Civil Society and Lebanon - Towards a Hermeneutic Theory of The Public Sphere in Comparative Studies

None of the English-language literature on the civil war in particular, or Lebanon in general, emphasizes civil society and public sphere theory in analyzing the historical and social forces which informed the emergence of modern Lebanon, and gave rise to and sustained the civil war, and have informed the constitution of the Tai'f peace and Lebanon's much-vaunted Second Republic with the important exception of a recent article by Antoine Messara (1995). This study attempts to fill this void in the literature while, at the same time, making a contribution to the increasingly important and growing scholarship on civil society in the Middle East in particular (most notably in English: Norton, 1996; Schwedler, 1995; al-Sayyid, 1995; Mowlana, 1994) and democratic public sphere theory in general.