Reconciliation, Reform and Resilience: Positive Peace for Lebanon

Lebanon's model of post-war power sharing and liberal economic growth has been widely praised. But it has failed to deliver for most Lebanese. Repeated outbreaks of political violence since the 1989 Taif Peace Agreement, and today fear of spillover from insecurity in Syria, show that a fundamentally different approach is needed to transform negative and precarious stability in Lebanon into positive and resilient peace. This peace deficit for the Lebanese is threefold: social, governmental and regional-international. Lebanon's conflict system feeds on complex interaction between levels (official and unofficial) and environments (internal and external). Peacebuilding responses to promote reconciliation, reform and sovereign resilience demand equal attention and need to be addressed strategically and simultaneously, to identify leverage points within the system to affect positive change. [WorldCat.]