Challenging the Gatekeepers: Disability Rights Advocacy and the Struggle for Self-Representation within Lebanon’s Post-war Sectarian Democracy

Abstract

Marginalised groups across the world have been struggling for their rights as citizens from the beginning of the modern state era. These struggles have been particularly challenging within the global south where emerging states have been weaker, the effects of capitalist penetration more unevenly distributed and, hence, where the concentration of socio-economic and political power has been more pronounced. Particularly challenging for many marginalised groups has been the resilient perpetuation of clientelist dynamics that have thrived within these conditions of socio-economic and political inequality — giving rise to political systems dominated by mediated rather than direct/unmediated access to the state and to the rights and resources that should flow from one’s status of being a citizen. Much of the history of citizenship across the world — now being played out within most of the countries of the global south — has been characterised by this very struggle to enhance the dynamics of mediated access to the state, if not establish direct access to the fruits of citizenship (Waldner 1999).