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Paper short abstract:

Taking Lebanon as a case study, this paper analyses the effects of community policing' transfer on both the police institution and the agents at the local level. Highlighting the dynamics of appropriation, it sheds light on the authoritarian features of a consensual democracy.

Paper long abstract:

Since the withdrawal of Syrian troops in 2005, the Lebanese security field has been invested by international donors. In order to favour the creation of a democratic police, Lebanese officers were asked to readapt their practices to the standards of “good governance” and among them community policing.

This presentation questions the effects of community policing’ transfer on a fragmented state like Lebanon. Going beyond the neo-institutionalist paradigm, which stresses on the role of institutional blockades to explain the opposition to change, it focuses on the rationales of appropriation of local actors. It combines two levels of analysis: on the one hand, the effects of transfer on the political-administrative apparatuses, on the other, the re-interpretation of these norms by agents in uniform at the local level of Ras Beirut police station.

Various works have shown how the implementation of this exogenous police model reinforces non-democratic structures, while other studies have demonstrated how the growth of neighborhood police has comforted the use of force. This paper aims at highlighting the way in which community policing has become involved in power stakes between various types of actors, thus exacerbating the Lebanese state’s structural divisions. It also sheds light on the authoritarian features of Lebanon: clientelism, abuse of power and participation in crowd policing.

Based on a fieldwork carried out in Beirut between 2015 and 2017, this paper combines an ethnographic inquiry at the Ras Beirut police station and a series of interviews of different actors participating in the transfer of this model. ,