Description
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. I argue that a dialectical relationship between a social movement and a counter movement had been growing for years and exploded at the inception of the war. I show that the organisational origins and alliances of both the movement and counter movement 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 go beyond the deterministic approach that the literature on sectarianism tend to impose on ordinary Lebanese which reduces peoples’ group affiliation to their sect-based affiliations. I start by tracing the historical organisation of the warring groups across pre- to post-war contexts to explain how these organisational changes affect and are affected by the popular understanding of historical developments.
