“No one is prophet in his own land”? Hezbollah and the transnational constitution of non-state armed organizations in ‘fragmented societies’

This paper deals with ‘rebel diplomacy’. I am here primarily interested in armed organizations that, rather than breaking out of state-bureaucracies, have at least in part emerged in a bottom-up way. The focus is on the Middle East and Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas will serve as study cases. With regards to their international relations, armed groups are often analysed in two distinct ways: 1/ as the proxies of foreign states; 2/ as states-in-the-making conducting their own foreign policy. In this paper I try to show that both interpretations are simplistic. They both suppose that these organizations develop in a context of national isolation, before engaging in international relations. They thus miss that armed groups often emerge at the interface of national struggles and locally embedded transnational (i.e.‘trans-local’) networks. The latter might spring from diasporas, the training in camps or madrassas abroad, through religious or ideological long-distance networks etc. This centrality of long-distance networks can be sociologically explained. The initial problem many would-be rebels face is how to build a national organization out of local networks of micro-solidarity (Malesevic & O Dochartaigh 2018), given that the ‘national arena’ is already controlled by the incumbents. Even when the state does not fully penetrate society, local mobilization does not necessarily allow creating nationally cohesive organizations. Indeed, the fragmentation of ‘society’ in infrastructurally weak states implies that parochial networks have opposed interests. The resulting micro-cleavages are easily manipulated by counterinsurgents. In this context, pre-existing trans-local networks, networks of long-distance solidarity, allow for rebel leaders to transcend micro-cleavages. They allow building coherent governance structures immune from the incumbents' divide and rule strategies. These transnational connections are often recognized by analysts to play a significant role. They are however often framed in ideational terms, as generating combat motivation, or in purely logistic terms as giving access to money and weapons. My argument is that through these networks, ideological power in fact plays an organizational function. While transnational movements (especially in explanations of the ‘Arab spring’) are often seen as ‘freely floating’ in an institutionally empty space, I argue that in the more successful cases we are rather dealing with locally embedded long-distance networks. The latter penetrate deeply into local societies and have frequently developed over the long term. Highlighting the role of long-distance networks has obvious implications for rebel diplomacy. Rather than marking a successful opening of rebel structures to international relations, rebel diplomacy requires the successful ‘nationalization’ of trans-local structures. While drawing on their transnational resources, rebel diplomacy requires rebels to draw a border between their national organization and the wider networks of which they are part. Organizations that manage to develop a full-fledged ‘diplomacy’, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, have in this sense successfully ‘nationalized’ their trans-local structures, addressing the regional and global order from a nationally principled position. Many groups have failed in this endeavour, either losing touch with their local base, with their transnational elites or being split between them as highlighted by many armed opposition groups in Syria.