What's Syria Got to Do With It?: The Rise of Sectarian Violence in Lebanon and the Syrian Civil War
Date
2014
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Haverford College. Department of Political Science
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
Violence in the Middle East has been increasingly discussed in sectarian terms over the past few years. In Lebanon, academics and experts alike have been quick to cite the rise in sectarian violence plaguing the country as spillover from the civil war in neighboring Syria. In this thesis, I reevaluated this assumption by looking at the role of domestic stability, proxy intervention, and conflict spillover as causes for the rise in sectarian violence in Lebanon. A comparative case study approach is used to divide the country's post-Syrian occupation history into three distinct time periods in order to better isolate each of the three categories of analysis. Through the use of International Crisis Group’s Crisis Watch Database, I quantitatively analyzed the number of violence incidences, the type of violence, the frequency of incidences, and the number of fatalities to determine that violence had indeed increased in frequency and that the nature of the violence had evolved over time. By using this approach, I was able to deduce that the relationship between the rise in violence and conflict spillover is not as clear-cut as many scholars have made it out to be. Instead, the rise in sectarian violence can be attributed to the rise of Hezbollah as a major political player since 2005 and its decision to enter into the Syrian conflict on the side of President Bashar al-Assad.