My first document

#272

The purpose of the game

There’s nothing quite like sitting down with friends on a sunny winter afternoon for rounds of backgammon. Anyone passing by tables of competitors would likely hear goodhumored curses and raucous shouting. During one such Sunday afternoon, after watching a streak of wins and observing different playing strategies, I began to notice exactly what differentiated a winning tactic from a losing one.

In the game of backgammon, players maneuver their pieces across the board, each move carefully calculated to advance their position to one side of the board while simultaneously thwarting their opponents’ progress. The winner is able to advance their own pieces quickly while dodging their opponent’s attempts to slow their progress. Yet, there exists a subtle balance between strategic disruption and focused advancement. A player fixated solely on disrupting their opponent’s strategy often loses sight of their own objectives, squandering valuable time and resources in a futile pursuit. While some of my friends tried to gain ground by impeding each other, the winners were too busy with their own game to waste time needlessly obstructing others’. This strategy works.

I can’t help but apply the metaphor to our country. It’s clear: leaders embroiled in petty disputes and power struggles are derailing the collective agenda for the sake of short-term gains. Lebanon has no time for this. Just as in backgammon, where victory lies not in the destruction of the opponent’s pieces but in skillful navigation towards one’s goal, so too must our leaders prioritize the advancement of a secure and sovereign Lebanon.

The essence of backgammon is strategic focus and adaptability, not brute force or coercion. In the playing field of Lebanon, which happens to be a country full of backgammon experts, anyone with vested interest in the country’s sovereign future should realize that success hinges not on the capacity to dominate or hinder others, but to navigate complex situations while keeping their purpose in check.

There are lessons to be learned—whether in backgammon or on the national playing field—about strategic balance and focused purpose. Both require transcending immediate and exclusive self-interest for the overarching purpose of achieving a more lasting and meaningful “win.” And for those who forget their objectives, the Executive Toolkit for Sovereignty Building is there to help.

EDITORAL

The purpose of the game

LEADER

Reading beyond the ominous signs

Where to look for virtuous directions and omens of hope?

EXPLAINER

SOVEREIGNTY

To be a state and an economy for the 21st century A bundle of sovereign challenges is facing Lebanon

Energy security at a crossroads 2023 issued old and new obstacles to Lebanon’s energy sovereignty.

Harvesting reforms Lebanon’s agro-food industry must course-correct

The case for full dollarization once and for all Could dollarization save the economy?

xecutiv E E

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LEADER

Reading beyond the omnious signs

Where to look for virtuous directions and omens of hope?

Lamentations over the state of the world, the ongoing extinction of a Mediterranean conurbation, and the mass murder of a populace in our corner of the Middle East are currently ubiquitous on the world’s streets and in virtual public squares. In the global market place of opinions, minds are bombarded with both constant protests against war and genocide and constant hue and cry lambasting the parties bearing the blame of the ongoing armed conflicts.

From the vantage point of our small geopolitical neighborhood, this has the perverse effect that apparently vote-seeking philippics about concrete wars, genocide, and everything and everyone that is – verily or presumably – not adequately functioning in the global system, currently are detracting from giving what it takes to meet this troubled region’s urgent need for radically new, sustainable and long-term solutions.

Such detraction is all the more tragic under the Lebanese socioeconomic perspective. Any valiant effort for a full national reboot, the need of which has been stated openly and unmistakably for seven consecutive years by the economically literate in this country who trusted this magazine as their forum, is today forced to confront the bickering, self-centered infighting of the country’s political class and their external beneficiaries. Additionally, all calls and efforts for producing solutions to the Lebanese economic dilemmas are now drowned out by the political maneuvering, fake news and propaganda assaults in the massive info-war that has been raging since last October

line for igniting Lebanon’s economic democracy is marked

by

new

dangers

on multiple fronts around Lebanon. This is nauseatingly counterproductive because the crisis of the Lebanese economy is not solved in the least.

A HORIZON HANGING FULL OF MOURN

However, before it is conscionable to discuss if and how the worsened Lebanese situation, heightened national security, and persistent economic threat level can be rationally addressed, it is a human obligation to acknowledge that Lebanon, while suffering, is far from being as bad off

ECONOMIC ROADMAP

as the Palestinian territories, long the nexus of universal suffering in this part of the world. With the Palestinian pain at a tortuous and wrongly justified historic peak level, it must be expected that nothing other than dirges will become the emblems of living in Gaza and all of Palestine and that those Arab dirges will for years be sending their worthy message to the world.

This outlook on future perception of the Palestinian cause is diametrically opposed to how, in the global battlegrounds of opinion manipula-

tion and mind twisting, it is today impugned as barbaric and disgracious to open one’s mouth, asking for example what delineates genocide when the stage is Gaza, or “coldheartedly” compare what percentage of Gazans have been killed in five months with the percentage of civilian casualties during two years of warfare over Ukraine. But most depressingly, and regardless of the inevitable rectification of the current vile rage against calling out the mass extinction of Gazans and deliberate “inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group’s physical destruction in whole or in part” for the genocide it is, the stories of monstrous suffering and unbearable pain in Gaza will only lead to the eternally unanswerable question of “why?”.

“Why” is the essence of lamentation, whether one searches today, 7 decades, or 27 centuries ago. And even if one dirge were to ask, “where are signs of hope and peace?”, such a question’s indisputable answer can only be the negative affirmation: not with terrorists, not with the tyrants of power, and – with 99 percent certainty – not in geopolitics.

AND YET

However, an equally indisputable fact about the future of what is today the world’s most concentrated war zone, is that the there will be a “day after.” Even as no one can predict how many more needless deaths it will take for the power of atrocity raging in Gaza to finally wane, it is a fact of history that wars do cease.

And this means there will be the day when all partisan non-starter solutions for Palestine, and by extension Lebanon, will be substituted with an endeavor of somehow realizing nonviolent coexistence and a fair regional framework that fortifies these peoples’ yet to be built sovereign path of self-determination, prosperity and virtuous interdependence.

Notably, even if there will also be a “day” marked by the need to heal

the souls of victims and unmask the lies that have been and still are ruling the war, the “day after” on country level will require return to economic life and implementation of political coexistence with neighbor countries.

Being cognizant of all this, it would be wholly unconscionable to approach the economic “day after” for Lebanon without a cogent plan.

The Executive Economic Roadmap, throughout seven iterations, has adhered to the concept that balanced cognitive processes are crucial for a diversified and sustainable economy.

This has motivated the roadmap’s structuring into pillars in adherence to the thought that what is crucial in an economy’s intensification and expansion, are applied methods of information processing for balanced growth and conservation while also considering juxtaposed innate tendencies such as aggression and cooperation. This mindset, used since the first draft of the Executive Roadmap, is the mindset that we relied on when revising our current roadmap draft 7.0 and its more appealingly digitized version, the Executive Economic Roadmap Interactive, or ERMI, which we intend to be maintaining and updating under this designation in continuity.

BEATING THE RED QUEEN FROM A NEW BASELINE

The 2024 departure line for igniting Lebanon’s economic democracy is marked firstly by new dangers, namely the specter of foreign aggression against Lebanon and the equally threatening specter of violation of liberty from inside. But the course of our roadmap is also newly distinguished by the opportunity to analyze where Lebanese sovereignty has in the past 30 years been faked and how thoroughly the people were deceived by a false sense of economic security. The race to a sustainable country is secondly entering a new phase this year on strictly national grounds. With the old Lebanese fiefdom system of fake freedoms and pretend

economic security gone, the target of economic salvation is no longer delineated by a polity that either masters structural reforms and gains approval from international development finance institutions (DFIs), or has no other chance but to run for the foreseeable future in what is sometimes called a Red Queen’s race (in allusion to Lewis Carroll). Being trapped in the latter would mean running and striving at the highest speed that Lebanon’s business community can muster – yet without a chance to escape dependence on handouts.

The vision driving ERMI is that of an interdependent and networked sovereignty with meaning in the digital age. This concept of sovereignty as supreme but not indivisible or absolute can only succeed if based on social and economic security, and constructed on consultative collaboration from an economic democracy that practices non-confrontational conflict management.

Executive invites all those seeking a reformed Lebanon to access ERMI Join our journey to security and realistic sovereignty by delving deep into propositions for betterment of Lebanese social and economic compacts.

TESTING FAR-OUT METHODS

Many methods have been used throughout human history when seeking conflict resolution and postconflict scenarios. Some involved looking for celestial signals. By some trait encoded in the human being, turning our eyes to the skies is ingrained in our kind. Turning their eyes to the skies was what the augurs– one might describe an augur as a political consultant and futurist – of antiquity’s Mediterranean super power Rome did routinely and professionally over 2,000 years ago.

Another no less astounding but very different story of reading the skies is the tale of the Mediterranean seafarers who, close to three millennia ago, navigated to distant African and Northern European shores.

They did so not by auguring from mystical sights but by using a combination of celestial and terrestrial observations, imprecise mathematical calculations, and experience. Thus ensued the narrative of long-distance trade and the fame of requisite Phoenician skills eons before sailors started to use the compass, not to mention GPS.

Thus, despite the boost in appreciation for metaphysical decisionfinding that the performances of leading players in today’s empires may have unwittingly caused in the past few months, it is the method of combining intuitive, experiential, and evidentiary elements that Executive continues to trust as far as the salvation of the Lebanese polity and economy is concerned.

LEADER

Your daily update on all corporate news and announcements from all the region’s countries and sectors xecutiv E E

Yet, outside of our economic roadmap, how can a contemporary human being react to seemingly irreversible moral bankruptcy and operational catastrophe of the overextended geopolitical system?

It is in this context that the anachronistic proposition of auguring sneakily arises in this writer’s notoriously simple mind. When contemplating and agonizing about the political maneuvering and grandstanding that falsely claims to be a search for peace in the Middle East, it suddenly sounds sane, almost compellingly so, to resort (like a Roman augur) to reading aerial movements as arguments for a Pax Deorum.

However, to return to a more realistic mental ground, about the

short-term potential of ERMI one must make no mistake: what in a best-case scenario is on the cards for Lebanon will not be, for a great and indeterminate while, a day of peace or prosperity. It will be a day of newly endeavoring for economic sanity. This effort can be informed by two prior stages of mapping of the Lebanese economy’s needs, but it will also in the coming post-crisis years remain an absurd aspiration to succeed on terrain that has up to this day been hostile to sane and sustainable economic life in so many different ways. In this spirit let’s just recall one apt motto of Lebanon’s 2006 mental rebellion against being bombed into the “stone age” by a most belligerent neighbor: Keep walking.

EXPLAINER

The secret of the seventh Roadmap: meet ERMI

The Executive Roadmap is a dynamic, consultative and collaborative undertaking that documents solutions and bundles of measures which are seen as answers to Lebanon’s economic and structural woes by committed residents from many walks of life. To the best of the editors’ knowledge, the Roadmap is the longestrunning, often relayed on or copied, and most crowd-sourced economic plan under publication in Lebanon. It also is distinct in its origins and character from rescue plans that were conceived in public sector, business community and civil society contexts of the country’s acute economic crisis in the past four years. As such, the Roadmap is a testimony to the will of the people beyond any political affiliations. It is a permanent draft that is in its seventh annual iteration, thus in its pdf iteration marked as Draft 7.0.

At the same time, Draft 7 marks the entry into Executive Roadmap’s third phase of iteration and development. This new phase is externally determined on one hand by the national circumstances that entail more severe external threats and internal dangers – but also new economic and social impulses that highlight the potential for restructuring and rebooting what Executive codifies as economic democracy. On the other hand, the new phase of RM iteration represents a significant editorial effort of making the Roadmap Drafts more accessible, visual, and indeed inviting to new stakeholders aspiring to share in the shaping of Lebanon’s fortunes.

To this end, the Executive Roadmap is now garbed in fancy digital attire. The visual representation and navigation have been redesigned

from scratch. Its 390 recommendations have been condensed and aligned in style to be sharper, under the intent of serving as content platform in workshops, roundtables, and new interaction formats where Executive will in this year and henceforth be inviting contributions and debate. When compared side by side with the 7.0 pdf version, the Executive Economic RoadMap Interactive, or ERMI, are one in spirit and fully aligned in content but distinct in appearance and nuance.

THREE PHASES OF ROADMAP EVOLUTION

Induced by years of observing and analyzing administrative and political deficiencies that have been widening instead of being resolved, and of social and economic pathways that were directed at walls and cliffs instead of sustainable solutions and stairways to greater prosperity, the Executive Roadmap to save Lebanon was first prepared in the second half of 2018 and published in December of that year as a substantive plea for implementation of reforms and creation of efficiencies.

In the earliest iteration, direct consultations with stakeholders as well as the archive of Executive informed Draft 1.0’s formation with analysis pieces, industry reports,

The new phase of Roadmap iteration represents a significant editorial effort of making it more accessible, visual, and indeed inviting more stakeholders to share in the shaping of Lebanon’s fortunes

business features, interviews, expert comments, by-invitation op-eds, and editorials. Extracted from a loose list and organized into four pillars (Build & Reform; Strategize; Combat; and Develop), the aggregate of the magazine’s stakeholder contributions and insights was translated into an actionable document of 16 Policy Priorities laid out on 48 pages. Three internal and twelve external stakeholders were listed on the masthead of Draft 1.0.

The mindset of Executive editors at this moment in time, expressed in the Facts & Figures 2017-18 end-ofyear issue, was deeply concerned, but still hopeful. The issue’s Economy & Policy overview piece warned “The Lebanese state has no plan for where to take the country economically in 2018 and beyond.”

It can thus in hindsight be said that the first steps of the structured Roadmap process, while yielding Draft 1.0, were embedded in an increasingly uneasy calm, the relative peace of the status quo ante that lulled Lebanon in the entire postconflict reconstruction and development period of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. In the months following publication of Draft 1.0, the country was still engulfed in deceptive calm (while the July 2019 issue of Executive was titled “Breaking Point” and argued that, if Lebanon were a corporation “its management would need to be fired and fired fast”, editors continued to emphasize the great value of the financial system and called upon banks “to make every effort they can to be absolutely trustworthy”).

But in editors’ anticipation of likely deepening social and economic chasms and breakages in the country’s integrity, Executive’s Roadmap was, in a parallel effort to the regular coverage, materially reviewed and substantially expanded through consultative meetings held with diverse civil society organizations and stake-

Economic Roadmap

https://embed.kumu.io/a79cfd7a56c527ea03f631713eee6725#a-economic-roadmap

holder groups (that in some cases did not even consider themselves being prima facie economic stakeholders). Because of these interactive, on-theground consultations, the number of credited Roadmap contributors multiplied more than sixfold; Draft 2.0, published as a standalone document in spring 2019, introduced 268 newly proposed measures.

A first for Executive in the preparation of Roadmap 3 was an intense cluster of five economic and financial roundtables organized in a downtown Beirut hotel just ahead of national

day 2019. Stepping out of the conference venue and walking less than 50 steps after the successful conclusion of the last roundtable session meant that participants and conveners of the gathering were immersed in one of the most vibrant and enthusiastic Martyrs’ Square convocations of civil demands for change. Draft 3.0 was thus informed by the civil thawra at the end of 2019, but was still in many ways an effort of finding ways to avert the tsunami of despair that had been looming higher and higher in the preceding months. The number of credited contributors and stakeholders in the project again rose, almost doubling from Draft 2.0.

ASPIRATIONS OF RESCUE IN DIRE STRAITS

As the liquidity and banking crisis merged into the structural economic meltdown, the Roadmap process entered its second phase of iteration and became a crisis response and rescue tool. Draft 4.0 sought to help chart the way through the crisis by highlighting proposed emergency measures while attempting to “complement the emerging political will, doctrine, and resolve, which centers Lebanon’s well-being.” Draft 4.0 was presented in print in the “Fight for Hope” December 2020 – January 2021 issue of Executive.

As the immensity of the Lebanese political, economic, and social crisis was building up in 2020, Executive’s Roadmap Drafts went in search of new perspectives and ways forward.

In this overwhelming crisis context it is important to acknowledge that the work on RM Drafts 5.0 and 6.0 was marked by many financial and personnel impediments because of the unexpected mega-crisis exacerbated first by the Covid-19 pandemic and then, of course the Beirut Port explosion of August 4, 2020 unleashed by human failure and criminal political negligence.

Hence, RM Drafts 5.0 and 6.0 saw addition of measures urging fast ac-

tion on issues such as negotiations for an agreement with the International Monetary Fund and provision of vaccines. A noteworthy addition aiming to include private sector productivity and focus was the addition of the Enable pillar, documented in Draft 5.0. This pillar emerged out of consultative roundtable work with international agencies and private sector industry leaders in March 2021.

The Enable pillar consequently covers seven sectors of promise in manufacturing and services. These seven sectors – manufacturing; agroindustry; media and content development; hospitality; knowledge enter-

The Roadmap is a testimony to the will of the people beyond any political affiliations

prises; specialized chemicals (with utility for health and beauty); and renewable energy – were judged by consulting experts as best positioned for new growth. The number of contributors in Draft 5.0 reached more than 180 while proposed measures culminated at over 360. Draft 6.0 at the start of 2023 reiterated the content of Draft 5.0, adding new accents and shifting emphases.

Ideation of ERMI started in mid2023. In the iteration’s design and collation phase, Executive produced a mindfully shortened, more visually appealing and intuitively interactive ERMI and the reference Draft 7.0.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS(ES) OF MANY INNOVATIVE MINDS

As the crisis landscape has shifted to a wider need for integrated regional development and stabilization, the third phase of our Economic Roadmap iterations is upon us in form of ERMI. In preparation for the day after regional instability, phase three denotes the time of joint striving for

a new sovereignty that is realistic, modular and interdependent. In parallel with ERMI, Executive has developed Draft 7.0 as final pdf iteration and reference document containing the longer-form Policy Priority descriptions and proposed measures.

Digitized but not yet fully digital, ERMI offers an abridged Roadmap that condenses lengthy proposed measures and omits some proposed measures that overlap and have been included in more than one pillar and Policy Priority. We also condensed the introductions for each theme and designations of Policy Priorities for easier interaction in ERMI.

ERMI is even more committed than Drafts 1.0 to 7.0 to the stakeholder diversity and consultative approach that is the governing mindset of the Executive Roadmap since day 1. The editorial commitment to continuity of this process is evident in the structure of five verticals (pillars) and 26 topics or Policy Priorities with a total of 52 sub-categories.

The integrity of the Roadmap numbering system has been retained, even where individual measures have been retired from ERMI for reasons of redundancy or inappropriateness in the 2024 timeframe. In short, numerical identifiers of Policy Priorities and proposed measures in reference Draft 7.0 and EMRI are 100 percent the same.

In terms of intended priority audiences, pillars one and two have been compiled with the primary target of serving and inspiring public stakeholders, pillars two and three are designed to appeal civil stakeholders, pillar four and five aim to reverberate with private sector stakeholders. All five pillars, however – and this is the raison d’etre of moving the Executive Economic Roadmap into expanding interactivity with more and more digital functionalities envisioned for future EMRI iterations – seek to unleash innovative thinking and garner input and debate from all types of mindful stakeholders.

EXPLAINER

Forging an economic path to new sovereignty

Crisis situations are nothing if not an opportunity for change. In this sense acting as a supreme motivating force for change, the economic crisis was expanded by a national security crisis and threat to sovereignty of Lebanon. In the 2023/24 issue of Executive, we explore the magazine’s consultative Economic Roadmap under a perspective of building security and ultimately a new expression of sovereignty that is both networked and interdependent, instead of being defined as indivisible and territorial.

Economy is the aspect of a polity that is always in flux. By definition, economy is never at the same

time static and growing. The investigations and inquiries of Executive Magazine over the three years since March 2021 have shown that some sectors of the economy meet the criteria of both serving greater societal need and opening larger economic development potential.

Specializations of economic activity that have these two characteristics of great need and reward included renewable energy and production of food stuffs. Improvements of productivity and output in these sectors will therefore translate into the increase of security for the whole of society. In an additional advantage, meeting societal priority needs for food and energy is acknowledged globally under targets of food security and energy security (see stories contained in this pdf issue that summarize our 2023 findings on these sectors).

The economic crisis of Lebanon

has in this sense spurred on the identification of economic activities with high potential for job creation and market growth. Such potentials for boosting the economy were discovered through stakeholder consultations curated by Executive in manufacturing, hospitality, knowledge and creative industries, tech entrepreneurship, and niches in the real economy such as healthy cosmetics and organic products in food and beauty.

Further priority efforts of private and public sectors are needed for creation and improvement of financial markets and social safety networks, which are curiously interdependent to one another in the respective assurances of social security and financial security (see special report in issue 270 and dollarization comment on page 28).

A new aspect of security needs is cybersecurity, which is the meet-

Networked and Interdependent Sovereignty

TERRITORIAL MONETARY FOOD

DIGITAL ECONOMIC ENERGY

SECURITY

BUILD & REFORM STRATEGIZE COMBAT DEVELOP ENABLE

Fiscal policy

- Align scal and monetary policies

- Build scal policy

Capacities

- Enhance capacities in the public sector

- Develop capacities for data collection, analysis, and use

- Increase productivity

- Enhance the business and investment climate

- Make privatization work

State Institutions

- Modernize the civil service

- Reform ministries and agencies

Judicial Reform

- Improvement of judicial institutions

- Fortify judiciary independence

Regulatory frameworks

- Modernize regulatory framework

Education

- Develop a skilled labor force

- Strengthen public education

Health

- Modernize healthcare frameworks

- Improve social insurance systems

- Improve public health

- Launch an educational and civil service campaign

Energy

- Develop and implement a sustainable energy policy

Water

- Update water strategy and sector governance

- Maximize water sector ef ciency to reduce losses

Transport

- Develop an integrated transportation policy

- Improve urban mobility and green transport

ing defense needs of an increasingly digital society and in many ways is the equivalent of national security in the physical territory of a country. The importance of addressing those two security needs has been heightened immensely and the value of national security has been put in sharp relief by events in the last quarter of 2023.

It must be noted, however, that the economic sectors of above stat-

Gender Inequality

- Empower women in the workplace

- Reform laws to foster protection for women

- Increase the number of women in leadership roles

Poverty

- Support and protect vulnerable population groups

- Develop nancial mechanisms for the support of the poor

Corruption

- Strengthen anti-corruption frameworks

- Promote and increase transparency

- Improve institutional and societal corruption resilience

Pollution

- Combat air and water pollution

- Stop environmental degradation

- Combat noise pollution

ed potential were not at all times the first focuses of private investment. Neither were they the recipients of incentives by legislators or public sector support. This has to change as much as private and public capacities can facilitate.

A further factor of detriment was made evident through Executive’s research, namely that the sectors with the highest job creation potential in the real and the

Competitiveness

- Upgrade the competitiveness of the national economy

- Maintain a free and fair trade policy

Entrepreneurship Support

- Strengthen entrepreneurship frameworks

- Enhance micro, small and medium-sized enterprises

- Promote innovation and diversi cation

Labor

- Strengthen workers’ rights

- Initiate measures governing labor in ux

Outreach to the diaspora

- Institutionalize relations with the diaspora

- Capitalize on diaspora resources

Heritage Preservation

- Strengthen heritage preservation laws

Manufacturing

- Enable manufacturing companies

Agro-industry

- Enable food processing & agro-industrial production enterprises

Media

- Enable media, publishing and content creation ventures

Hospitality

- Enable food & beverage and hospitality enterprises

Knowledge enterprises

- Enable technology and knowledge enterprises

Chemicals

- Enable specialized chemicals, health and beauty enterprises

Renewable energy

- Enable renewable and clean energy production companies

services economy, and the priority issue of security, are interconnected with national public sector and governmental capacities that have been long and deeply deficient are still not being developed. The implementation of the economic roadmap through private and civic efforts and achievements of its purpose and vision layers cannot be completed without building and reforming the state and its institutions.

OVERVIEW

TO BE A STATE AND ECONOMY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

A BUNDLE OF SOVEREIGN CHALLENGES IS FACING LEBANON

There is no denying that Lebanon’s territorial sovereignty has, especially in recent months, been heavily violated. Not a dozen or a hundred times, mind you; it has been transgressed against to the point where numbers have become so routine as to be meaningless. Lebanese finds itself again as a playing field of international powers at the expense of its own sovereignty.

Yet, not only have the daily violations of this country’s territory, carried out with no regard for human lives and material damages, climbed to their highest peaks in decades. In facing the transgressions against its sovereignty, Lebanon seems to be left to fend for itself, without international diplomatic or moral support of its territorial integrity while aerial attacks against the country continue being perpetrated with scandalous impunity.

Moreover, recent threats of foreign intrusions and escalation against

Lebanon went from a ground invasion to as far as burning down Beirut. The physical and mental assaults against this polity have insidiously entered a dimension of harm and disrespect that is a magnitude or two above the self-inflicted weakening of the Lebanese state that has arisen in the past four years from damages to the country’s monetary sovereignty, economic stability, and social equity.

The outcome for Lebanon, in terms of the country’s standing visà-vis the community of nations and the managing partners in the global order, appears to be singular: a tortuous weakness of the Lebanese state’s supreme authority in its territory (the currently dominant definition of sovereignty) that is almost beyond repair. How can a state position itself for commanding new international respect and negotiating strong development potentials when its acute

impotence of shielding its borders further exacerbates a staggering economic and social meltdown that has been causally entwined with failures in the institutional backbone of its democracy?

However, far and above the territorial and national security challenges of Lebanon, there are serious global implications of the Palestine crisis of which the Lebanese people are but one, and not the most suffering, group of victims. Along with war crimes and genocide wherever it occurs around the world today, the blatant disregard for a country’s sovereignty as shown against Lebanon has to be counted as facet to an ongoing wider mockery of the global order.

When judged in combination with failures revealed in information wars, meaningless elections, and hapless genocide debates in the global realpolitik of 2023/24, an event such

as the disregard for a small state’s sovereignty counts toward an involuntary declaration of moral and legal bankruptcy by the system of ordered relations between states. This acute weakness of the global system is unmistakable when examined against the United Nations’ founding ideals. The system’s weakness actually appears to be on the verge of becoming critical when contextualized with the many moves that the UN and related institutions have made toward a more interventionist role in the universal enforcement of human and social rights, determination of digital sovereignty and monetary sovereignty in context of a borderless virtual world, and trans-national management of global climate, health, and environmental risks.

From this general observation and the experience of Lebanon as a state enmeshed in the region’s most concentrated and destructive conflict in at least 50 years, three or more lines of questions arise with regard to a global system based on sovereign nations as the constituent elements. Questions such as: what is the validity of sovereignty from a conceptual perspective and historical examination? What

SOVEREIGNTY

OVERVIEW

What is the validity of sovereignty from a conceptual perspective and historical examination?

are reasonable and rational remedies for the Lebanese weakness in sovereignty? What are the best aims for this country, other small states, and the community of nations in seeking to face the challenges that are outlined in the introductions to practically every global meeting on future policy needs? And what role can sovereignty play in producing solutions?

THE ORIGIN OF STATE AND SOVEREIGNTY

The fact that the baseline of international political relations today is the sovereign state, is the fruit of the 17th century European invention of indivisible state authority. Under this paradigmatic combination of state and sovereignty, much crime and damage has been dealt to groups and individuals within states and, between states, to neighboring populations over more than four centuries.

But the state-sovereignty combo stands also as a paradigm that from its very inception during the years of negotiating the Westphalian treaty to end the pan-European 30-year war has facilitated the ending of indiscriminate violence and in the long run contributed to outlawing what since the 20th century is known as genocide. In views held over years and years by many political theorists, the “power to command and control everything inside a physical space”, as American scholar Joan Cocks describes the supreme authority defined as sovereignty, was even a method of liberating polities from patterns of universal warfare of all against all that made their ordered existence and coexistence impossible. Sovereign states created order and shaped the world.

This position of political orthodoxy, however, is juxtaposed with the notion, expressed as introductory argument to numerous current treatises on the topic, that sovereignty is a “highly ambiguous and contested concept” and, as, for example, Cocks argues in a 2014 book, “has emerged in our time as a highly complex and often incongruous knot of problems.” According to her, sovereignty has engendered problems stretching from foundational violence of settlers (with the US the prime example of the phenomenon) and groups seeking to ascertain their delusional sovereign freedom at the cost of others to problems of global interconnections that have rendered sovereignty into the category of concepts in need of rethinking for the global age.

Moreover, the linkage of state and sovereignty is being tested also by a fact check of assumptions over the origin of the state and expressions of sovereignty by noted author team of anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. This particular background check spans a

Measure 26.1.16

Install solar panels on the rooftops of school buildings as a means to support the education sector.

Measure 26.1.17

Utilize existing micro grids of back-up generators to scale up solar energy on the short term.

Measure 26.1.18

Engage with public sector partners and economic advocacy partners in efforts to improve hard and soft infrastructures for transportation, export facilitation, shift to renewable sources of energy, waste management and other macro-level priorities highlighted in Executive Roadmap pillars two, three, and four.

Measure 26.1.19

Transition to a more open and competitive power market that supports the renewable take-off.

Measure 26.1.20

Diversify the energy supply and energy demand management on the technical side, but also tackle the political economy constraints that would allow the leapfrog towards renewables, by controlling the oil cartel value chain, and the diesel generators market and network.

Measure 26.1.21

Introduce participatory tools and channels in the energy transformation process that could foster acceptance and contribute to fair power dynamics and energy policies.

Measure 26.1.22

Construct new gas-powered plants in Zahrani and Deir Ammar with a capacity of up to 2,000 megawatts and a natural gas import facility in Zahrani.

Measure 26.1.23

Support financial vehicles that make it attractive to Lebanese depositors to invest their “libano dollars” in solar power projects.

Measure 26.1.24

Add climate risk mitigation measures to public and private RE projects to attract greater investments.