Author: Reinoud Leenders
Publisher: Cornell University Press – 275 pages
Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram
After a decade and a half of civil war, and with the signing of the Ta’if peace accord in 1989, the rebuilding of Lebanon’s shattered infrastructure and the establishment of a working state apparatus were urgent needs and big priorities. But this rebuilding was marked with widespread corruption.
In this book Reinoud Leenders presents ample evidence of rampant graft and corruption. He describes the extent and nature of the wrongdoings in several key sectors of Lebanon’s economy, including:
- Construction
- Energy
- Government
- Health care
- Natural resources
- Social assistance programs
- Transportation
On how corruption implicated high-level public servants and senior policy makers, Leenders offers detailed evidence and clear perspective. He also discusses the Syrian leadership’s role and its interests in Lebanon and how it manipulated Lebanon’s internal differences for its benefit.
An overview of what is covered and discussed in this book is offered to you here, from its Contents pages:
- Corruption: A Window into the State of Postwar Lebanon
- Assessing the Corruption
- Public Institutions and Bureaucratic Organization
- The Political Settlement of the Second Republic
- The Politics of State-Building and Corruption
- Corruption and the Primacy of Politics
Epilogue
Here is what the situation was in Lebanon in the early 1990s after the civil war:
- More than 150,000 people killed
- Tens of thousands of people displaced
- Most state institutions collapsed or paralyzed
- Destruction of physical infrastructure worth around $25 billion.
- Plunge in per capita income by two-thirds
The 1970s and 1980s saw much violence and bloodshed in Lebanon. The 1990s were relatively calm, with the exception of the deaths of over a thousand Lebanese caused by destruction of its infrastructure by Israelis.
In the 1990s, security conditions improved in Lebanon, including the reorganization of the Lebanese army. A period of normalcy returned. The October 1989 Ta’if peace accord (named after the Saudi resort that hosted 58 survivors among the 72 deputies elected to Lebanon’s Parliament in 1972) brought on the beginning of Lebanon’s Second Republic about a year later. Syrian armed forces then helped prevent political violence.
The year 1992 was significant in Lebanon’s political history, as it not only brought about parliamentary elections every four years – as called for in the revised constitution- but also augured improved living standards.
This book links corruption to the nature of state institutions in postwar Lebanon. Lender essentially asserts as his central thesis in this book that corruption is the result of a defective political system. He underlines the importance of state institutions, which, he shows in this book, have a critical role in influencing economic behavior.
Reinoud Leenders, formerly International Crisis Group analyst in Beirut, is Assistance Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He is coeditor of Middle East Authoritarianisms: Governance, Contestation, and regime Resilience in Syria and Iran.
