Middle East Studies Lecture
Prudent Resistance: Hezbollah's Endurance in a Hostile World
- Date
- Tuesday 27 May 2025
- Time
- Series
- Middle East Studies Lectures
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 1.128 (Verbarium)
Hezbollah has withstood intensifying attacks since its emergence in the 1980s. Major powers – especially the United States and Israel – have led the assault through political, legal and military means to ostracize and eradicate it. Without success. Hezbollah has repelled these attacks, reorganized its force and capabilities after each of them, and grown stronger as a result. The systematic scale of assault on Hezbollah makes its very existence paradoxical. This talk explains why. It locates Hezbollah’s strength in its prudent mobilization of ideology to counter the justifications that major powers use to ostracize and destroy it. Transcending explanations based on pragmatism and normalization, it offers a theorization of Hezbollah’s struggle for survival as a form of ‘mimetic hedging’, leveraging its extra-institutional and institutional roles to absorb internal and external assaults. Hezbollah prudently applies simulation and dissimulation to avert present, and potentially mortal, threats to buy time for pursuing an Islamic liberationist order in the future. The talk finally reflects on the significance of Hezbollah’s resistance and its limits at a time of global reordering and breakdown of core international norms.
