Introduction

The preceding two chapters have sought primarily to build an evaluative profile of who does welfare in Lebanon (and to a certain degree the three other Middle Eastern countries that are of interest in this book), how and why they do it and what they actually achieve. This chapter continues to build on this profile by engaging with the fifth of the main questions outlined in Chapter One:

• • How does religious affiliation shape the conceptualisation of social cohesion and solidarity in the region?

This will add analytical insights to the overall configuration of social policy in the Middle East. Indeed, the analytical purpose of this chapter is to lay the more conceptual groundwork for the model of welfare that will be discussed in the next chapter. In this sense, the tone of the book changes in this chapter as it engages more directly in an analytical synthesis of the descriptions offered so far.

The primacy of social cohesion as a conceptual tool for the analysis of welfare in Western social policy is well established but its role in modern forms of social welfare in the Arab world remains poorly researched. Previous research I conducted in Lebanon (Jawad, 2002) considered the relevance of social exclusion and suggested that this particular concept was neither a reality nor of primary concern there. This led me to question, for the purposes of the present book, of what role social cohesion and solidarity played in social welfare in Lebanon and the extent to which social exclusion was indeed absent from the conceptual landscape of local welfare actors.

So far, I have argued that social solidarity in the Lebanese context appears to be a key motivator of social action although it is coloured by non-civic forms of association, namely family, clientelism, regional or religious. Likewise, concern with social cohesion as a moral bond in the Lebanese welfare context is epitomised by efforts to promote family unity in social care programmes, the concept of takaaful (financial sponsorship, social solidarity) in micro-credit programmes as well as the sustainability of the sects.

The title given to this chapter hints at how the above ideas are incorporated into an overall argument about the nature and role of social cohesion in Lebanon. I shall present below four arguments that form the basis of the main conclusions made in this chapter.