The year 2015 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary the Lebanese Civil Wars' end. This interdisciplinary panel anticipates this milestone through reconsiderations of the conflict. We do so not only through revisionist histories, but through examination of how such histories are constructed and contested within popular memories, scholarly writing, literature and the arts. We hope to map the current state of knowledge about the conflict. More importantly, through the juxtaposition of objects and methodologies, we seek to open new spaces through which knowledges might proliferate.
The panel takes us through a range of geographies of memory. A tightly focused encounter with Beirut's Holiday Inn, a one time symbol of elite cosmopolitanism that now stands pock-marked and abandoned, opens outward, through ethnographic engagement, to gather Beirutis' memories of what was lost and what may yet be. Our second paper examines the construction of the wars and memory through Incendies, a critically acclaimed Canadian film that engages the global Lebanese Diaspora in the brutality of the wars. The paper interrogates both the memory the film narrates but also asks how the production of a film by and for a Diaspora complicate or simplify the complexity of the civil wars and the tragedies they wroughtr
The remaining papers engage the limits of what may be discussed in relation to the Civil Wars. Silences, often attributed to a state-enforced amnesia, the final two papers argue, represent a mapping of wartime power that remains to be investigated. Few studies of the Civil Wars escape the focus upon sectarianism and the political rivalries between self-appointed sectarian leaders. Social histories of the civil wars, on the other hand, are sorely missed. Except as the militiaman or victim, everyday Lebanese, and the triumphs and tribulations of their daily lives in wartime, do not appear in scholarly histories. Hidden, too, are the activities of those at the very top of the Lebanese political economy: the financial mercantile elite. What place did war making as capital accumulation have the civil wars and their perpetuation over fifteen long years How did various networks of elite families and institutions compete and cooperate, both within Lebanon and abroad, to survive, and indeed, often thrive, during the darkest dayst How might answering these questions enable a re-evaluation of the civil wars and the challenges to a positive peace
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.
Incendies (Scorched) is the title of the critically acclaimed 2010 film by Quebecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. The film is based on a play of the same title written by Wajdi Mouawad, who since his immigration to Quebec in 1983 from Lebanon—via France—has risen to the top of the Canadian theatre scene. This paper focuses on the film, which more than 20 years after the end of the Lebanese civil war, sends two Quebecois siblings, Simon and Jeanne Marwan, on a quest to the Middle East that is simultaneously a reconstruction of their mother’s brutal personal past and a meditation on the meaning of civil war.
While the film seeks to move beyond the particulars of Lebanon by setting the events in a fictional Middle Eastern country symbolically named Fuad, there is no mistaking it for any place but Lebanon; the main city of Daresh is clearly Beirut and the prison in the South where the mother is detained closely resembles the notorious Khiam prison run by Israel’s army of occupation and the South Lebanese Army. The protagonist, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), who assassinates a Christian right wing militia leader, is in part based on the true story of Souha Bechara who attempted to shoot General Antoine Lahad of the SLA.
This paper begins by cataloguing correspondences between Lebanon’s history and civil war references in the film, and then it moves beyond the obvious parallels to explore how the fiction of the narrative, which weaves familial intimacies around political intrigue, is undercut by the verisimilitude that characterizes the imagery of the civil war. In the final section of the paper, I critically engage the affective quality of the film, its ability to draw the viewer into the drama of self-discovery as it is experienced by Simon and Jeanne (the twins) and to achieve a neat resolution of the past as they deliver the letters of the dead mother to their "estranged" Middle Eastern father and brother. The upshot of this analysis of the film is to show how Incendies complicates representations of war in the Middle East even as it seemingly reproduces the myth that the nightmare of violence over there (Fuad/Lebanon) stands in contrast to the banal reality of here (Montreal).
My MESA paper will combine archival work with oral history to develop a picture of everyday life during wartime. I cast light on the ways that “ordinary” people adapted to the ever changing political, social and physical geography of the conflict. The landscapes in which non-combatants lived, worked and went to school were continually and unpredictably shaped and reshaped by a dizzying array of local, regional and international political and military alliances and conflicts.
In my paper I ask a series of questions about the nature of sovereignty and community by investigating the ways in which the Lebanese conceived of their neighborhoods or villages. Notions of safe or home space among non-combatants produced expectations about what could be experienced as normal and how to imagine one’s community. In this way my paper will glimpse at the lives of teachers, restaurateurs, EMTs, homemakers, students, nurses, barbers, civil servants, university professors and radio personalities shopping, strolling, sunbathing, and working over the course of the Civil War. By looking at their stories and in indexing their individual experiences to the shifts in the war my paper will attempt to connect a micro-level optic to that of the wider course of the war. In the end this will enable me to suggest a counter narrative to that of the “emergence and strengthening of sectarian identity” narrative that overdetermines writing about the war in Lebanon.
