On 4 August 2020, an enormous explosion tore through Beirut.
Approximately 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had been stored for years at the city’s port. When it exploded, more than 200 people were killed, thousands were injured and entire neighbourhoods were devastated.
The images were almost unbelievable. Windows shattered kilometres away. Buildings collapsed. A shockwave travelled across the Lebanese capital.
More than a year later, there has still been no final determination of political responsibility for how such an enormous quantity of dangerous material was allowed to remain inside one of the country’s most important pieces of infrastructure.
Instead, this Thursday, people were killed during a protest over the investigation itself.
Supporters of Hezbollah and the allied Amal movement had gathered near Beirut’s Palace of Justice demanding the removal of Judge Tarek Bitar, who is leading the investigation into the port explosion. Gunfire erupted. At least six people were killed and dozens injured. The streets around Tayouneh became scenes of armed confrontation, with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades appearing in parts of Beirut.
For older Lebanese citizens, the images inevitably recalled the country’s civil war, which ended only in 1990.
But what happened this week should not simply be understood as another episode of Lebanon’s sectarian conflict.
The more important question is why investigating one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in modern history has become politically dangerous in the first place.
A functioning state should be capable of asking a relatively basic question after more than 200 people die:
Who was responsible?
Lebanon is discovering how politically explosive that question becomes when the people being investigated belong to institutions powerful enough to challenge the state conducting the investigation.
The port explosion was not an unpredictable natural disaster. The ammonium nitrate had arrived in Beirut years earlier and remained improperly stored despite repeated warnings about its danger. That immediately created several possible levels of responsibility. Who knew the material was there? Who had legal authority over it? Who received warnings? Who failed to act? Were those failures criminal negligence, administrative incompetence or something worse?
Judge Bitar has attempted to question and prosecute senior political and security officials as part of that investigation.
That is where the legal process has collided with Lebanon’s political system.
Hezbollah and Amal accuse Bitar of political bias and have demanded his removal. Other Lebanese groups and many families of victims argue that removing him would amount to another attempt by the country’s political elite to prevent accountability.
I obviously cannot determine from outside Lebanon whether every decision Bitar has made is legally correct. Judges should be scrutinised too, particularly when conducting investigations with enormous political consequences.
But the broader pattern is difficult to ignore. The investigation has repeatedly encountered political resistance, legal challenges and disputes over whether senior officials can be questioned.
That makes this about more than one judge.
It is about whether Lebanon possesses institutions capable of investigating powerful people when those powerful people have the ability to obstruct the institutions.
This is a different form of state weakness from the one we normally imagine.
When people describe a weak state, the image is usually a government incapable of doing things: it cannot collect taxes, control territory, provide electricity or enforce laws.
Lebanon certainly has elements of that problem.
But perhaps some states are weak for another reason.
They contain political actors that are extremely strong.
Hezbollah is the clearest example. It is simultaneously a political party represented in parliament and government, a social organisation with extensive networks of services, and an armed movement possessing military capabilities independent of the Lebanese armed forces.
That makes the relationship between Hezbollah and the Lebanese state extraordinarily complicated. Hezbollah operates inside Lebanon’s political system while also possessing power outside the state’s normal monopoly over organised force.
This raises a basic political question that goes back to what a state actually is.
Political theorists often describe one defining characteristic of the modern state as a monopoly over the legitimate use of force within its territory.
Lebanon does not fit neatly into that model.
The Lebanese army exists.
The government exists.
Police exist.
But so do heavily armed political organisations.
When political disagreements escalate, the possibility of violence therefore exists outside the formal institutions supposedly designed to resolve those disagreements.
Thursday demonstrated why that matters.
A dispute over a judicial investigation should take place through courts.
Instead, Beirut ended up with gunmen in the streets.
Once political actors possess both electoral power and independent armed power, legal accountability becomes much harder. A prosecutor is not simply challenging an individual politician. The investigation may affect an entire organisation with the capacity to exert pressure far beyond an ordinary legal defence.
This does not mean Hezbollah alone explains Lebanon’s institutional problems. That would be much too simple.
Lebanon’s political system itself is built around sectarian power-sharing.
The country’s major religious communities are guaranteed representation through a confessional political structure. By convention, the president is a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. Parliamentary seats are also divided along confessional lines.
There is a historical logic behind this.
Lebanon contains several major religious communities, and the political system attempts to prevent any one group from completely dominating the others. After a devastating fifteen-year civil war, power-sharing can appear much safer than majoritarian politics in which one community might permanently control the state.
But the same system creates serious incentives.
Political leaders can present themselves not simply as politicians but as protectors of communities.
A political dispute then becomes a communal dispute.
An investigation into an official can be portrayed as an attack on the sect that official represents.
Economic resources can be distributed through patronage networks.
Government ministries can become prizes divided among political factions rather than components of one coherent administration.
Accountability becomes harder because removing one politician can alter a delicate political balance.
This is the central paradox of Lebanon’s political system: the arrangements designed to prevent conflict can also make effective government extraordinarily difficult.
Power-sharing protects groups.
It can also protect the politicians claiming to represent those groups.
That distinction matters.
A system created to ensure that Shia, Sunni, Christian and Druze citizens all possess political representation does not necessarily require the same political leaders to remain permanently insulated from accountability.
But political elites can blur those categories.
Criticism of the leader becomes criticism of the community.
An investigation becomes persecution.
Political survival becomes communal survival.
Once that happens, accountability itself begins to look destabilising.
And this creates a terrible choice.
If authorities aggressively investigate powerful officials, they risk political confrontation.
If they avoid investigations because confrontation is dangerous, impunity becomes part of the political system.
The second option may preserve stability today.
It makes the state weaker tomorrow.
Because every official learns the same lesson: enough political power can place you beyond accountability.
Lebanon’s economic collapse makes this institutional failure even more consequential.
The country is experiencing one of the most severe economic crises in the world. The Lebanese pound has lost most of its value. Inflation has devastated household purchasing power. Electricity shortages have become severe. Fuel and medicine have become difficult to obtain. Banks have restricted access to depositors’ savings.
Just last weekend, much of Lebanon lost electricity after its two largest power stations shut down because of fuel shortages.
A country containing Beirut’s sophisticated financial and commercial history is struggling to keep the lights on.
It is tempting to treat the economic collapse and the port investigation as separate stories.
I don’t think they are.
Both involve the same underlying question:
Can institutions force powerful actors to bear the consequences of their decisions?
Economic reform creates losers.
Reducing subsidies hurts people benefiting from subsidies.
Restructuring banks creates losses for bank owners, shareholders or depositors.
Reforming public institutions threatens patronage networks.
Investigating corruption threatens politicians.
Every serious reform therefore requires somebody powerful to accept a cost.
If political institutions are too weak to impose those costs, reform repeatedly stalls.
The result is a political system capable of distributing benefits while money exists but incapable of distributing losses once the money runs out.
That may be one reason economic crises become so politically difficult.
Growth allows governments to avoid hard choices because several groups can gain simultaneously.
Collapse requires deciding who loses.
Lebanon’s political system appears extraordinarily poor at making that decision.
Everyone can agree abstractly that the economy needs reform.
The disagreement begins when reform reaches somebody’s bank, ministry, subsidy, political network or constituency.
Then the national interest suddenly becomes negotiable.
The port investigation has the same structure.
Almost everyone can agree that the explosion was a tragedy and somebody should be accountable.
The problem begins when the investigation identifies actual people.
Accountability sounds wonderful in the abstract.
It becomes much less popular when it arrives with a name.
This is why institutions matter more than intentions.
A political system cannot depend on every powerful person voluntarily agreeing to be investigated.
Of course they will resist.
That is rational behaviour.
Institutions exist precisely to make accountability possible even when the person being held accountable does not consent.
An independent judiciary therefore needs enough authority that a politician cannot simply remove a judge because the investigation becomes inconvenient.
But judicial independence creates another responsibility: judges need procedures credible enough that accusations of political bias do not become believable excuses for obstruction.
Institutional legitimacy runs in both directions.
Courts need independence from politicians.
Citizens also need confidence that courts are not themselves political actors.
Thursday’s violence shows what happens when that confidence disappears.
There is also a regional dimension that makes Lebanon’s political system harder to reform.
Lebanese factions do not exist only inside Lebanese politics.
Iran supports Hezbollah.
Saudi Arabia has historically exercised influence among parts of Lebanon’s Sunni political establishment.
Syria has played an enormous role in Lebanese politics and occupied much of the country for decades.
France retains historical and political influence.
The United States has its own interests.
Lebanon therefore becomes an arena in which domestic political divisions overlap with regional geopolitical competition.
That makes compromise harder because local actors can obtain support from outside.
Again, sovereignty is not binary.
Lebanon is formally sovereign.
But domestic political outcomes are influenced by governments and organisations beyond its borders.
This resembles several conflicts I have written about this year. Weak institutions create openings for external influence; external influence strengthens domestic actors; strengthened domestic actors make national institutions weaker.
The cycle reinforces itself.
There is a danger in analysing Lebanon this way, however. It can make the country sound doomed by sectarianism, as though Lebanese people are naturally divided into communities incapable of sharing a state.
That would be wrong.
The enormous protests beginning in 2019 demonstrated something very different. Lebanese citizens protested across sectarian lines against corruption, economic failure and the entire political establishment. The slogan “all of them means all of them” deliberately rejected the idea that only politicians from another sect were responsible.
That matters because political identities are not fixed.
Institutions encourage certain identities to become politically important.
If political representation, public employment and access to resources are organised through sectarian networks, citizens have incentives to operate through those networks even when they personally dislike sectarian politics.
Changing political behaviour therefore requires changing the incentives surrounding it.
Telling people simply to stop voting along sectarian lines misses why those networks remain powerful.
If your community’s political organisation helps you obtain a job, healthcare or protection because the state cannot reliably provide those things, abandoning that organisation may be individually irrational even if everyone would collectively benefit from a stronger non-sectarian state.
That is a collective-action problem.
Everyone may prefer functioning national institutions.
Each person may still depend on the sectarian network that helps them survive while those institutions remain weak.
The system reproduces itself.
This is perhaps the most difficult thing about institutional failure. Once weak institutions have existed for long enough, people adapt around them. Those adaptations then make reform harder.
Corruption creates private alternatives.
Political parties provide services.
Communities provide security.
Families rely on connections.
Businesses learn which officials need to be paid.
Eventually, informal systems become more reliable than the formal state.
At that point, reform is not simply writing better laws.
It means persuading people to abandon networks they currently depend on in exchange for institutions they do not yet trust.
That requires enormous political credibility.
Lebanon does not currently possess much of it.
This is why the Beirut port investigation matters far beyond the explosion.
If the state can investigate one of the greatest disasters in Lebanon’s history and hold responsible officials accountable regardless of political affiliation, it would demonstrate that institutions can operate above factional interests.
If the investigation collapses under political pressure, it communicates the opposite.
It tells Lebanese citizens that some people remain too powerful to investigate.
And if that becomes the accepted rule, why should anyone trust the state to conduct banking reform, fight corruption or distribute economic losses fairly?
Accountability is therefore not simply about justice for the past.
It changes expectations about the future.
The families of more than 200 people killed in the port explosion deserve to know why their relatives died.
But Lebanon also needs the answer for another reason.
A state is partly built from the expectation that when something catastrophic happens, institutions can establish what went wrong and impose consequences.
Without that expectation, negligence becomes rational.
Why fix a dangerous warehouse if nobody will be punished when it explodes?
Why resist corruption if everyone else benefits from it?
Why follow rules if powerful people do not?
This is how institutional failure becomes self-reinforcing.
Thursday’s gunfire is therefore not simply another tragic episode of Lebanese political violence.
It is a warning about what happens when accountability itself becomes threatening to the political order.
For years, Lebanon’s leaders have argued that the country’s delicate balance requires compromise.
Often, they are right. A deeply divided society cannot be governed by pretending its divisions do not exist.
But there is a difference between compromise and impunity.
Compromise means political actors accept less than everything they want so that the system can continue functioning.
Impunity means powerful actors are protected from consequences because imposing those consequences might destabilise the system.
A political order that repeatedly confuses the two eventually creates a terrible incentive:
become powerful enough, and accountability itself becomes too dangerous to attempt.
More than 200 people died when Beirut’s port exploded.
Fifteen months later, the investigation into why they died has contributed to armed men firing at one another in the streets.
Lebanon does not lack power.
That may actually be part of its problem.
It has politicians with power, parties with power, sectarian organisations with power, banks with power and armed movements with power.
What it lacks is enough power concentrated in legitimate institutions to make all of those actors obey the same rules.
And perhaps that is a better definition of a weak state than simply saying the government cannot do anything.
A weak state can contain extremely powerful people.
Sometimes it is weak precisely because they are more powerful than the institutions meant to govern them.
