The migration of violence across Syrian-Lebanese borders: the failure of the states and the reconstruction of religious primordial identities

The research will focus on two Lebanese non-state actors: Hezbollah who supports the Syrian regime, and an informal yet increasingly active nebula of Sunni movements supporting Syrian rebels. Beyond the assessment of who these actors are and how they involve in the conflict and (violently) interact with Syrian actors and with each other, attention will go to the disarticulation of “national” borders through the reconstruction of transnational religious identities and solidarities. The paper starts by making a series of assumptions about the failure of the states in the Middle East to translate into politically accepted and interiorized realities, to generate new loyalties and identities and to produce socially relevant borders. It will then ask questions about how borders have been dissolved through both discourse and action during the very last years, how some places have been given special meaning and how identities have been reframed in order to prompt Lebanese youngsters to fight and die in Syria. It will also look into the variety of temporalities that are in play at the level of both identity construction (e.g. narratives about enmity between Sunni and Shia) and political projects whose territorial translation might qualify as either pre- or post-Westphalian; and the geopolitical implications of a Middle East where non-state actors overflow states and borders. In doing so, the paper will try to highlight the contradiction between innovative and technologically up-to-date means to dismantle conceptually and physically the borders while supporting what might look like archaic primordial identities. This paper will offer the early conclusions of an ongoing research on violent identity mobilization in the context of the Syrian conflict notably across the borders with Lebanon. The research relies on two field inquiries conducted in Lebanon in December 2013 and February 2014, with interviews with actors, observers, social workers, security experts and diplomats