Attachments
Executive Summary
Mercy Corps has worked with 27 municipalities in the North of Lebanon and the Bekaa region since 2013 to improve governance, social cohesion and social stability, with the support of the UK, EU, and Regional Development and Protection Program managed by Danida. Mercy Corps defines social cohesion as a state of relationships within a community based on the behaviors, attitudes, levels of trust, and collaboration that promote and foster commitment to and cooperation among the overall community, while social stability focuses on non-violent resolution of conflict. Over this period, Mercy Corps has carried out a number of research initiatives, which have tested the underlying hypotheses which orient social cohesion and stability programming in Lebanon. To date, allocations of programmatic resources in response to the Syrian refugee crisis overwhelmingly focus on increasing access to social and municipal services for Lebanese and Syrians. This is because assessments from multiple organizations identify that worsening living standards are closely connected to rising inter-communal tensions. These assessments assume increased tensions over access to social and municipal services lead to violence; however, they rarely try to understand in more detail how tensions correlate with disputes and violence, or try to understand whether access to different types of services or opportunities has any impact an individual’s propensity to use violence.
In order to understand this dynamic in more detail, Mercy Corps carried out a survey of 2,437 households in eight municipalities in North of Lebanon. This survey sought to identify when physical violence occurs – understanding that not all tensions manifest as disputes, and not all disputes escalate into violence – in order to better test the assumption that increased tensions over social service provision will lead to violence.
As a result of this survey, Mercy Corps recommends that social cohesion programmes should deploy a mixture of social services, livelihoods, and social interactions, rather than maintaining the status quo of overwhelming (in terms of allocation of programmatic resources) focus on social service provision. In particular, Mercy Corps recommends increasing investment in employment as the most effective way to promote stability in Lebanon, in communities with high numbers of refugees. The data shows that Lebanese households with no or limited livelihood options and those with poor economic outlooks for the future correlate with being more prone to use violence, while there was no such correlation between social service access and violence.
The data also indicates that the use of violence is socially accepted, with 49% agreeing it can be justified (70.15% for Lebanese and 27.24% for Syrians), and that verbal disputes do escalate into physical violence on a somewhat regular basis.3 However, these violent incidents are frequently financial: defending goods/property (38%) and defending livelihoods (33%) being the third and fifth most frequently identified justifications for using violence, exceeded only by defending one’s honour (83%) and defending family (50%). Even as drivers of verbal disputes, money and employment are the second and third most frequently identified by 37% and 29% of respondents respectively, while social services was identified by only 13% of respondents. Employment, rather than social service provision, is therefore the most consistent predictor across both the violence and dispute questions.
When resolving disputes before they escalate into violence, programmes often focus on mobilizing and training ‘Community Representatives’, established or emerging civil society, as well as religious and/or youth leaders to act as conflict mediators, without also linking these actors to municipal conflict resolution mechanisms. In this category, the findings also show that programming is not allocating resources towards the most impactful activities. Specifically, municipalities are overall the most effective inter-community dispute resolution actors based on the success rate, ability of the population to access them, and their capacities to utilize a mixture of mediation and legal responses.
Alongside expanding understanding of why and when verbal disputes escalate into violence, the research also focuses on social cohesion, describing how social service provision and interactions support this goal. Crucially, findings show that it is not only social interactions, but also economic interactions, if facilitated in a mutually financially beneficial and socially positive manner, that can contribute to building social cohesion, an important finding for livelihoods programmes with a stability goal.