Student activism in Lebanon reaches its climax every year, at the time of university elections. Dominated by parties strongly implanted in theuniversities, these ballots continue to echo the fragmentations of a divided society in which political groups articulate social cleavages. Incorporating sectarian affiliations as well as rivalries inherited from the civil war (1975-1990), these distinctions strongly frame the collective actions organized yearly.
Starting from the close observation over several years (from 2003 to 2011) of these mobilizations in two of Beirut’s main universities (the American University of Beirut and the Saint-Joseph University), this paper proposes to explore how such collective actions provide a concrete scene for constructing and expressing social identifications and boundaries.
Interactional rituals as they involve the joint participation of multiple actors and precisely exist because of this conjunct contribution, these mobilizations can be analyzed in the perspective of the “sociology of the circumstances”, which focuses on the emergence and the diffusion of meaning built by the interplay between actors. During the electoral campaign, partisan labels override all other identifications in the interactions between students as each party rallies networks of activists whose repertoires of action are invariably supported by interrelated but distinctive storylines aiming at distributing the participants in a social map organized along exclusive partisan boundaries. At the end of the process, the pinnacle of the mobilization is reached during the announcement of the results when rival groups confront each other identity narratives, symbolically affirming the cleavage of the Lebanese society between irreconcilable segments.
Consequently, these collective mobilizations seem to constitute a “key institution” as defined by Geertz, a space of construction and affirmation of a grammar of the social that emphasize intergroup fragmentation. Thus they offer a paradigmatic example of the on-going construction of bonds and boundaries in a divided society.
