Lebanese Civil War Research Articles

Willingness to forgive: A study of Muslim and Christian Lebanese.

The study was aimed at (a) examining the overall level of willingness to forgive expressed by Moslem and Christian Lebanese adults who lived through the Lebanese civil war, (b) examining the factorial structure of the responses given, (c) studying the way education, community, and other characteristics were related to the factorial structure, and (d) comparing Lebanese data with data previously gathered by Mullet et al. (1998) in France. A sample of 240 participants from six different communities, Shiite, Sunni, Druze, Catholic, Orthodox, and Maronite, was asked to express their degree of agreement with 38 statements related to forgiveness in general or in specific circumstances. A three-factor solution was found. Overall, participants expressed significant disagreement with statements expressing the desire to seek revenge (the Forgiveness versus Revenge factor), and disagreement with statements indicating that the attitude of close others was important (the Social and Personal Circumstances factor). Th...

Psychological Boundaries and Ethnic Conflict: How Identity Constrained Choice and Worked to Turn Ordinary People into Perpetrators of Ethnic Violence During the Lebanese Civil War

Why do ordinary people commit ethnic atrocities? To understand the psychology of ethnic violence we constructed a pilot project based on narrative interviews with five ordinary people who participated in acts of ethnic violence during the Lebanese Civil War. The interviews present striking evidence that identity constrains choice for all individuals, regardless of their particular ideological or socioeconomic demographic background. Our findings challenge both the rationalist approaches of realistic conflict theory and rational choice and the institutional claims of consociational democracy and suggest the tremendous power of identity and perceptions of self in relation to others to constrain political actions.

Makdisi's War Memoir: Fragments of Self and Place

This article aims at analyzing the fissures of female discontinuity in Beirut Fragments (1990) through examining three aspects: the position of the female 'I' in relation to the narrative, which includes the form of the narrative, and thus, the author calls it 'narrative and its discontents'; the centrality of the place (Beirut in this case) that works as a substitute for the fragmented 'I' and turns the book into a topography rather than autobiography; then the language as a vehicle of conveying the gaps and seals of the self. ********** Wars have often paradoxical results: they both destroy and allow for the appearance of new modes of relations. As the social fabric in Lebanon was getting ripped by the horrors of the civil war (1975-1990), gender responsibilities were changing. In volume II of Bahithat, issued by the Lebanese Association of Women Researchers, Mona Takieddine Amyuni states in the 'Preface' that it is significant that al-Bahithat was born in 1986 during the Lebanese war. The war was a cruel mother for all the Lebanese. But it was particularly a turning point for the Lebanese woman. The Lebanese woman safeguarded her nation's humanity in the midst of savagery. She was propelled to the foreground at home and outside. She took upon herself domestic, economic and social responsibilities when men fought, went away, or simply died. So many testimonies of displaced families speak of the stamina of women, in a country where one-sixth of the population was displaced. (19) To hear that women are most affected by the Lebanese war, by any war, is not new information. Wars usually throw women into the trauma of trying to find the 'human' in the utterly 'inhuman'. It is a trauma that fuels different forms of resistance ranging from what Suha Bishara, the Lebanese militant, actually presented as an expression of her position in a recent book, Resistante. (1) Youmna el-Id argues it was resistance when the Lebanese woman carried on with her work ... It was resistance when she wrote secretively the mottoes of perseverance on the walls of the city. And when she wrote the stories of men and women who joined the movement of resistance. (6 My translation) The notion of writing as a form of resistance sounds like an abstract piece of privileged philosophy, yet it was a lived experience. The fiction written by women during, and in the aftermath of, the Lebanese war is broadly considered a form of resistance, a means of survival, and a consolidation of the memory. Hanan al-Shaykh's The Story of Zahra is a narrative example of what war can do to women, and Hoda Barakat's The Tiller of Waters is another example of war's devastation rendered fictionally. Still, in fiction there is a protagonist who does this and then that, that is to say, the power of imagination lavishes some order on the lives of the characters even when these lives are already dismembered by the war. The difficulty arises when the writer decides to record the events of the war in a linear, chronological sequence with the knowing 'I' in the center. In her book Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir, Jean Said Makdisi makes one of these attempts. To write a memoir of the civil war in Lebanon is not an easy task since it lasted almost fifteen years. Reality became more harsh and cruel with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The civil strife started with a battle between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Kata'ib party (Phalangists). Battles spread to the different parts of Beirut, and eventually the city center was destroyed. The extreme sign of deterioration was the division of Beirut into two warring parts. It is perhaps the complexity of the situation which inspired Makdisi to add a historical chronology at the beginning of her war memoir. The chronology also serves another purpose. …

Unipolarity and the Middle East

Bipolarity and Middle Eastern politics the model for unipolarity the unipolar world order the unification of the Yemens Iraq's invasion of Kuwait the formation of the Multilateral Force the end of the Lebanese civil war operation Desert Storm operation Provide Comfort Madrid and the Palestinian autonomy Israel and the Arabs survey of Middle Eastern politics 1989-1996 the unipolar Middle East.

The Drama of Survival: Staging Post-traumatic Memory in Plays by Lebanese-Québécois Dramatists

Quebec theatre has frequently been a site for dramatizing trauma–whether we mean the collective historical trauma of the Conquest or the more personal traumas related to dysfunctional families or violent acts. In a group of recent plays by Lebanese immigrant playwrights we see a different kind of trauma being staged–the overwhelming historical trauma of the Lebanese civil war as performed in plays by Abla Farhoud, Bernard Antoun, and Wajdi Mouawad. This different kind of "théâtre engagé" bears witness to the national tragedy of Lebanon, works through the trauma it caused, and offers hope to the survivors. Instead of inspiring dread, fear, horror, and pity leading to catharsis, these plays re-enact violence, memorialize the victims, and perform mourning work in order to renew our shattered faith in humanity.

Is all the News Bad News for Peace?

ACADEMIC AND POLICY CIRCLES have recently devoted much attention to agendas in civil wars. Their findings: the economic functions of violence contribute significantly to the duration of civil wars; they also pose serious obstacles to conflict resolution. This article takes another look at the impact of economic agendas on the attitudes of belligerents to conflict resolution. I argue that the economic activities of insurgents can become a source of political and military vulnerability and thus contribute to decisions to negotiate a peace settlement.After a brief methodological note on research into economic agendas in civil wars and a review of the main findings of the literature on the subject, I challenge the prevailing understanding of the impact of economic agendas on the course of civil wars and use the example of the Lebanese Forces, the main Christian militia in the Lebanese civil war (1975-90), to illustrate the connection between economic agendas, strength, and vulnerability.(f.1)DEFINITIONS AND METHODOLOGICAL ISSUESThe term 'economic agendas' refers to the belligerents' involvement in black-market activities, ranging from transactions carried out 'off the books,' which are not different in substance from regular economic transactions, to criminal endeavours, which, by their very nature, contravene the law. Underground economic activities differ from conventional economic transactions in three respects:(f.2) - Unregulated: Since they are kept secret from governments, they fall outside the purview of a multitude of laws regulating exchanges of commodities and labour. - Untaxed: They do not generate tax revenues for the state or contribute to social security programmes. - Unmeasured: They are reflected in no official statistics on the economy.The nature of the activities raises special methodological problems that account, in part, for the relative dearth of empirical studies. Connections to the criminal 'underworld' shroud war economies in a secrecy that hinders efforts to obtain tangible evidence of theoretical claims. The context of civil wars, with the attending disruption of normal life, makes data collection arduous and research in the field hazardous.Within these limitations, it is, nonetheless, possible to sketch the role of the black market in the decision-making of the Lebanese Forces.(f.3) Indeed, this is a particularly instructive case. When the structures of the state collapse, as they did in Lebanon during the civil war, belligerents are often able to secure control over territorial enclaves wrested away from the state. The underground economy becomes the main economic activity within these enclaves. This may not necessarily increase the transparency of specific transactions; it does, however, provide a better sense of the scope and nature of the belligerents' economic undertakings.ECONOMIC AGENDAS IN CIVIL WARSAlthough relatively new to academic analysis, the study of economic agendas in civil wars has already generated a significant body of literature, which can usefully be divided into two main streams. One emphasizes greed as a primary motivation of violence; the other situates the economic agendas of combatants within the framework of efforts to address grievances.(f.4)When the motive is greed, violence is aimed at circumventing the law. Its immediate functions are local rather than national in scope. When a state collapses, military capabilities give warlords the means to extract economic resources for private profit.(f.5) Violence becomes a continuation of economics by other means.(f.6) Therefore, there is more to war than winning; for bandits or warlords it is logical to perpetuate conflict as a means of pursing economic interests. The policy implications are stark. There can be little prospect for conflict resolution as long as economic benefits flow to combatants. Sanctions, such as economic embargoes, may be the only available means to force combatants to the negotiating table. …

HASSAN N. DIAB, Beirut: Reviving Lebanon's Past (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1999). Pp. 144. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The fifteen-year civil war in Lebanon and its destructive social effects have called for soul-searching by many Lebanese. Hassan Diab explores the regional and international economic developments that caused political instability and led to episodes of civil strife and social upheaval in Lebanon from the late Ottoman period until recent times. Further, Diab promises to assess the revival of Beirut's past through the governmental project of Rafiq Hariri known as Horizon 2000, and the ramifications of reconstructing downtown Beirut in the aftermath of the civil war. Diab raises a number of legitimate concerns about the validity and necessity of these projects and the extent to which they can prevent the eruption of a civil war in the future.

Exile, Existentialism, and Identity in Emily Nasrallah's Flight Against Time

In 1995 Roger Allen stated that the focus of most Arabic language critical studies of the Arabic novel has been largely historical, national, or thematic. He points out, however, that to Western feminist critics, gender has been a central topic of interest for some time and is likely to continue to be (132). Indeed, writings by Middle Eastern and North African women have been the subject of numerous works by both Western and Eastern critics, most notably Miriam Cooke's War's Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (1988) and Evelyne Accad's Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Contemporary Fiction of North Africa and the Arab World (1978) and Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (1990).

ITAMAR RABINOVICH, The Brink of Peace: The Israeli–Syrian Negotiations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). Pp. 298. $35 cloth, $15.95 paper.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin made an astute decision in the summer of 1992 when he entrusted the highly respected rector of Tel Aviv University, Itamar Rabinovich, with the task of reinvigorating the moribund Israeli–Syrian negotiations that had grown out of the Madrid Conference the previous October. Rabinovich had launched a stellar academic career by writing what remains arguably the best study of Syrian domestic politics during the Ba⊂thist era; his subsequent work explores the dynamics of the civil war in Lebanon, the intricacies of Egypt's relations with Palestine during the 1940s and 1950s, and the origins of inter-Arab diplomacy, among many other topics. More important, in 1991 Rabinovich published an authoritative yet accessible overview of the tangled history of direct talks among the governments of Israel and its Arab neighbors in the years immediately after the 1948 war. The book not only undermines the general presumption that the Arab–Israeli dilemma is inherently insoluble, but also elucidates the miscalculations and tactical errors that derailed early attempts to resolve the conflict. Rabinovich was clearly the right person to supervise delicate bargaining with the Syrians, and might have been expected to compose a notable account of his experiences once his term as Israel's chief negotiator came to an end.

Is All the News Bad News for Peace? Economic Agendas in the Lebanese Civil War

Is All the News Bad News for Peace? Economic Agendas in the Lebanese Civil War

Seigniorage, Dollarization and Public Debt: The Lebanese Civil War and Recovery Experience, 1982–97

The paper develops theoretical frameworks to explain the phenomena of seigniorage, dollarization, and public debt; and then applies them to the Lebanese macroeconomic situation over 1982–97. More specifically, it analyzes the implications of seigniorage and dollarization to see what extent they were responsible for the inflation and exchange rate depreciations during the civil war period. It also studies the sustainability of postwar debt. The conclusions that emerge from the analysis are that budget deficits were only one of the reasons behind the war inflation and depreciations, dollarization could still impose some problems for macroeconomic stability, and tax reforms are essential for fiscal balance.

Historical dictionary of Lebanon

The Lebanese civil war has made the study of Lebanon a difficult endeavor. The complexity of Lebanese society is the result of a unique political system and a richly diverse populace. This volume will help those who wish to delve beyond the superficial journalistic accounts of Lebanese society and culture. Entries encompass information about various subject areas, including political leaders, poets, artists, actors, writers, musicians, singers, important events and places, political parties, militia groups, foreign interests, and military elements. It is important to note that this dictionary does not exclude women, as is often the case with historical works on Lebanon. It escapes the narrow confines of a male-gendered history of Lebanon. Many of the personalities presented in this text are not presently known to English readers, and the volume easily bridges the widening gap between Arabic and English approaches to the study of Lebanese history. It also offers crucial information about rarely discussed issues such as AIDS, homosexuality, and prostitution, and delineates the ethnicities that exist in the country, making clear the balances of power that propelled Lebanon into civil war and dragged it back toward peace again. The volume includes an extensive bibliographic section with sources in Arabic, English, French, and German. An essential volume on a country that has occupied center-stage in the last decade of Middle Eastern politics.

Death, Anxiety, and Depression in Lebanese Undergraduates

A Lebanese sample of undergraduates ( n = 228) responded to the Death Anxiety Scale (DAS), Death Depression Scale (DDS), general anxiety (Trait Anxiety; STAI-T), and general depression (Beck Depression Inventory; BDI). Administration of the psychometric instruments was carried out in March 1991, after the cessation of the civil war in Lebanon, which had lasted for sixteen years. Alpha reliabilities were either acceptable or high. The DDS has a meaningful factorial structure. All of the intercorrelations ( r) between the four scales were statistically significant Foremost among them are the following: DAS and DDS r = .709, STAI-T and BDI r = .486, DAS and STAI-T r = .198, DDS and BDI r = .215. Two orthogonal factors were extracted: death distress and general neurotic disorder. The main results are in keeping with previous results on Egyptian and U.S. participants. There is a need to test the differences of the total scores of the aforementioned four scales between the Egyptian and Lebanese samples.

The strategy and tactics of Hizballah's current ‘Lebanonization process’

This article contains a careful description and analysis of the transformation of Hizballah from a small rag‐tag militia, skillfully combining terrorist and guerrilla warfare techniques with effective social action on the local level during the chaos of Lebanon's civil war, to a formidable, legitimate political, military and social force on the Lebanese scene in the 1990's, in what has been described as its ‘Lebanonization’ process. This so‐called ‘Lebanonization’ process of Hizballah has become a trademark of the movement. It is visible in the close interrelationship between its political, social, and military activity which has extended its opportunities. It shows an ability to exercise pragmatic judgement within the conditions and limitations imposed on it by Syria's agenda and within the confessional nature of Lebanon's political make‐up. It also demonstrates the limits of Hizballah's manoeuvring within the framework of the wider Iranian‐Syrian relationship and the limits to its ability in presenting itself as an alternative oppositional force amidst sectarian politics and Syrian hegemony. Hizballah strongly emphasizes that it is entirely Lebanese in character rather than a foreign entity directed by Iran in order to reinforce its internal legitimacy within Lebanon.

EN MINORITET SØGER IDENTITET: Drusisk religiøs identitet i den libanesiske offentlighed

Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen: A Minority in
 Search of Identity. Druze Religions
 Identity in the context of the Lebanese
 Public
 In recent years a number of Middle Eastem
 religious minorities have been engaged in
 redefinitions of their religious identities.
 One of the impulses for this activity has been
 the growth of Islamic movements that give
 strict and narrow definitions of what
 constitutes proper Islam. Another impulse
 has been the growing awareness of civil and
 religious rights of minorities. The Druze in
 Lebanon constitute such a minority that
 seeks to establish its proper identity in the
 aftermath of the Lebanese civil war 1975-90
 and the general upheavals in the Lebanese
 national consciousness. Tracing the history
 of publications about the once-so-secretive
 Druze religion, the article explores the
 tendency to stress an Islamic identity for the
 Druze religion. This Islamization of Druze
 religion became apparent in a number of
 publications in the 1960s but has received a
 new impetus after the end of the civil war.
 Since this period more sophisticated
 arguments have centered on the Sufi
 character of the Druze holy writings and
 defended their Islamic character along the
 lines of Sufi apologetics. The article argues
 that this increased sophistication and
 professionalization of the agrument is partly
 due to the polemics against an Islamic
 identity of the Druze coming from Sunni and
 Maronite thinkers, some of whom were
 writing under Druze pseudonyms during the
 war. It is also due to a novel understanding of
 the Druze as a religious public which must
 be leamt about and adapt its Islamic identity
 through a public debate.

Palestinians in Lebanon ad the PLO

This article highlights the two sometimes incompatible imperatives facing the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon. The first aim of the organization has been to protect its role as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians throughout their diaspora. This has sometimes required them to undertake actions detrimental to their second aim, which has been the protection of the Palestinian community in Lebanon. Tracing the development of Palestinian political organization in Lebanon from the rise of the Palestinian Revolutionary Movement in the 1960s to the triumph of Arafat's Fatah organization in 1971, the article goes on to critique the role played by the PLO in the Lebanese civil war and discusses how the Oslo peace process has affected the PLO's standing in Lebanon. The article ends with the key issues that must be addressed by any just and lasting settlement.

Lebanon's Civil War: Faces of Lebanon: Sects, Wars, and Global Extensions. . William Harris.

Lebanon's Civil War: Faces of Lebanon: Sects, Wars, and Global Extensions. . William Harris.

War's other voices: women writers on the Lebanese civil war

This is a study of Arab writers such as Ghada al-Samman, Hanan al-Shaikh, Emily Nasrallah and Etel Adnan. It presents a constructive literary approach to the ravages of the civil war in the Lebanon. The ways in which women's consciousness is awakened in terms of female liberation is a theme.

Religious heads or civil servants? Druze and Sunni religious leadership in post‐war Lebanon

The end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 coincided with the death of two major figures on the Lebanese Muslim religious scene. Hasan Khalid, Mufti of the Lebanese Sunni community since 1966, was killed in 1989; Muhammad Abu Shaqra, who since 1949 had held the position of the Druze Shaykh al‐'Aql, died in 1991. These two religious heads had many things in common, not least a strong personality and a talent for carving out a political platform for themselves in spite of unremitting meddling from the political and religious leadership of their respective confessional communities. Throughout the war, these two men had held regular meetings ‐ together with the Shia leader Musa Sadr and later Muhammad Shams ad‐Din ‐ and had issued joint statements pertaining to the life of the Muslim half of the Lebanese population. Even after their deaths, the fates of Shaykhs Khalid and Abu Shaqra seemed to continue to follow the same path. In neither case has a successor been appointed. Both have been followed by a deputy (...

Nationalist Anxiety or the Fear of Losing Your Other

The nation of the nationalists is always conceived to be in crisis. There is always an other standing between them and ‘it’. ‘It’ is often the impossible goal of a ‘totally gratifying nation’. Within a psychoanalytic framework, gratifying this nation is perceived as a fantasy, an object‐cause of desire (Lacan), that is, a practical impossibility that neverthless keeps the practitioner trying to reach it. Within such a framework the other standing between the nationalists and their goal becomes a necessary subjective construction which allows the conversion of the impossibility of the nationalist fantasy into deferred possibility. The crisis presented by nationalist thought as triggered by the presence of the other is in fact a mode of reproducing the nationalists' belief in themselves and their nation. The ‘real’ crisis is when nationalists ‘lose’ their other and are forced to face the impossibility of the desired nation. Such situations can be described as states of nationalist anxiety. This paper, based on research during the civil war in Lebanon, examines certain events where the Lebanese Christian Nationalists were faced with the threat of losing their Muslim other. The paper describes the states of anxiety generated by this ‘threat’ and the nature of the strategies the Christian militias deployed to bring their state of anxiety to an end.