What role do women have in war and violent conflict? In public, political and media discourses it is often assumed that women are either victims of war or (potential) actors for peace. The fact that many women, too, play an active role in inciting violence, spreading hatred and inflicting damage tends to be overlooked. In academia, these notions of women as inherently peaceful, innocent and non-violent beings are reflected by a lack of literature on women as perpetrators of violence. Most publications on perpetrators of violence during war and political conflict do not take into account the role of women. This lack of academic literature on the role of women in wars and violent conflicts stands in stark contrast to the participation of women in political violence worldwide and the fact that women’s participation in violent groups has been increasing in recent years. Some non-state violent political groups have a lot of active female members, including female fighters, while others have many less or none at all. How can we explain this variation? This paper focuses on the case of non-state violent political parties and organisations involved in the Lebanese Civil War. Comparing groups which, at the beginning of the war, were part of the revisionist Lebanese National Movement and the pro-status-quo Lebanese Front, it aims at answering the question of why some of these groups had female fighters whereas others did not. After an analysis of existing conflict and terrorism studies literature on the topic, this paper will then provide an overview of existing explanations for female involvement in combat activities and examine the degree to which these can help us understand women’s participation during the Lebanese Civil War. With hardly any literature available on the role of women during the Lebanese Civil War, this research contributes to filling an important gap. It is based on several months of fieldwork carried out in Lebanon in 2015 and 2016, during which qualitative semi-structured interviews with former fighters and party members, researcher, journalists and civil society representatives and analysis of former fighters’ biographies were conducted.

Based on interviews, original documents and media reports, this paper traces the emergence of the group called the “Nonviolence Movement in Lebanon” in the mid-1980s, during the country’s 1975-90 civil war. It argues that this group had a unique ambition and function in civil society in that it went beyond simple anti-war causes or socio-economic demands. Rather, it sought to introduce the principles, theories and methods of nonviolence – as they interpreted them – as a comprehensive ideological basis for civil society. The nonviolence movement organized nonviolence training workshops for individuals, associations and unions, focused on social and political rights, histories of nonviolent resistance, and techniques and strategies for nonviolent struggle. The Nonviolence Movement mobilized around protest methods and an ideology of basic civic rights and responsibilities rather than specific interest politics. This paper argued that such a focus enabled the Nonviolence Movement to form an unprecedented broad civil society coalition. In open calls and protest action, the Movement was joined by or participated alongside with civil society actors ranging from specific enterprise unions, via the Teachers’ Syndicate and the League of University Professors, to the Movement for the Handicapped and the Lebanese Women’s Council. Although short-lived, this coming together of different interests to protest the civil war and collapse of governance in unison, indicated the potential of civil society. The main mobilizing factor in the coalition in terms of sheer numbers of people was the General Confederation of Lebanese Workers (GCLW), and as the country’s most powerful union, it was also the most politicized. When the broad movement declined following a general strike and mass protests in November 1987, the blame was placed on the GCLW leadership for bowing to political pressure and reverting to pursuit of specific interests. Other civil society organizations conducted a similar retreat retreat to interest politics, however, and this tendency may be seen as a precursor to the post-war NGOization of Lebanese civil society.

The post-WWII era saw a global surge in the circulation and dissemination of theories of economic development inspired by the work of British economist John Keynes. How did these global ideas circulate and metamorphose in a Middle Eastern context? In this paper, I trace the post-WWII rise of a group of scholar-technocrats, whom I refer to as developmental institutionalists, that were based at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon. Most of these scholars, like Said Himadeh, Yusif Sayigh, and Salim Hoss, studied in the United State and returned to the Arab World where they held high ranking positions in education and the bureaucracy. As I argue in this paper, these economists were not simply emissaries but equally transformers of global currents of economic thought. Their models for economic development combined elements of Keynesianism with those of US-based Wesley Mitchell’s economic institutionalism in order to address the challenges of state-building under the banner of Arab or Lebanese nationalism. They applied these new ideas to pressing questions such as state financial regulation in underdeveloped money markets and ideal central banking prototypes for emerging nations. The influence of the AUB economists transcended Lebanon and was linked to the rise of the Arab oil economy. At the centre of this influence lay the institutional role of the Beirut-based Economic Research Institute (ERI, est. 1953) and its academic journal of record, the Middle East Economic Papers (MEEP). In the first decade of its operation, ERI was involved in training over a hundred junior government officials from across the Arab world in statistical methods as part of a multi-national effort based in Beirut. MEEP acted as a catalyst for the creation of transnational currents of intellectual exchange and influence within the Arab and Muslim Middle East that spanned Karachi, Tehran, Baghdad, Istanbul, Cairo, and Khartoum. A better understanding of these networks and the philosophy behind them will shed new light on how global thought shapes and is shaped by local and regional contexts. More specifically, it contributes to a further elaboration of the evolution of Arab economic thought rarely features in histories of modern Arab intellectual renaissance, the Nahda. My conclusions are based on extensive archival research of US diplomatic cables, correspondence records of the Ford Foundation that funded ERI, as well as a detailed survey of the writings of these scholars including their publications in MEEP.