The chapter explains how youths, families, and the educated middle class took over Tripoli’s al-Nour square during Lebanon’s revolutionary moment in October 2019. Al-Nour square had been the site of Sunni Islamist demonstrations of solidarity with the Syrian opposition, and against the Shiʿa Hizbullah movement from 2011-2013. The 2019 protests in al-Nour Square, against the sectarian political system, challenged the widespread idea that Tripoli was a conservative Sunni Islamist city, where non-Sunnis could not feel welcome.

Tripoli faced a number of interlinked challenges. Although security in Tripoli deteriorated in the shadow of the war in Syria, it was not the primary challenge for the city. A 2014 security plan helped Tripoli regain some stability. Lebanon’s and Tripoli’s primary struggle lay in the collapse of its public services and the decline in the rule of law. People felt that the country’s sectarian political leaders, including Saad Hariri, ultimately only served their own interests, yet no real alternative leaders emerged. Tripoli’s clientelist political system continued to show some degree of resilience even after the 2019 revolutionary moment.

The concluding chapter draws lessons from the analysis developed in the preceding chapters and offers a recap of the historical case study of the map of Kurdistan in line with the evolution of self-determination. It then looks at the situation of Kurdish politics in the context of the crisis in the Middle East today. Since the start of the war in Syria, Kurdish nationalist politics gained a new momentum in the Middle East. The war in Syria led to the emergence of a de facto Kurdish region in northern Syria under PYD control and changed Syrian Kurds’ relations with the international community. Kurds in Iraq held an independence referendum much to the annoyance of Iraq and other regional states. Kurdish political party in Turkey passed the ten percent electoral threshold and entered the parliament. Moreover, cross-border interactions between Kurds in Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran further increased during instability and conflict in Syria and Iraq and the fight against ISIS. The chapter assesses these developments and what they mean for the idea of Greater Kurdistan.