More plausibly, Lebanon's miserable record regarding the human rights of Palestinian refugees (and others) is a result of the country's sectarian structure.
Lebanon's sectarian political structure virtually guarantees a continuation of the current "national unity" government, in which the winning coalition in the 128-seat Parliamentherants the loser veto powers to preserve civil peace.
The civil war has heightened tension in Lebanon and shaken the nation's fragile, multi-sectarian governing structure.
The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, endorsed by the Iraqi parliament yesterday, is firmly structured along sectarian lines, a feature Iraqis were hoping was a mere temporary measure in the aftermath of the chaotic fall of the Ba'athist regime and the even more chaotic occupation that followed.
Her research is grounded in extensive qualitative fieldwork paired with original spatial and survey experimental data; her work highlights the very personal and local nature of insurgency and sectarian division, revealing the structure and character of groups that we know relatively little about because of their clandestine nature.
For months, the solution posed by the Americans, at least publicly, has been to break up the command structure of the sectarian militias and disperse their fighters into ethnically mixed government-run security forces.
It also reformed the political system root and branch, creating a government structure based on sectarian identity, which arguably played a key role in stimulating the violence that continues to this day.
The first was the sectarian college, which was small, structured like a boarding school (with one or two instructors and 20 or 30 students), ill-funded, and [End Page 190] rarefied, educating less than 1% of the general population.
Decades of sectarian violence have left a warped political structure.
It failed and the political structures it created allowed ethnicity and sectarian affiliation to become the de facto political alliances.
