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Lebanon: State Failure in Slow Motion?

Entire neighbourhoods levelled, over 200 people killed, thousands injured, and hundreds of thousands more homeless. The gigantic chemical explosion that devastated the Lebanese capital of Beirut on 4. August 2020 would have been an unmitigated disaster for any state, but for Lebanon, it just marked the high point of a year of calamity. The current situation in the country can only be described as bleak and deteriorating: A currency in free-fall, more than half the population below the poverty line, daily nationwide power outages, people fighting each other for daily necessities all amount to one of the worst economic crises ever recorded. Bleak may have been too optimistic a term, at this point describing Lebanon as a nation in the process of state failure, seems arguably more fitting.