exempted dominant forces from being evaluated in terms of economic performance, governance, or justice. The social price of this perpetual frenzy, fear, and erasure of the future has been the paralysis of any possibility of a robust civic contract. Politics has ceased to be the pursuit of improved living conditions under shared rules, becoming instead captive to unmeasurable grand slogans like “dignity” and “divine victory.”

Party Mechanisms: When Politics Becomes a Marketplace

Mobilization machines, organizational discipline, media platforms, service networks, financial flows, and reconstruction projects have in Lebanon become a parallel governing architecture in their own right. The strength of some political parties lies in the fact that they act as functioning institutions in a country where the “institution” itself falters. Yet that strength has another face: uneven playing fields and electoral competition shaped not by programs but by predetermined balances of power. When generalized, this model turns the country into a “federation of networks” rather than a state of rights. As a result, legitimacy itself is no longer pure; it is a composite of the symbolic, the sacred, the service-based, and the security-oriented—an index by which both politics and morality are measured.

If the issue were limited to “weapons” in their material sense—artillery, rockets, heavy arms—the debate would be easier for both Hezbollah and its opponents. For such weapons, by the experience of the past decades, no longer shift regional equations; instead, they exact devastating costs on those who bear them and their communities: death, displacement, destruction of homes and livelihoods, and irreparable loss of land and country. But reducing the matter to iron and gunpowder is misleadingly simplistic. In Lebanon’s current reality, weapons are not just instruments of combat—they constitute an entire way of life, complete with its own systems, meanings, and institutions. Hence the attachment to arms is framed as a matter of “existence or annihilation,” and their “surrender” as collective suicide. The issue is not a “stockpile of bullets,” but a founding narrative that provides an alternative legitimacy. In practice, the duality of power and the division of authority over war and peace fracture a foundational pillar of the social contract. Transforming welfare into a channel of loyalty redefines the very notion of the public good. Thus, the debate on weapons cannot be disentangled from the system that reproduces their political meaning.

Since 2006, Hezbollah’s “Promise” and “Jihad al-Bina” organizations have filled the void of the absent state, accumulating clientelist capital. The Syrian war further fused “regional security” with “national contract,” turning debate into a tool of accusation and treason. Today, amid renewed tensions, Lebanon lives by unwritten rules of engagement, a politics of permanent exception, and a life perched on the edge of a suspended future. The legal contract has not collapsed outright, but it has shrunk in favor of a parallel contract written in the language of “protection” rather than “rights.”

This is not about “demonizing” one party or “absolving” another; it is a diagnosis of a reality that multiplies the cost of returning to a single channel of legitimacy called the state. Any serious debate about disarmament, therefore, cannot be separated from a debate about the system that continuously regenerates its political rationale within Lebanon’s social fabric. The sum of these factors has led to a profound breakdown in Lebanon’s social contract—manifested in the erosion of the state’s monopoly on force and decisions of war and peace; in security becoming contingent on sectarian affiliation; in the rise of partisan welfare networks that turn rights into favors conditional on loyalty; in the freezing of democratic alternation and long-term planning; in the shift of legitimacy from constitutional institutions to religious, security, and service-based symbols immune to accountability; and in the suffocation of rational politics within binaries of treason and allegiance. The result: “parallel republics” within a single state—making any talk of a new contract without structural transformation futile.

The issue cannot be resolved through confrontation, but through a political technique that reshapes incentives and reunifies power and service under the rule of law. What is needed is not to “break the sword,” but to sheathe it within a legal framework that safeguards deterrence while ending the regime of exception. A national defense strategy should integrate military capabilities into a legitimate, accountable chain of command, shifting from “weapons of meaning” above the contract to defensive capacity within it.

Simultaneously, public service standards should be unified by gradually integrating health, education, and relief networks into national programs through a transparent “service-purchase” model—one that preserves the role of civil society while removing the political price of access. Politics would regain coherence through modern party legislation that mandates financial transparency, regulates campaign media, and revitalizes internal democracy, so that competition returns to programs and performance rather than to hierarchical networks. On the ground, decentralization with accountability would follow: broader municipal powers tied to published budgets, performance indicators, and citizen satisfaction metrics—so that electoral lists compete over service effectiveness, not identity.

As for the usual objections—“the state has failed,” “monopoly is unrealistic”—they can be calmly countered: deterrence is not incompatible with institutionalization, and accusations of treason close debate rather than protect it. The goal is not to abolish any party or to surrender to a defective state, but to design a transitional architecture that reconnects the power of force to constitutional legitimacy, separates rights from loyalty, and reopens political time to natural cycles of accountability. Only then can the language of the contract be restored: a state judged by the quality of its service, parties competing on measurable programs, and a society able to criticize without fear.

Ultimately, the Lebanese will have to choose between continuing to live in a “protection market,” where the state disintegrates into rival fiefdoms and loyalties, or building a new citizenship-based contract that restores the state as the sole inclusive framework for all. The first path leads to statelessness and a futureless void; the second alone can carry Lebanon from its condition of exception and disorder to the normal state its people deserve, where the state is both guardian and arbiter, citizens are equal under its protection, and political life rests on a clear, renewable social contract.