A Social Movement Path? Sect-Based Divisions in the Lebanese Civil War

• In Event: Civil War Paths

Abstract

Based on interviews collected via a life history approach with Lebanese ex-combatants and ordinary civilians who experienced the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990, this paper explains the conditions of possibility for violence as part of a social process that unfolds during the periods of pre-war, war, and post-war. This paper shows how violence as a social process varies between groups of the same and different religious sects. While at the inception of the war, the origins of the warring groups are typically coded as social movements, in this paper, I show how these organizational origins conditioned popular decision-making to pick up arms or not along sectarian lines. I also show how the unfolding of war events fragmented these alliances even when the sect-based divisions were preserved. This paper goes beyond the deterministic approach that the literature on sectarianism and on the Lebanese war tend to impose on ordinary Lebanese which reduces peoples’ group affiliation to their sect-based affiliations. I start by tracing the historical organization of the warring groups across pre- to post-war contexts to explain how these organizational changes affect and are affected by the popular understanding of historical developments.

The war literature on Lebanon mainly blames the geopolitics of the region, specifically the Arab-Israeli war, and sectarianism for the eruption of the armed conflict and the sustenance of this conflict for 15 years. This paper builds on that literature and departs from it in three ways. First, while the literature focuses on political elites’ decision-making processes in relation to the geopolitical situation at different moments during the war, this paper shows how ordinary Lebanese made meaning of the geopolitics of the region and to what extent that played a role in their decision to fight or not. Second, rather than taking the violence of sect-based differences as a given, this paper shows how, why, and when these identities turn violent during pre-war, war, and post-war periods. Lastly, this paper challenges the instrumentalist assumption that ordinary people are manipulated by political elites into conflict, armed struggle, and cohabitation to serve elites’ agendas and shows that the process of decision-making at the popular level is a complex social process that is highly dynamic and ever-changing, at different moments before, during, and in post-war periods and therefore is not only controlled by political elites.

Author

• Toni Rouhana, University of York