| Summary/Abstract |
The growing literature on sports in Lebanon tends to portray football as often implicated in the production of sectarian belonging and national disintegration. This article lays out key features of the complex politicization of sports in Lebanon vis-à-vis the discourse of national unity. It shows how the ruling elite uses sports to reaffirm its position as custodian of the hegemonic discourse of national unity that revolves around religious communities living together. It further demonstrates how normal citizens through everyday practices, and when not under the dominion of the elites, tend to ‘imagine from below’ a country that is not only powerful and defiant but also able to compete with the very countries that reputedly interfere in its domestic politics.
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