Published in Foreign Policy Association and Middle East Book Reviews
FROM THE LAROUSSE
Libanisation (Lebanization): the process of fragmentation of a state, as a result of confrontation between diverse communities.
Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict. By Samir Khalaf. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002. 368 pp. ISBN: 0-231-12476-7. US $27.50.
A LOT has been studied about Lebanon’s protracted civil war—identifying perpetrators, determining the “Sarajevo” that ignited the conflict, or ascribing responsibility. Little, however, has been said about the peculiarity of this war—what sets Lebanon apart from other violent contexts. It turns out that the forces that sustained the conflict (for fifteen years!) are different from those that ignited it in the first place, and, in Lebanon’s case, much more important in delineating the country’s tortuous trajectory. Even more obscure is that Lebanon’s modern history has been one of intermittent violence whose patterns have remained largely consistent for two centuries. This discovery serves as both the premise and the conclusion of Samir Khalaf’s Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon.
Khalaf’s examination of Lebanon’s conflicts since the 19th century uncovers three themes that investigations of communal strife overlook:
1. The circumstances that propelled oppressed groups to resort to social or political violence have not been those which sustained the violence or defined its character.
2. When communal discord replaced socioeconomic or political grievances as the face of a conflict, quelling violence became a herculean task. In Khalaf’s words, violence was transformed from a dependent variable to an independent variable inflicting its own vicious cycle of violence.
3. Lebanon’s successive encounters with violence have been futile. As Kaplan suggests, for wars to be productive, they must produce a victor and a vanquished. Much to the interests and efforts of foreign powers, conflicts in Lebanon always ended in suspension.
Lebanon’s major episodes of unrest reveal painstaking similarities in their pattern of violence. Conflicts that started as ordinary socioeconomic or political protest quickly turned into sectarian confrontation. Once conflicts took on a sectarian edge, and they almost always did, they acquired a life of their own and spiraled out of control as self-definition became threatened. Essentially, as Hanf explains, conflicts that were initially over divisible goods became struggles over indivisible principles. Finally, and most painfully, these conflicts have been largely futile, at best restoring status quo.
Today, coexistence is ever so distant. In short, Lebanon’s history with violence is especially vexing as hostilities never revolved around a set of causes nor have they resolved core issues that ignited unrest.
Familiar pattern: a donkey is a donkey
Against this conceptual backdrop, Khalaf revisits three distinct conflicts—the uprisings of the 1800s, the turmoil of 1958, and the 1975-1990 war. In each, he demonstrates how civil circumstances that propelled groups to mobilize were deflected into confessional conflicts, and how geopolitical forces and regional and global rivalries consistently amplified fissures.
Take for instance the peasant uprisings of the 1800’s where Feudal Mount Lebanon’s Christians & Druze—who had lived harmoniously for a long time—were pitted against each other by their Ottoman & Egyptian masters. Or the 1958 pseudo-war where Syrian and Egyptian efforts in propping up the opposition against the Chamoun government, along with the creation of the United Arab Republic in 1958 and the Maronites’ perennial fears of being engulfed by Arab nationalism and Palestinian presence, quickly transformed the situation into a vengeful conflict defined along confessional lines.
Conflicts that started off civil—revolving around socioeconomic or political disparities— were quickly transformed into battles of identity, and Lebanon became a bloody circus. Time and time again, fear of loss of identity and heritage, one’s very existence, motivated “out-of-control” violence—including banditry, kidnappings, and torture. And again, violence subsided, much as it had started, with foreign intervention—the latest in the form of the Taif Accord, which clinched to the “the ethos of no victor and no vanquished.”
An Ominous future?
Khalaf provides a glimpse of the country’s social psyche that sustained violence and the resulting psychological scars. He explains how ordinary citizens get entrapped in aggression and how traumatized groups come to cope with chronic fear and hostility. He addresses the impact of war on collective memory, group loyalties, and attitudes towards the “other.” Religion and the vilification of the “other” sanctified violence. It simply became routine: groups engaged in such cruelties believed they were morally justified, and observers morally distanced themselves to the extent of desensitization. In essence, citizens became frenzied spectators morbidly fascinated by a Spanish bullfight.
Most ominously, the picture of post-war Lebanon is bleak. Perhaps the most important impact of the war is what he calls the “retribalization” and “reteritorialization of identities.” The war has reinforced kinship and confessional loyalties. It has destroyed public spaces that provided venues for intercommunity interaction and has caused people to retreat to homogenous spaces. The density of social interaction and intensified intracommunal loyalties are foreboding for the nation. Boundaries between communities, once physical, have become psychological, cultural, and ideological barriers.
Enter “postwar barbarism.” Khalaf persuasively elaborates how, as a consequence of the war, the Lebanese show “no self-control in directing their future options.” Instead they reveal “insatiable desires for acquisitiveness, lawlessness, and unearned privileges,” ranging from the negligence of laws to the destruction of the environment to increased wickedness to the obsession with kitsch and vulgar trends. Khalaf laments the proliferation of kitsch—propagated by the desire to escape the memories of the past—that have vulgarized folk art and architecture in the process of providing cheap distractions to the wounded Lebanese souls.
The reader may take solace in the author’s moderate voice. While providing a sobering account of a violent nation, he reminds us that Lebanon knew periods of calm that rendered the country an avant-garde paradise in the region. Khalaf, a sociologist by training, is at his best in exploring in exquisite detail the social and cultural forces that made Lebanon a cultural paradise in 1959-1975. Few have provided such a comprehensive exposé of Lebanese society during that time.
It is a pity, however, that Khalaf does not more deeply explore the two modern periods of relative calm—1860-1958 and 1959-1975—to understand whether Lebanon could ever again experience such prosperity. With a civil war on the horizon in the latter period, the reader would benefit from a deeper analysis of the economic and political grievances stirring beneath the surface and how society managed to keep them at bay.
Breathe fresh air, pick fresh roses
Perhaps most interesting in this work is the absence of policy recommendations related to political reform. Khalaf must have given up on the role of politicians. Perhaps he knows too well that such alternatives have been proven naïve, imaginary solutions. In fact, Khalaf explicitly encourages focusing on strategies unrelated to conflict resolution and political reforms.
Khalaf emphasizes the role of restoring social spaces in reconnecting “denationalized” Lebanese with each other and with their country. He focuses on the importance of what Paul Rabinow refers to as the “social technologies of pacification” in bringing back meaningful life to society. He calls on urban designers, architects, and intellectuals to play a much needed role in Lebanon—connecting the citizenry through public space. “By mobilizing aesthetic sensibilities… and cultural expressions…, they can prod the Lebanese to…transcend the parochial identities to connect with others.” Productive social networks provide opportunities for intercommunal socialization. Examples include environmental campaigns, pro-local agriculture produce campaigns, and activities promoting women rights.
The alternative he points out is bleak:
“Consider what happens when a country’s most precious heritage either is maligned or becomes beyond the reach of its citizens…their country’s scenic geography, is pluralistic and open institutions, which were once sources of national pride…have either become inaccessible to them, or worse, are being redefined as worthless.”
The point is: group loyalties can be resocialized, but it is not an uncomplicated task.
