Lebanon

Lebanon sits at the junction of three continents and has never enjoyed the luxury of irrelevance. France carved the modern state out of Ottoman Syria in 1920; independence followed in 1943; and the arrangement it produced — a confessional political system distributing power among Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Shia Muslims — has governed Lebanese public life ever since, generating both the country's cosmopolitan vitality and its recurring instability. Beirut built a regional identity as a center of Arab finance and culture precisely because its sectarian arithmetic forced a certain pluralism, however precarious.

That architecture broke in 1975. The civil war ran fifteen years, killed an estimated 120,000 people, and delivered Lebanon into successive foreign occupations — Israeli forces in the south until 2000, Syrian troops across much of the country from 1976 until the Cedar Revolution expelled them in 2005. Hezbollah, the Shia militia-party Iran cultivated during those years, emerged from that period as the single most capable armed force in the country, fighting Israel to a contested draw in 2006 and anchoring Lebanon's southern border politics ever since. The economic collapse that began in 2019 erased the savings of an entire middle class, shuttered the banking sector, and collapsed the Lebanese pound; the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel reopened the southern front and drew Hezbollah into sustained cross-border exchanges that the country's gutted institutions had no capacity to manage. Lebanon today is the clearest living demonstration that a state can survive its government's functional disappearance for decades before the bill comes due all at once.

Lebanon occupies 10,400 square kilometres at the eastern end of the Mediterranean — roughly one-third the size of Maryland — positioned at 33°50′N, 35°50′E between Israel to the south and Syria to the north and east. Its land boundary runs 484 kilometres in total: 81 kilometres with Israel and 403 kilometres with Syria. The coastline extends 225 kilometres along the Mediterranean, against which Lebanon asserts a 12-nautical-mile territorial sea.

The terrain dictates the country's internal logic. A narrow coastal plain rises abruptly into the Lebanon Mountains, which then drop into the Bekaa Valley before climbing again into the Anti-Lebanon range along the Syrian frontier. Qornet es Saouda, at 3,088 metres, marks the highest point; the Mediterranean shore marks zero. Mean elevation sits at 1,250 metres — an unusually high figure for a country of this scale, and one that shapes climate, hydrology, and settlement patterns in equal measure. The Lebanon Mountains accumulate heavy winter snows, feeding river systems that make Lebanon a water-surplus state within an otherwise water-deficit region; that hydrological position is itself counted among Lebanon's natural resources alongside limestone, iron ore, salt, and arable land.

Climate follows Mediterranean convention: mild to cool, wet winters and hot, dry summers at lower elevations, with the mountain zones subject to substantially more severe winter conditions. The country faces seismic hazard and periodic dust and sandstorm events originating in the broader regional desert systems.

Agricultural land accounts for 65.9 percent of total area as of the 2023 estimate. Within that figure, permanent pasture dominates at 39.1 percent, while permanent crops — olives, fruit, vines — cover 13.7 percent and arable land 13.1 percent. Forest cover stands at 13.8 percent. Irrigated land reached 1,040 square kilometres as of 2012. The combination of Mediterranean climate, mountain water surplus, and cultivable valley floor gives the Bekaa Valley in particular a productive agricultural character that no other sub-region of comparable size in the Levant fully replicates.

Lebanon is a parliamentary democratic republic whose constitutional architecture dates to 23 May 1926, when the current constitution was adopted under French mandatory authority — independence following on 22 November 1943, the date now marked as the national holiday. The capital is Beirut, its name derived from the Phoenician *be'erot*, meaning "the wells," situated at 33°52′N, 35°30′E and operating at UTC+2. The republic is divided into eight governorates (*mohafazat*): Aakkar, Baalbek-Hermel, Beqaa, Beirut, North Lebanon, South Lebanon, Mount Lebanon, and Nabatiye.

The legislature is the unicameral National Assembly (*Majlis Al-Nuwwab*), comprising 128 seats filled by proportional representation across four-year terms. Its most recent full election was held on 15 May 2022, with the next scheduled for May 2026. The 2022 result distributed seats among a fragmented field: Strong Republic won 19 seats; Strong Lebanon, 18; Development and Liberation and Loyalty to the Resistance, 15 each; with the remainder divided among the Democratic Gathering, Independent Deputies, unaffiliated independents, and a cluster of smaller formations. Women hold 6.3 percent of seats. The constitution bars the Assembly from conducting regular legislative business while the presidency is vacant — a provision with recurring practical consequence given Lebanon's history of prolonged presidential interregnums.

Sectarian arithmetic is structurally embedded in the chamber: seats are apportioned evenly between Christians and Muslims, a formula rooted in the National Pact of 1943 and reaffirmed in the 1989 Taif Agreement's constitutional amendments. Constitutional amendment itself is deliberately laborious — proposals require a two-thirds Cabinet majority, followed by a two-thirds vote of a two-thirds quorum of the Assembly, and promulgation by the president — a threshold that consolidates the weight of cross-confessional consensus.

The legal system is a composite: French civil code, Ottoman legal tradition, and community-specific religious law governing personal status, marriage, divorce, and family relations for the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian communities. Citizenship passes exclusively by paternal descent; citizenship by birth on Lebanese soil is not recognised. Suffrage is universal at age 21 for men and women of all recognized religious communities, with exclusions for convicted felons and all military and security personnel regardless of rank.

Lebanon has not submitted a declaration accepting ICJ compulsory jurisdiction and remains a non-party to the International Criminal Court. The political party landscape encompasses sixteen named formations spanning the principal sectarian communities — from Hizballah and the Amal Movement through the Lebanese Forces, the Free Patriotic Movement, and the Progressive Socialist Party — reflecting a party system organized as much around confession and patron networks as ideology.

Lebanon's economy registered a GDP of $20.1 billion at the official exchange rate in 2023, against a real GDP (PPP) of $65.4 billion — a gap that reflects the currency dislocations that have defined the post-2019 period. Real GDP contracted by 0.8 percent in 2023, the third consecutive year of negative or near-zero growth, following a 7 percent contraction in 2021. Real GDP per capita stood at $11,300 in 2023, down from $11,600 in 2021. The Lebanese pound, pegged at 1,507.5 per dollar from 2020 through 2022, traded at 13,875 per dollar in 2023 and reached 89,500 per dollar by 2024 — a depreciation that has no modern parallel in the country's monetary history.

Inflation measured 221.3 percent in 2023 by the consumer price index before falling to 45.2 percent in 2024, a deceleration that leaves prices structurally elevated. Households directed 37.1 percent of expenditures to food in 2023. Fixed capital investment contributed just 1.9 percent to GDP composition that year; household consumption accounted for 136 percent, a figure that can only be sustained through external transfers. Remittances supplied 33.3 percent of GDP in 2023, up from 27.5 percent in 2021, and constitute the principal stabilising income flow in the economy. The current account deficit narrowed from $7.3 billion in 2022 to $5.6 billion in 2023, as imports declined from $24.5 billion to $23.3 billion.

External debt stood at $41.9 billion (present value) in 2023. Public debt was recorded at 146.8 percent of GDP as of the 2017 estimate, the most recent figure available. Tax revenues reached only 5.7 percent of GDP in 2021, a ratio more typical of fragile states than of a country that once sustained a regional banking sector. The 2021 central government budget recorded revenues of $12.7 billion against expenditures of $11.9 billion, though the methodology converts figures at the official exchange rate and therefore overstates fiscal capacity in real terms. Reserves of foreign exchange and gold rose to $33.3 billion by end-2024, up from $27.5 billion in 2023.

The services sector accounted for 42.4 percent of GDP in 2023; industry, 2.1 percent; agriculture, 1 percent. Top export commodities were jewelry, cars, diamonds, scrap iron, and gold, with the UAE absorbing 26 percent of exports. Switzerland (12 percent), China (11 percent), Greece (9 percent), and Turkey (8 percent) supplied the largest import shares; refined petroleum, gold, cars, packaged medicine, and garments led import values. The industrial production growth rate was 0.1 percent in 2023.

The labour force numbered 1.94 million in 2023. The headline unemployment rate held at 11.6 percent — unchanged from 2022 — while youth unemployment reached 23.6 percent, with the male rate (24.4 percent) marginally exceeding the female rate (21.9 percent). Formal industry spans banking, tourism, real estate and construction, food processing, wine, jewelry, and cement, though the sectoral GDP shares confirm that productive activity remains heavily concentrated in services rather than manufacturing or primary production.

Lebanon's Armed Forces maintain an active strength of approximately 70,000 personnel, recruited entirely through voluntary enlistment. Men and women between 18 and 25 years of age are eligible to serve; the state operates no conscription mechanism. The absence of a draft places recruitment pressure squarely on the institution's appeal as an employer — a pressure that Lebanon's prolonged economic crisis has made structurally acute.

Military expenditure as a share of GDP has moved in a consistent direction since 2018. Spending stood at 5.1 percent of GDP in 2018 and 4.7 percent in 2019, then contracted to 3 percent in 2020, 3.2 percent in 2021, and 2.9 percent in 2022. The trajectory mirrors the collapse of Lebanon's formal economy rather than a deliberate drawdown in defense posture: when the denominator — national output — falls, even nominally stable or shrinking budgets can produce a higher percentage, and conversely a contracting nominal defense budget in a contracting economy will not necessarily register as a steep percentage decline. The 2022 figure of 2.9 percent nonetheless represents the lowest share recorded across the five years in the dataset. Lebanon's military spending pattern in this period resembles that of states navigating acute fiscal stress, where the armed forces absorb cuts alongside every other line of government expenditure.

Taken together, the three data points describe an institution of substantial nominal size — 70,000 active personnel places the Lebanese Armed Forces in the mid-tier of regional land forces — operating under a financing trajectory that has moved consistently downward from its 2018 peak. The Lebanese Armed Forces have historically functioned as one of the few cross-confessional state institutions retaining broad domestic legitimacy, a structural characteristic that distinguishes them from most other formal agencies of the Lebanese state.