Conceptualizing Hizbollah’s Transformation in Lebanon’s Post-Cedar Revolution

Abstract

Since its inception in 1982, Hizbollah has never been an ordinary player in Lebanese local politics. Apart from orchestrating a successful guerilla warfare type of military resistance against Israel, the Party of God—as the translation from Arabic suggests—gradually shifted from being a rigid ideological party seeking to establish an Islamic republic in a sectarian war-torn Lebanon, to a fully fledged integrated political party representing the historically marginalized Shiite community in this complex Middle Eastern country. From this perspective, the party’s evolutionary nature elicited a large body of analysis that aimed to conceptualize Hiz-bollah’s multiple roles, identities and raison d’ëtre (Alagha 2001; Byman 2003; El-Hokayem 2007; Hamzeh 1993, 2004; Harb and Leenders 2005; Harik 2004; Goldberg 2002; Norton 1999, 2008, Saad-Ghorayeb 2002).