49 Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice Volume 6(1), 2014, pp. 49–69, ISSN 1948-9137 GOVERNANCEAND GOVERNMENT IN THE ARAB SPRING HYBRIDITY: REFLECTIONSFROM LEBANON NORA STEL stel@msm.nl Maastricht School of Management ABSTRACT. Unrepresentative and ineffective governance has been a key instigator of the ‘Arab Spring.’ However, analyses of the Arab Spring tend to limit ‘gover- nance’ to ‘government.’ The Spring is exclusively framed as the bankruptcy of authoritarian government and the significance of the revolutions as an indication of resilient (non-state) governance is overlooked. This discards opportunities to build on existing and emerging non-state governance arrangements. Based on a critical review of the emerging literature dealing with the Arab Spring, this article argues that the state centrism underpinning the majority of analyses of the Arab Spring reflects an (implicit) adherence to the fragile state paradigm. With reference to Lebanon, a country on the brink of being sucked into the upheavals, the article offers a complementary conceptual frame for engaging with the Arab Spring. It proposes that studies of the Spring would benefit from focusing on ‘pragmatic governance’ in ‘hybrid political orders’ rather than on ‘fragile governments’ in ‘failing states.’ Keywords: Arab Spring; governance; hybrid political order; Lebanon 1. Introduction The international community increasingly accepts that peace, security and development are decisively shaped by ‘good’ governance and institutions (Grindle 2007; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2008; United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) 2011; World Bank (WB) 2011). This observation is only reinforced by current developments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) presented as the ‘Arab Spring.’ 1 Dynamics in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria have nothing so much in common as their mix of socio-economic dilapidation and political-institutional despondency. Corrupt, unrepresen-