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11.06.25

Beyond Security Fixes: Toward a sovereignty-based reform pact in Lebanon

Sami Atallah,
Sami Zoughaib

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Lebanon entered a new political phase on Feb 3, 2025, when Joseph Aoun, the long-serving commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces, was elected president and immediately tasked Nawaf Salam with forming a government. Their appointments took place under the lingering shadow of the 2024 Israeli offensive—a seventy-day campaign that leveled villages in the South, devastated Beirut’s periphery, and displaced hundreds of thousands before a fragile cease-fire on Nov 27, 2024. The truce did not bring stability. Near-daily Israeli drone strikes, overflights, and incursions continued into 2025, a constant reminder of Lebanon’s compromised sovereignty. The sense of urgency for recovery was acute, but it collided with a sobering truth: the state remained mired in a six-year depression without enacting any of the reforms it had repeatedly promised to its citizens, international donors, or the IMF. Capital controls remained ad hoc, the banking sector insolvent, and basic public services in tatters. The experience underscored that crisis alone does not guarantee reform.

The persistence of paralysis is not accidental. It stems from structural constraints hardened over decades. Since the early 1990s, postwar governments embraced a growth model built on debt, real-estate speculation, and foreign-currency inflows. This model enriched bankers, contractors, and political patrons across sects, while hollowing out productive sectors and public institutions. Over time, this elite coalition fused with Hezbollah’s security veto and the fragmented state apparatus, producing a multilayered barrier to redistribution, accountability, and institutional overhaul. Reform rhetoric was plentiful, but redistribution of costs and power was consistently avoided. This entrenched equilibrium is the baseline against which the postwar reform debate must be measured.

The events of August 2025 illustrate how the reform window has been widened by geopolitical pressure, but also how narrowly it has been defined. On Aug 5–6, the cabinet instructed the army to present a plan by year’s end to confine all arms to six official security institutions. Hezbollah denounced the move as a “grave sin,” and Shi’a ministers walked out. At the same time, a U.S. envoy pushed a package tying phased disarmament steps to an Israeli withdrawal from five positions in the South and a Gulf-financed reconstruction zone. Yet the proposal met local resistance: on Aug 27, protests in Tyre and Khiam forced the envoy to curtail his visit. Four days later, Speaker Nabih Berri called for a national dialogue on Hezbollah’s weapons, signaling a preference for consensual management of the issue rather than unilateral decisions. Meanwhile, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2790 (2025) on Aug 28, renewing UNIFIL’s mandate but fixing an end date of Dec 31, 2026, while urging Israeli withdrawal and an expanded LAF role south of the Litani.

On the ground, incidents underlined both the volatility of the moment and the risks to the army itself. On Aug 25, the LAF reported seizing a large weapons cache in Akkar. Less than three weeks earlier, on Aug 9, six soldiers were killed while dismantling a depot in Tyre, the deadliest single-day loss for the army since the cease-fire. And on Feb 14, a UNIFIL convoy was attacked near Beirut airport, injuring the mission’s outgoing deputy commander. These episodes show how security enforcement remains fragile and politically charged.

Taken together, these developments widened the reform window but did so almost entirely in a security-first direction. International support has become more conditional, but the conditions have narrowed to financial transparency and AML/CFT1 compliance. Broader reforms—such as bank resolution, equitable loss-sharing, and judicial independence—remain sidelined. Domestically, Hezbollah has shifted from systemic veto player to situational blocker, willing to obstruct measures that cross its red lines but less able to impose blanket paralysis. Economic elites, meanwhile, practice tactical compliance: conceding on low-cost governance fixes like secrecy amendments or procurement rules in order to protect their core interests.

The result is a selective reform trajectory. It delivers procedural changes where donor and elite interests align but stops short of structural transformation. Lebanon risks repeating its familiar pattern: surface compliance, elite survival, and citizen exhaustion. Breaking out of this cycle requires a different anchor. The report argues for a sovereignty-based reform pact that ties external backing not only to disarmament benchmarks but also to equitable burden-sharing, progressive taxation, and credible cease-fire enforcement. Only by coupling security with redistribution can reform move beyond procedural fixes and become the foundation for institutional renewal.



1. AML/CFT refers to “Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism.” It encompasses the set of laws, regulations, and institutional measures designed to prevent illicit financial flows, detect suspicious transactions, and ensure that financial systems are not misused for laundering criminal proceeds or funding terrorist activities.

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