The Looting of Lebanon: The Civil Wars Reconsidered The year 2015 marks the 25-year anniversary of the end of the Lebanese civil wars. This paper offers a revisionist account of this painful period in Lebanese history, in which I argue that the Lebanese wars were among the first of the so-called “New Wars” that engulfed Africa and Eastern Europe in the final two decades of the twentieth century. The New Wars are known for unprecedented ethno-religious violence and the deliberate targeting of civilians. They are also marked by the degree to which capital accumulation rivals victory on the battlefield as the goal of protracted violence. According to this view, war economies emerge on the ashes of the normal economy, and, marked by criminality, predation and warlordism, inhabit politico-economic spaces outside of “normal” trajectories of development and globalization. This paper takes seriously the New Wars paradigm’s focus upon political economy, to understand the Lebanese civil wars, while moving beyond its foundation upon a dichotomous distinction between normal and war economies. Through a multi-sited political economy anchored by three years of fieldwork in Beirut, I argue that the Lebanese militia economy never operated outside of larger processes of financial globalization. In tracing rise of, and the competition and cooperation between, three large wartime financial networks – those of the Kata’eb Militia, the Amal Movement and the Saudi-backed billionaire Rafiq al-Hariri – I demonstrate the degree to which the civil wars were not about sectarian rivalries, but about capturing the commanding heights of a globalizing Lebanese political economy: the banking sector. Moreover, I argue, it was precisely this integration of the war economy within larger regional and global financial networks that rendered this space of violence a central vector through which the region was drawn into the emergent global neoliberal order.