Lebanese Citizenship In Crisis

Lebanese people have reached another peak of devastation as the economic crisis badly impacts all citizens from all social classes. Various means are being used to express the accumulated suffering and mistrust among Lebanese. Some people are protesting in the streets peacefully, and others protesting through violence. Some people are active online using all available social media tools to express their grievances, political views, and mistrust in the current political regime. Another margin of people is abstaining from any form of expression in their home with fueled anger and distress from all the implications that come with the fact of being a Lebanese citizen. We have reached a point where our citizenship is in question. The concept of “citizenship” evolves throughout history with the changes in the norms and values shaping our societies and cultures. According to “Compass: Manual for Human Rights Education with Young People” published by the Council of Europe, the most common understanding of citizenship is the one attributed to the legal relationship between the state and individual that entitles rights and privileges for the individual and imposes duties toward the state. Today, citizenship is not limited anymore to the legal dictum of rights and responsibilities; however, it is posited by various factors and elements related to one’s ownership and sense of belonging to the community. The relationship between the individual and community is shaped by four dimensions: social, political, cultural and economic. The paper “Information and citizenship: a governance perspective” published by Hector Alejandro Ramos-Chavez introduces new approaches to the concept of citizenship. It goes beyond the individual’s social, political, cultural and economic rights to a multifaceted concept in which individuals play an active role in setting public policies. The paper outlined “three important approaches that shall be addressed to contextualize the citizenship concept. The first is associated with the loss of credibility in the representation once provided by traditional channels of citizen participation, such as political parties. The second is related to the advent of new identities and the struggle for acknowledgement. While the third is correlated with the influence of the mass media in the construction of the citizen.”