 The Elephant in the Room: Accumulation by Dispossession and Lebanon’s Neoliberal CrisisZiad Anis Koussa Contemporary Review of the Middle East, 2026, vol. 13, issue 2, 200-224 Abstract: This article reinterprets Lebanon’s 2019 financial collapse through the lens of David Harvey’s theory of neoliberalism, with a particular focus on Accumulation by Dispossession (ABD). It argues that dominant paradigms—sectarianism, externalism, merchant republicanism, and anti-colonialism—fail to adequately explain the structural transformations underpinning Lebanon’s post-Taif political economy. By introducing ABD as a legalized, state-sanctioned mechanism of elite enrichment, this study makes a crucial distinction between systemic dispossession embedded in law and institutions and corruption as an illegal or unethical deviation from them. This distinction reframes Lebanon’s crisis not as a failure of governance alone but as the outcome of a deliberate neoliberal project that restructured the economy to facilitate upward wealth transfer. The article draws on Harvey’s framework to reinterpret Lebanon’s neoliberal trajectory and positions the 2019 uprising as a class-based revolt against decades of legalized dispossession. It concludes by calling for a research agenda that centers ABD in analyses of neoliberalism in the Global South. Keywords: Neoliberalism; Accumulation by Dispossession; Lebanon 2019 crisis; David Harvey; Global South; sectarianism; state capture (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:crmide:v:13:y:2026:i:2:p:200-224 DOI: 10.1177/23477989261426118 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Contemporary Review of the Middle East |
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