Sunni Political Parties in Postwar Lebanon An intriguing feature of post-war Lebanese politics is that the Sunni community is the only major sectarian group that did not end up with a representative party comprised of former militia leaders. Indeed, most of the Sunni militias that existed on the eve of the civil war or that emerged during its first five years (e.g., al-Mourabitoun) had effectively disappeared by the mid-1980s. The absence of a militia leader who would act as a protector of the Sunni community can be in part explained by the role taken by Palestinian forces in Sunni protection during the civil war. Most Lebanese Sunnis were ambivalent in their support of a distinct, multi-confessional Lebanese state, and were sympathetic to the Palestinian exiles, who shared their religious affiliation. Instead of developing independent Lebanese leaders, they rallied behind Yasser Arafat and the PLO. A second factor contributing to the non-emergence of a Sunni party based on a wartime militia is Syrian opposition. Fearing that a powerful Sunni militia in Lebanon might have a spillover effect and encourage Syrian Sunnis to rise up against the Alawite regime, Syria’s leaders actively (and violently) discouraged the development of any such organization during the civil war. In the years immediately following the civil war, two notable Islamist movements gained in popularity among Lebanon’s Sunni community. The first was the Jama`a Islamiyya, the Islamic Group, an organization strongly influenced by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and the second was the Jami`yat al-Mashari` al-Khairiyah or the Association of Islamic Charitable Projects, (known as al-Ahbash or the Ethiopians). While these organizations did not have a great impact on the Lebanese political scene, they became a recognizable part of the national discourse and thus merit a brief examination. The post-war period also saw the emergence of the vigorous, Sunni-dominated “Future Movement,” created initially by businessman Rafiq Hariri and then cultivated by his son Saad after the elder Hariri’s assassination in 2005. This paper will discuss the role played by the two Islamist parties in the early 1990s, and will analyze the rise of the “Future Movement” and the role it played in Lebanese politics in the first decade of the twenty-first century.