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Dr. Bashir Saade is a Lecturer in Politics & Religion at the University of Stirling. He held posts at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh and at the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut. He is the author of International Political Economy and the Global South (Routledge 2025) and Hizbullah and the Politics of Remembrance (2016).
Lebanon’s Uprisings—Bringing the Political Back In
The #YouStink movement and its various associate movements have denounced “the system,” “confessionalism,” and “the political class” of all orientations, including the parliament, the cabinet of minister, the prime minister, and so on, without really showing an understanding of how all these institutional positions relate to one another, and to the problem of corruption and of the poor public sector. By looking at the recent protests in Lebanon, this article proposes ways to avoid this slippery slope and demonstrates how to think of genuine change––and recognize its limits––given the prevailing political context.
Instruments such as the shakuhachi and the nay—though both many centuries old—have seldom met because they come from very distant places. The nay is a piece of reed from the Middle East, while the shakuhachi is bamboo from Japan. Although very simple in substance and shape, their sound has a strong character because they have grown to represent in the most complex ways what they have inherited from the past. When Kamal Helou, my musical partner, and I made these two instruments converse, we knew that we were forcing the laws of time. We found the first musical contact timid—both the shakuhachi and the nay imposing their characters, clinging to their traditional aesthetics. The shakuhachi is sharp and focused, the nay moving and warm. Yet the similarities were evident, both instruments having come to reflect similar ethical questions—the universality of being and the intuition of the soul.
