that they will return one day because you don’t know what his fate is … I was very attached to him When I lost him, it felt like I lost the whole world.” —Ibtehaj, whose father and two uncles disappeared during Lebanon’s civil wars, on Fushat Amal
Space of Hope for Lebanon’s Missing
Promoting Transitional Justice through a Digital Memorial
Erik Van Ommering and Reem el Soussi
Giovanni Bochi
This article examines the practices of mobility and settlement of a community of Syrian Dom moving between Syria and Lebanon. I explore strategies, limitations and opportunities that defined the sphere of Dom social relations in Lebanon. While considering mainly the experience of Dom men, I argue that the scarcity of work, combined with social and political instability, affected their ability to reproduce community and family ties in Lebanon. Within these external constraints, flexibility and adaptation informed both residence patterns and the field of social interactions, which the Dom reconstituted through their cross-border mobility.
Leonardo Schiocchet
My ethnography of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (2005–2010) points to a strong disposition towards suspicion associated with refugeeness. This, in turn, highlights politico-moral economies of trust, indexed by honour, that become what I call boundary-maintenance disciplinary practices. The dynamics of suspicion and trust, propelled by social crisis and uprooting, shape all groups, from their social support systems and marriages to collective political, ethnic and religious allegiances. Uprooting tends to be associated with displacement of the subject's social order, bringing about an intensified sense of intra-group bonds and a concomitant suspicion towards those outside this group. This, in turn, heightens a necessity on the part of refugee subjects to reflect and shape networks of trust, expressed in a moral idiom, even when decisions are known to be political. This article analyses some of the dynamic between suspicion and trust in conditions of social crisis and refugeeness.
Bringing Lebanon’s Civil War Home to Anglophone Literature
Alameddine’s Appropriation of Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Yousef Awad
Introduction Ripped apart by civil war and continual political and military interventions by regional and international powers, Lebanon is an ‘unstated state [… that] has no strength and no authority’, as literary scholar Salah D. Hassan laments
Death of a Statesman – Birth of a Martyr
Martyrdom and Memorials in Post–Civil War Lebanon
Are John Knudsen
Lebanon is a country awash with martyrs and they are remembered in anniversaries and memorials, revered in song and popular culture and, most visibly, reincarnated in larger-than-life posters lining roads, highways and thoroughfares demarcating
Conflicts in Children’s Everyday Lives
Fresh Perspectives on Protracted Crisis in Lebanon
Erik van Ommering
Even though Beirut attains top rankings among the trendiest travel destinations each year, Lebanon retains notoriety for its legacies of civil war, an unparalleled refugee crisis and vulnerability to regional conflicts and global power play. In 2016
“Coaching” Queer
Hospitality and the Categorical Imperative of LGBTQ Asylum Seeking in Lebanon and Turkey
Aydan Greatrick
argues, is the “categorical imperative of hospitality” (ibid.: 81). This categorical imperative—of appearing and distinguishing between the “credible” and the “bogus” SOGI refugee—has numerous consequences for refugee protection in Turkey and Lebanon
From the Throes of Anguished Mourning
Shi‘i Ritual Lamentation and the Pious Publics of Lebanon
Fouad Gehad Marei
concrete barricades and military checkpoints manned by Internal Security Forces, the Lebanese army, and Hezbollah special forces—a precaution that has altered socio-spatial life in Beirut's southern suburbs since 2015, when a series of attacks attributed to
Living Through and Living On?
Participatory Humanitarian Architecture in the Jarahieh Refugee Settlement, Lebanon
Riccardo Luca Conti, Joana Dabaj, and Elisa Pascucci
informal tented settlement (ITS) of Jarahieh, in the municipality of El Marj, West Bekaa, Lebanon. There, thanks to the work of two small Syrian NGOs—Jusoor and Sawa for Development Aid—over three hundred children had attended school for a year in a
Arabic Grammar Curricula for Primary Schools in Middle Eastern Countries
A Comparative Study
Haifaa Majadly and Aharon Geva-Kleinberger
comparative analysis of the curricula in several countries. The countries selected (Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia) are spread over a large geographical territory and differ in their political, intellectual, and educational ideologies. 17