Writing in Foreign Policy on May 11, Nils Mallock, a research fellow at King's College London's Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy, and Trends (XCEPT) program, and Nafees Hamid, the program's research and policy director, argue that conventional Western strategies for dismantling Hezbollah's arsenal are fundamentally misreading Lebanese public opinion.
The findings come at a precarious moment. Lebanon launched its most ambitious Hezbollah disarmament plan last September, deploying Lebanese Armed Forces south of the Litani River and seizing weapons. But following U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, Hezbollah's retaliatory rocket barrages into northern Israel, and Israel's subsequent air and ground campaign — which has killed more than 2,500 people and displaced over one million since March — the disarmament effort has ground to a halt.
Mallock and Hamid's research, based on a nationally representative survey of more than 2,000 Lebanese citizens and in-depth interviews with 300 participants conducted in December 2025, reveals a striking paradox: while only 18 percent of Lebanese express political support for Hezbollah, 45 percent oppose disarming it.
The authors tested three widely cited explanations for Hezbollah's resilience — sectarian loyalty, dependence on the group's social services, and the security threat posed by Israel — and found all three insufficient on their own. Sectarianism, for instance, explains political loyalty but is "essentially irrelevant" for explaining opposition to disarmament, with Shiite identity raising that opposition by only three percentage points.
The most powerful driver, the researchers found, was moral grievances against the Lebanese state itself. Citizens who expressed deep distrust of the government and felt a sense of injustice were 29 percentage points more likely to oppose disarmament — regardless of sect, economic status, or war exposure.
Those grievances are concrete and well-documented: the systematic obstruction of the investigation into the 2020 Beirut Port explosion, pervasive political favoritism in resource allocation, and a banking collapse that wiped out ordinary savings while elites shielded their assets. Fewer than one in four respondents said they felt any trust in the government, the survey found.
The pattern holds even in unlikely corners of Lebanon. In Akkar, in the predominantly Sunni and Maronite north, where political loyalty to Hezbollah stands at just 5 percent, 41 percent still oppose disarmament — a figure the authors attribute to chronic state neglect, not sectarian affiliation.
The implications for U.S. and Israeli policy are stark. Mallock and Hamid warn that pressure campaigns — sanctions, conditional aid, and military escalation — are targeting the wrong motive entirely. "No military operation or sanctions package will substitute for the one thing that might actually work," they write: "a unified vision of a Lebanese state worth disarming for".
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