Mimetic hedging: Hezbollah’s resistance against all odds

Abstract 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 and grown stronger as a result. The systematic scale of assault on Hezbollah makes its very existence, let alone growing strength, paradoxical. This article explains why. It locates Hezbollah’s strength in its prudent mobilization of religious ideology to counter the justifications that major powers use to ostracize and destroy it. Transcending explanations based on pragmatism and normalization, the article theorizes 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. Building on extensive fieldwork and media archives in Lebanon and interviews conducted with Lebanese and UN officials, this article contributes to theorizing the resilience of non-state armed organizations and their role in the security of postcolonial states.