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10.21.25

Security Without Legitimacy: The limits of sovereignty from above

Joseph Daher,
Sami Zoughaib,
Sami Atallah

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Lebanon enters the second half of 2025 confronting two converging crises. The first is military. Between mid‑September and late November 2024, Israeli forces launched a destructive air‑and ground‑campaign that targeted South Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut and infrastructure across the country. A ceasefire was declared on 27 November 2024 but has not been respected. Since the start of the hostilities in October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed more than 4,000 people and displaced over one million civilians, while causing about US$3.4 billion in physical damages and damaging or destroying nearly 100 000 housing units (Human Rights Watch 2025). Humanitarian agencies estimate that at the peak of the fighting more than 900,000 people were internally displaced and that the hostilities have affected around 1.2 million people (European Commission 2025). The United Nations Development Programme assesses reconstruction needs at about US$3.4 billion and donors have pledged roughly US$750 million in humanitarian aid (Human Rights Watch 2025). Israel continues to occupy five strategic positions south of the Litani River despite a February 18 deadline for withdrawal.

The second crisis is institutional. Lebanon’s financial collapse, now in its sixth year, has crippled public services, deepened poverty and hollowed out the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), making soldier salaries dependent on foreign aid. The Lebanese pound has lost over 95 % of its value since 2019 and a low‑ranking soldier’s monthly salary has fallen from around US$800 to about US$50 (Al‑Mashareq/AFP 2023). This collapse has forced donors such as the United States to provide direct salary supplements to keep the army and police functioning (Al‑Mashareq/AFP 2023). The LAF’s operational capacity remains severely limited, even as it is tasked with asserting control in the South and along the border with Syria.

Together, these conditions have reignited the national debate over sovereignty. In the wake of the war and the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, domestic and foreign actors alike have called for the LAF to assume full control of Lebanese territory and for Hezbollah to disarm. In the beginning of August 2025, the Lebanese government voted by a far majority to mandate the Lebanese army to draw up an action plan to be presented to the Council of Ministers by August 31, so that by the end of the year, weapons are exclusively held by the Lebanese state.1

This demand to disarm Hezbollah, often echoed by regional and Western powers, rests on a familiar logic: the state’s sovereignty can only be restored by consolidating its monopoly over violence. From this perspective, Hezbollah’s autonomous military capacity, and its alignment with Iran, are the principal obstacles to Lebanese sovereignty. Similar calls have extended to Palestinian armed groups in Lebanon’s refugee camps.

Yet this vision of sovereignty, pursued almost exclusively through the expansion of state security forces, overlooks two essential realities. First, the LAF lacks the material and fiscal capacity to independently defend Lebanon’s borders or fill the vacuum left by Hezbollah. In the context of runaway inflation and currency collapse, the overwhelming majority of the 2025 defense budget is consumed by salaries and basic operations. Many soldiers now earn less than US$50 per month and require foreign salary supplements (Al‑Mashareq/AFP 2023), leaving only a small fraction of the budget for training, equipment or modernization. Second, the Lebanese state lacks the legitimacy to sustain a centralized defense strategy. Years of sectarian patronage, regressive taxation and economic exclusion have undermined the state’s credibility among its own citizens.

The aim of this paper is to challenge the dominant, militarized conception of sovereignty in Lebanon by arguing that true national sovereignty cannot be restored through force consolidation alone. Instead, it advances a “sovereignty from below” framework that emphasizes the need for democratic reform, equitable economic development, and inclusive state-building as preconditions for any sustainable national defense strategy.

This paper argues that such a top-down model of sovereignty—based solely on military centralization and external alignment—is inadequate and ultimately unsustainable. Lebanon cannot achieve genuine sovereignty without first reconstructing its fiscal, economic, and democratic foundations. We advance an alternative framework, grounded in the concept of sovereignty from below: the idea that lasting sovereignty must be built through equitable development, social cohesion, and popular legitimacy.

The argument proceeds in four sections. Section 1 reexamines competing conceptions of sovereignty and situates Lebanon within these frameworks. Section 2 explains why Lebanon requires a defense strategy, and against whom, taking into consideration the challenges it faces from internal and external actors and factors. Section 3 assesses the country’s current defense architecture—split between an overburdened army and an autonomous militia—and highlights the structural limits of this model. Section 4 evaluates strategic options available to small states and argues that autonomous defense is Lebanon’s most viable path. It also shows why that path remains out of reach without deep political and economic reform. The conclusion outlines a sovereignty-from-below agenda that can generate the institutional capacity and public trust required for any credible national defense strategy.

Prepared by The Policy Initiative in collaboration with Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES).


1. The Shi’a Ministers affiliated with Amal and Hezbollah walked out of the session be­fore the decision was reached as “an expression of the resistance’s [Hezbollah’s] rejection of this decision” (Al-Jazeera English 2025).

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