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

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 article 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 article 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 organization of the political, and armed fields was set up along the lines and formations of two major alliances the National Front, and the Lebanese National Movement, 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. I start by tracing the historical organization of the warring groups pre, during, and post-war to explain how these organizations affect and are affected by the popular understanding of historical developments beyond the deterministic approach that the literature on sectarianism and on the Lebanese war tends to impose on ordinary Lebanese which reduces peoples’ group affiliation to their sect-based affiliation. 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 fifteen years. This article 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 article 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 article shows how, why, and when these identities turn violent during pre-war, war, and post-war periods. Lastly, this article 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.