The thesis uses the theories of Giorgio Agamben in three major works: Homo Sacer, State of Exception, and Infancy and History, in conjunction with a seminal work by Paul Ricoeur Memory, History, Forgetting, to explore the narrative films of three Lebanese directors. Agamben writes about the bio political body which must declare itself as under the total subservience of the sovereign in order to attain its rights to citizenship. He points to the relationship of language acquisition and the socialising aspect of infancy. Ricoeur’s theories are based on the narrative and the functional aspects of memory. These films are made from the child’s point-of-view, and span the years of the Civil War, from 1975- 1990. Based on events in the capital city Beirut, these largely autobiographical films outline the circumstances of the war. The directors provide a visual portrayal demonstrating that language and gesture, within time and space, are particularly important when raising issues and debates around the relationships between the private and the public. The perspective of the social and political structures lead to an exploration of the importance of the placement of the pre pubescent child within this environment. Gender roles, in particular the relationship of fathers to sons within the patriarchal society, help to demonstrate how the cycle of power transmission may be subverted.

Lebanon established itself as a consociation in 1943 and for thirty years achieved relative stability. However, in 1975 the state descended into a fifteen-year war that destroyed the idea that Lebanon was a bastion of tolerance and co-existence. In the years following the war the Lebanese state and society has remained deeply divided. Central in the discussion of Lebanese politics is the continued use of power-sharing between the eighteen recognised sects to manage societal cleavages. This thesis examines consociationalism in Lebanon and asks whether the consociational arrangement post-Civil War employs subsidiary control mechanisms to safeguard power-sharing. The thesis contained examines whether the Palestinian refugees residing in Lebanon are subjected to control measures in order to protect Lebanese consociationalism. Current population estimates put Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon at around 300,000, of which are nearly all Sunni. A common thought in the Lebanese body politic is that if Palestinians were to be naturalised in Lebanon, consociationalism would become untenable due to a population shift that would favour Sunnis. With the added weight to the Sunni constituency, Lebanese power-sharing would become redundant. This thesis therefore explores the legitimacy of this idea, using the example of Palestinian refugees to analyse key themes in the Lebanese polity, foremost the protectionism each sect exercises in defence of their political capital. Using Palestinian refugees as an example, this thesis illustrates the ways and methods that Lebanese sects react to potential threats, which in turn highlights the difficulties of governance in Lebanon. I conclude that Lebanon does employ control mechanisms to limit Palestinian refugees because the Lebanese polity is unable to substantively deal with issues that may jeopardise the equilibrium of the state. In a state that emphasises corporate power-sharing, any issue that is perceived to cause disequilibria will be met with intransigent policy positions from the Lebanese actors.

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The thesis deals with the relationships between political violence and the built environment of Beirut during the early phases of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1976). It investigates how the daily practices of urban warfare and the urban built fabric impacted on each other, and specifically how the violent targeting of the built fabric relates to contested discourses of power and identity enacted by the urban militias. The study is the result of residential fieldwork in Beirut, where I held in-depth interviews with former militia combatants, media representatives, academics and practitioners in urban studies and architecture, as well as conducting archival search into bibliographical, visual and microfilm sources in Arabic, English and French. Official geopolitical discourses in international diplomacy about the civil war between 1975 and 1976 focused on nation-state territoriality, and overlooked a number of complex specifications of a predominantly urban conflict. This led occasionally to an oversimplification of the war and of Beirut as chaos. Reading the official discourses side by side with unofficial militia accounts, I argue instead that state and non-state narratives coexisted in the urban warfare, and their intermingling produced geographical specifications that were particularly visible in the built environment. Both official and unofficial accounts were permeated of colonial references to the sectarian structure of the Lebanese society. In the thesis, I adopt a discursive and post-colonial approach to these references. Beirut's built fabric became a contested site where the militias enacted different visions of the same territorial discourse: the nation state of Lebanon. This enactment took place through the occupation, division and destruction of portions of the city. Beirut's built environment played a central role in actively shaping and giving materiality to contested ideas of territory, identity, and security. Therefore, the thesis offers a resourceful and critical approach to the study of the impact of conflict on everyday city life.

The present thesis re-assesses the utility of the theory of consociational democracy as a prescriptive conflict-regulation mechanism for plural societies, by re-examining the significance of the so-called causative/positive relationship between consociationalism and democratic stability. This re-assessment is based on a twin-fold examination of the internal constructs and logic of consociational theory, their political/economic procedural aspects and their societal manifestations. This examination is undertaken in two complex historical contexts, pre-war and post-war Lebanon. Mainly, the internal weaknesses of the theory have to do with its inherently flawed assumptions and the imprecise definitions of its main components, which make it problematic to analytically and empirically establish a causative link between consociationalism and democratic stability. Thus, to undertake a meaningful discussion of the ability of consociationalism to deliver on the promise of democratic stability, the thesis elaborates on the definitions of the main components and concepts of consociational theory (as they relate to the Lebanese context). It also examines their relations to democratic theory. Equally, starting with the observations that many countries of the world adopt consociational practices and mechanisms of rule and that consociational theory continues to receive significant scholarly attention, the continuous development and elaboration of the consociational model appear to be a way of alleviating the weaknesses of the theory and expanding its prescriptive power. Hence, particular emphasis is placed on an original elaboration of the definition, concept and representative scope of the grand coalition for two major reasons. First, this is so in the light of the centrality of the notion of elites and their role in consociational democracies (consociationalism being an actor-centered model). Second, this is the case in the light of the fact that executive decision-making power effectively lies within the ruling grand coalition. Based on the complex societal stage on which the thesis unfolds, (i. e., the Lebanese context), the findings of the thesis reveal that the consociational model of democracy is at times unable in very many ways to operate as the consociational theory of democracy suggests. Most importantly for the purposes of the present dissertation, the Lebanese experiments with consociationalism reveal that the model is unable at times to prevent the outbreak of communal conflict involving violence. Furthermore, it does not seem to work properly without a heavy dose of internal mediation and external arbitration. Additionally, it prevents the Lebanese state and social systems from reaching the political maturity necessary for stability. In other words, the Lebanese consociational structure of governance appears to work effectively at ensuring relative stability only if it is continuously assisted by additional mechanisms of conflict-regulation (those of mediation and arbitration). Indeed, the Lebanese consociational model functions relatively well when it borrows from the above-mentioned mechanisms provided by the literature on conflict regulation in plural societies. As such, consociationalism's so-called ability to deliver, alone, on the promise of democratic stability for Lebanon's plural society is seriously questioned.