What is a ‘political worker’? Leadership & leaderlessness in Lebanon’s ‘Independence Intifada’

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 11: Framing for the 21st Century

Abstract

Climaxing protest cycles in Lebanon which had taken place in the past few decades help us revisit the role of intellectual and organizational leadership, aiding our capture of new conceptual movement patterns. Amid the existing scholarly debate on leadership both as practice and structure, this paper illustrates the modes of practice which embody a few dozen secular ‘political workers’ in Lebanon’s ‘Independence Intifada’, which successfully expelled the Syrian regime from Lebanon in 2005. Using the extended case method on Lebanon under the Syrian mandate as a neoliberal and authoritarian system of governance, the paper builds on a Gramscian framework to elaborate the concept of ‘political workers’ as a theoretical and methodological instrument. It centers political biographies and their capacity to signify how the day-to-day labor of political workers contribute to elements of an alternative ‘common sense’, compensating for their movements’ weakness and lack of local-societal entrenchment. I use in-depth semi-structured interviews to better sketch the practices, and subsequently the discursive product, of secular political workers who participated in the Intifada. To aid my conceptual expansion of the term, the study zooms into the ways in which political workers employ discursive elements and organizational strategy to alter the public opinion leading up to the Intifada.

Author

• Karim Safieddine