Making Sense of the October 2019 Uprising in Lebanon: Competing Discourses and Conceptualizations

Abstract

High inflation rates, the devaluation of the Lebanese lira which was pegged to the U.S. dollar, and weak economic and social services contributed to the outburst of protests on October 17th of 2019, following a circulated decision by the government to impose a $6 tax on the WhatsApp application. The Lebanese people perceived this decision as yet another burden placed on them by a government that was already failing to provide basic services and assistance and were outraged by it widely. Some protestors gathered in the streets of downtown Beirut, chanting “All Means All” to symbolize the involvement of all politicians in the crises that Lebanon was in and demand for reforms beyond the empty promises of the same zu’ama and the same traditional political parties who failed to divert and save Lebanon from crises. But what started as a unanimous front of protestors from different backgrounds, classes, and identities fighting the same political class soon became a fractured front of various groups with their own respective varying understandings of what the movement stands for. Through a discourse analysis of eight different participating actors in the uprising, the research question of how each group understood the uprising uncovers that these competing discourses resulted in weakening the movement. By introducing the first few weeks of the uprising, this research answers the question of how the uprising was later on conceptualized. The findings highlight different protesting patterns of different groups with different alliances, all claiming to move under the same slogan of “All Means All,” yet having different conceptualizations of who the “all” includes, what the uprising aspires to achieve, and what the ‘change’ advocated for actually looks like.