The 2019 Lebanon Uprising

Reviewed by Justin Salhani, Lebanese journalist, on 9 June 2026.

The 2019 uprising in Lebanon, locally known as Hirak (movement) or Thawra (revolution), was a series of decentralised protests that dominated Lebanese politics in the final months of 2019 and beginning of 2020.¹ It was one of many protests that year, part of a global wave of uprisings that rocked places as diverse as Chile, Iraq, Hong Kong, Sudan and Haiti.

Initially triggered on October 17th by grievances over badly managed wildfires² and a government proposal to tax free phonecall services,³ the protests soon evolved into a more widespread denouncement of corruption, the entirety of the postwar status quo, here referring to the period since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war, and of sectarianism, the power-sharing status quo in Lebanon in which positions of power are divided up according to sectarian calculations.⁴

Eight years after the eruption of the Arab Spring throughout the SWANA region in countries such as Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya, protesters in Lebanon took up popular chants such as ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam (“the people want the downfall of the regime”)⁵ with an-nizam often replaced by al-ta’ifyyeh (sectarianism). This system, in place since the founding of the modern Lebanese republic in the 1940s and with roots in the Ottoman and French colonial periods, was widely seen as responsible for corruption and the absence of adequate state services.⁶ As state power is distributed along sectarian and patriarchal lines, this has led to the growth of primarily cis-male and sectarian elites that serve as gatekeepers of ‘their’ own communities, becoming the defacto providers of jobs and services, or the middlemen who facilitate this clientalist economy.⁷ Furthermore, the dominance of personal status laws that limit crucial issues such as marriage, divorce and inheritance within the various sects’ religious courts has meant that women and members of the LGBTQ community are legally subordinated to their cis and straight male relatives.⁸

In other words, sectarianism and patriarchy are two of the mechanisms through which capital accumulates and power is consolidated in Lebanon. While anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal politics were rarely explicit throughout the uprising, various groups have attempted to make them more pronounced through direct participation in the uprising and in some cases organising separate marches.⁹ The decentralised nature of the uprising has meant that otherwise underrepresented groups of citizens and residents were given greater access to public squares and discourses. This was in sharp contrast to a previous uprising in 2015 which, while sharing similar grievances as 2019, was largely dominated by a self-appointed committee¹⁰ that was quickly targeted, co-opted¹¹ and eventually rendered ineffective.¹²

Despite the state’s repression, protesters throughout the country set up encampments and populated them with “soup kitchens, free psychiatric clinics, piazzas for regular public debates, performance spaces, and meeting areas, among other functions.”¹³ These were tactics consciously set up to counter the sectarian divide and conquer strategy that segments of the ruling class was deploying.¹⁴ For example, in Tripoli, northern Lebanon’s de-facto capital and a Sunni-majority city, protesters chanted their solidarity with the Shia-majority south,¹⁵ leading Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury to call Tripoli “the light of the revolution.”¹⁶

In the end, the thawra was largely suppressed by a combination of state violence, a worsening economic crisis and, eventually, by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, among other reasons.¹⁷ While the impact of the uprising was immediately felt in the downfall of the then-ruling coalition,¹⁸ if temporary,¹⁹ its long-term impact remains to be seen. The 2022 general election brought in more independent MPs than ever before, a change that was credited to the thawra.²⁰ It can also be argued that, for the first time, people in Lebanon were offered a vision, however brief, of what a post-sectarian country could look like weakening the hegemonic hold that the establishment parties have had on the country for decades.²¹