The year 2022 brought the first national Lebanese elections since the turbulent 17 October Revolution in 2019, and many eyes were turned towards what has been popularly called “civil society,” or “mujtama3 madani” in Arabic. This term refers to the political change movement whose seeds were sown in the 2015 “You Stink” protests, and whose roots were established in the 2019 revolution. Many Lebanese hoped the change movement would prove to be an important inflection point in Lebanon’s political history in its challenge to the current establishment. However, the movement itself remains largely unknown to most Lebanese, as it consists of an organic but fragmented network of politically diverse groups, in which perhaps the sole unifying factor is the demand for political change.
In response to this lack of clarity, Action Research Associates, in collaboration with Democracy Reporting International, surveyed 30 change groups in the period around the 2022 elections to map these groups’ purposes, relationships, and the challenges they face. A summary of the findings was publicly presented and discussed on 26 October 2022 in the presence of various political actors, and the full report as well as a summary are now available for download below.
Finally, we release the dataset collected for this research for transparency and to facilitate others’ research. It includes, among others, 1) a list of change candidates in the recent elections, with affiliation, gender and number of votes; 2) a list of change lists in the elections, indicating from which part of the change movement they emerge, the fraction of votes they gathered, and how many MPs they landed; 3) policy and relationship data collected in our own interviews and surveys.
Download the Summary Report
Download the Full Report
Download the Dataset