A few weeks after the closing of the overfilled Naameh landfill and the pilling up of garbage along the roads in Beirut and Mount Lebanon a wave of protests swept Lebanon in August 2015. A group of civil society activists launched the “You Stink” campaign in an attempt to politicize the garbage crisis and link it to the corruption of authorities. After August 19, the campaign gradually transformed into popular protests that went beyond demanding a solution for the garbage crisis and on to expressing broader grievances about unemployment, precarity of livelihoods, and the commodification of public services. This so called Harak transcended the prevalent traditional sectarian politics at that time and reached a scale of mass mobilization against cross-sectarian livelihood issues that Lebanon has not witnessed since the end of the civil war in 1990.

The analysis of the dynamics of contestation in relation to the various social groups involved focuses in particular on people who joined the protest squares for the first time during the Harak.

The study is available in English and Arabic.