The Elephant in the Room: Accumulation by Dispossession and Lebanon’s Neoliberal Crisis

Abstract

This article reinterprets Lebanon’s 2019 financial collapse through the lens of David Harvey’s theory of neoliberalism, with a particular focus on Accumulation by Dispossession (ABD). It argues that dominant paradigms—sectarianism, externalism, merchant republicanism, and anti-colonialism—fail to adequately explain the structural transformations underpinning Lebanon’s post-Taif political economy. By introducing ABD as a legalized, state-sanctioned mechanism of elite enrichment, this study makes a crucial distinction between systemic dispossession embedded in law and institutions and corruption as an illegal or unethical deviation from them. This distinction reframes Lebanon’s crisis not as a failure of governance alone but as the outcome of a deliberate neoliberal project that restructured the economy to facilitate upward wealth transfer. The article draws on Harvey’s framework to reinterpret Lebanon’s neoliberal trajectory and positions the 2019 uprising as a class-based revolt against decades of legalized dispossession. It concludes by calling for a research agenda that centers ABD in analyses of neoliberalism in the Global South.