Lebanon Reborn

With a rich comparative case-study approach that spans Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Building Militaries in Fragile States unearths provocative findings that suggest the traditional way of working with foreign militaries needs to be rethought.

Sune Haugbolle's often poignant book chronicles the battle over ideas that emerged from the wreckage of the Lebanese civil war.

Beirut is the cultural, commercial and economic hub of Lebanon. But to what extent has the city affected and shaped the formation and perceptions of Lebanese national identity? Ghenwa Hayek here explores how anxieties over the past, present and future of Beirut have been articulated through a sense of dislocation present in Lebanese writing since the 1960s. Drawing on theories of cultural studies, geography and history, the author uses an interdisciplinary framework to explore the role that spaces - from rural to urban - have played and continue to play in the defining, and re-defining, of national identity in the seventy years since the creation of the Lebanese nation state. This theoretical perspective coupled with a close reading of little-explored contemporary writings lead Hayek to question the predominant assumption that Lebanese novelists only became engaged in discourses about place identity and individual and social belonging with the start of the fifteen-year civil war and the destruction of Beirut's city centre. Instead, the book shows that particular geographical imaginaries have been mobilized to describe, question and debate Lebanese identity since the 1960s and that some go back even further into the late nineteenth century. This re-reading calls for a re-evaluation of some of the most predominant assumptions about Lebanon and the processes of Lebanese identity formation across the country's modern history. Examining a wide range of modern and contemporary literature, Hayek charts the rise to cultural prominence of the city of Beirut as a significant player in shaping perceptions of Lebanese culture and identity.

This book examines the legacy of Lebanon’s civil war and how the population, and the youth in particular, are dealing with their national past. Drawing on extensive qualitative research and social observation, the author explores the efforts of those who wish to remember, so as not to repeat past mistakes, and those who wish to forget. In considering how the Lebanese youth are negotiating this collective memory, Larkin addresses issues of: Lebanese post-war amnesia and the gradual emergence of new memory discourses and public debates Lebanese nationalism and historical memory visual memory and mnemonic landscapes oral memory and post-war narratives war memory as an agent of ethnic conflict and a tool for reconciliation and peace-building. trans-generational trauma or postmemory. Shedding new light on trauma and the persistence of ethnic and religious hostility, this book offers a unique insight into Lebanon’s recurring communal tensions and a fresh perspective on the issue of war memory. As such, this is an essential addition to the existing literature on Lebanon and will be relevant for scholars of sociology, Middle East studies, anthropology, politics and history.

Long the most familiar of the Middle East countries to Americans, Lebanon has become something of an alien. Those who have only recently come to know the name associate Lebanon with extremism, bigotry, and violence. Their portrait is that of a poor, war-torn land not unlike other Third World states except in the savagery of its divisiveness. Those Americans who knew Lebanon in years past, and there were many, have tended to err just as grievously by assuming that the Lebanon whose shattered landscape they see on the front pages of their newspapers or in the more vivid images of television is the same Lebanon they once knew. Geography is more static than society. Apart from literature on the violence in Lebanon - which is largely one-sided material - there is no body of knowledge dealing with contemporary Lebanon. The conflicts in that country both resulted from and created numerous and far-reaching changes in Lebanese society. Let there be no mistake - whatever Lebanon will be in the future, we have passed a watershed. Lebanon is not the same country it was five, ten, or fifteen years ago; the political circumstances have fundamentally and irrevocably changed. This book is an attempt to begin to look at the nature of the changes that have taken place in Lebanon. --