Hizbullah in the Civilising Process: anarchy, self-restraint and violence

Adham Saouli

Third World Quarterly, 2011, vol. 32, issue 5, 925-942

Abstract: This study builds on Norbert Elias's ‘civilising process’ theory to examine when, how and why Lebanon's Hizbullah exercises self-restraint or violence in its political interactions. As opposed to studies that focus on how Hizbullah's ideological goals determine its political behaviour, this study argues that Hizbullah's political conduct should be understood by locating the Islamic party at the crossroads of war-making with Israel and state-making in Lebanon. Hizbullah's aim to minimise its vulnerability to Israel led it to rationalise its behaviour in Lebanon by exercising self-restraint and by remoulding its ideology. However, as the political divide in Lebanon has sharpened and the state there weakened, Hizbullah has advanced to fill the void by employing state-like measures, including violence.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436597.2011.578966 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:32:y:2011:i:5:p:925-942

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ctwq20

DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2011.578966

Access Statistics for this article

Third World Quarterly is currently edited by Shahid Qadir

More articles in Third World Quarterly from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().