Weak States, Borders and Humanitarian Interventions

This book focuses on international border and humanitarian interventions in Lebanon, from the Syrian ‘refugee crisis’ to the current political, social and economic crisis. It sheds light on the centrality of the paradigm of state weakness in shaping those interventions; a paradigm relying on a set of simplistic assumptions that ‘pathologise’ the state by framing it as absent, afflicted by fragmentation and bad governance, while downplaying its political agency. It shows that those dominant narratives – promoting an essentialised vision of Lebanon and of its capacity limitations – are crucial to the legitimisation of international interventions. In addition, the author points to the prevalence of externalisation logics, discourses and frames: Lebanon has been constructed by the international community as a security problem, a ‘dangerized’ place prone to foreign interventions, embedded in a European agenda of externalisation of migratory controls.

Clothilde Salelles is a postdoctoral researcher in political science at the University of Antwerp. A former student from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, she holds a PhD in political sociology from the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord.