Multi-actor interventions in cross-border conflict contexts: Lebanese border security

Lead researcher: Dr Simone Tholens 

Partner: European University Institute (EUI) 

Duration: March 2023 – March 2024 

Country: Lebanon 

This research project focuses on recent multi-actor interventions to strengthen Lebanese security agencies’ border management capacity. Since 2006, and in earnest since the outbreak of the war in neighbouring Syria in 2011, international efforts to strengthen the porous border between Lebanon and Syria have accelerated. These interventions – predominantly led by major Security Assistance providers including the US, UK, and France – are in many ways ad hoc and defined by geopolitics. They are not multilateral coalitions with a comprehensive peacebuilding mandate, nor do they seek to implement a political reform strategy. Rather, they operate in a field we may call a double coordination-complex: at the Lebanese level, the fragmented landscape of security agencies and actors, wedded to both formal and informal power-sharing principles, provide significant challenges to building effective and legitimate border security responses, while at the international level, competition and cooperation operate in tandem and with largely unscripted patterns of coordination between international donors. As such, international efforts to strengthen the Lebanese state in the face of cross border threats such as trafficking, terrorism, illegal migration, and instability are highly instructive when analysing how multi-actor interventions develop coordination practices at the ad hoc level.  

The proposed study mapped and scrutinised a selection of such ad hoc coordination mechanisms that have been initiated over the past decade in order to overcome this double coordination complex, with emphasis on border management. The project was in particular concerned with two recent dynamics that plausibly impact on the fragility of the border landscape, and the security agencies’ capacity to perform their duties: i) the dire economic crisis that has deeply affected Lebanon since 2019, and ii) the transcendence of smuggling as a widespread issue across the Middle East and in particular in the Lebanon-Syria nexus.  

Primary data was collected by conducting semi-structured and largely in-person interviews with stakeholders affected by or involved in the processes of delivering international security assistance to the Lebanese security sector. Three types of stakeholders were interviewed, namely, international donors and implementing agencies, Lebanese parliamentary and municipal representatives, as well as actors from civil society 

Explore more about the project:  

• Event | Rethinking security assistance in Lebanon amidst escalating Hezbollah-Israel hostilities 

For more information regarding this research, contact [email protected]