8 - Hezbollah

Summary

This chapter demonstrates that jihadist rebels with more transformative goals imitate the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) governance using the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon. When Hezbollah first formed, it defined its goals as revolutionary and imitated the CCP’s governance, building many of the same institutions as the CCP, despite Hezbollah leaders’ familiarity with more ideologically proximate models for political organization. Hezbollah, however, changed the content of the CCP’s governance institutions to match its jihadist ideology. Even today, Hezbollah leaders and members compare the organization to the CCP or leftist rebel groups that imitated the CCP and note that governance is a strategy for revolutionary change with its origins in the Chinese Civil War. The chapter further underscores that it is more transformative goals, and not ideologies, that determine governance strategies.