To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
The talk will assess the structural factors that led to Lebanon's current protest wave, with an emphasis on local governance in the country's urban periphery. It will describe how the parties that have dominated the national government since the end of the civil war engaged in practices that contributed to deteriorating welfare conditions while foreclosing the capacity of outsiders to challenge incumbent elites' power. It will then examine the nature of protests in urban spaces outside of Beirut. For this, the presentation will leverage original survey data collected before then, unexpectedly, during the 2019-20 protest wave.
