Reform within the System: Governance in Iraq and Lebanon
Author: Amal Bourhrous, Meray Maddah, Shivan Fazil & Dylan O’Driscoll (SIPRI)
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Abstract
The 2019 protests in Iraq and Lebanon revealed a widespread dissatisfaction with political systems based on sectarian and ethnosectarian power-sharing, which many saw as being responsible for a host of governance failures. This has given rise to demands for a wholesale change of the political systems in both countries. However, the dismantlement of identity-based power-sharing systems is a remote prospect—they are deeply entrenched, and change would depend on action from the very political elites that benefit from them.
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