Stretching the margins: identity, power and new ‘frontiers’ in Lebanon’s Maronite community

While assuming, as a starting point, that communities in Lebanon are ‘spaces’ where various techniques of domination and control are reproduced to prevent their members from questioning the religious, identitarian or political hegemony, in this paper we argue that the Maronite community’s resizing process has created in-between border spaces within this community, where new discourses aimed at questioning this system of control arise. To justify this in-between border spaces’ relevance to understanding discourses of dissent, the analytical category of liminality will be explored. This will help answer the questions of why counter-hegemonic discourses arise in marginal spaces and how these spaces become liminal. We contend that the manifest incapacity of the Maronite elites with regard to bordering and ordering the ‘margins’ of their own community is weakening the elites’ (political and religious) control over these new spaces: they became ‘arenas’ where dissent potentially coagulates and new social realities free from the community control system can emerge.