Navigating the nineties: Palestinian education during Lebanon’s post war reconstruction (1990-2010) This paper uses archival research and oral histories to explore how Palestinian teachers in Lebanon, who worked for UNRWA schools during the period 1990 - 2010, experienced the country’s post war transition. Specifically it asks how the changing political conditions and policy environment in Lebanon affected teachers’ professional practice and the possibilities and constraints they ascribed to education. For Palestinians in Lebanon, the postwar period entailed a dramatic shift from a nation building project within which their community and profession was a central actor, to a pseudo state-building project that excluded them. After the war subsided in 1990, the country’s reconstruction was marked by unfettered neo-liberalism and the heightened marginalization of Palestinians. Drawing on archival research conducted in various UN and private archives, I show how these changes were reflected in the reform of the Lebanese curriculum (also taught in UNRWA schools) and a marked technicalization of UNRWA’s education program in line with international norms. Even before this period UNRWA teachers had grappled with contradictory roles. On the one hand they were state actors tasked with socializing and acculturating students into the “rules” of an unjust public life in exile. On the other, many of them were cultural, civic, and political actors who were engaged in a liberation movement that challenged the oppression and injustice experienced by their community in these same public spaces. Here I use oral histories conducted with Palestinian teachers working in different areas of Lebanon to show how the post war environment eroded teachers’ autonomy and motivation, and contributed to the growing instrumentalization of Palestinian education along narrow economic and individual lines. In this way I build on existing scholarship that shows how the local pressures that emerged in post war Lebanon challenge assumptions about Palestinians’ national and collective identity. I also reflect on how these experiences can inform current understandings of the role Palestinian teachers in Lebanon play in shaping future generations in exile.