2025 marks many round anniversaries of conflicts. It has been 80 years since Nazi Germany got defeated, 50 years since the Vietnam war ended, 50 years since the Cambodian genocide and 30 years since the Srebrenica genocide ended. Anniversaries rarely mean coherent remembrance. 50 years ago, on April 13 1975, the Lebanese Civil War is said to have begun but Lebanon faces challenges evolving around its memorialization. There is no collective memory agreed upon and the state is doing little to nothing to establish one.
Collective Memory in Lebanon?
April 13 is commonly referred to as the starting point for the civil war, without any consensus on when it ended. At the same time, both the starting point and the label civil war aren’t collectively agreed upon. Already before the trigger ‘bus events’ in Ain El Remmaneh on April 13, there were incidents in February 1975 and further back.1 It is further questioned whether it constitutes a civil war or rather a glocal war (term used hereafter), which better stresses both its local and global dynamics.2 The absence of basic shared reference points complicates the establishment of a collective memory.3
After the war, the Lebanese state opted for general amnesty laws leaving perpetrators in power arguing that forgetting will help the healing process. This shows that the debate on collective memory in Lebanon takes place around the fine line of forgetting and remembering. Even though the amnesty laws didn’t cause a collective amnesia in society,4 they did not meet what historian and writer Fawwaz Traboulsi calls selective amnesia, a form of forgetting that can help society to reconcile.5 Furthermore, Lebanon’s memory culture is characterized by a sectarian war on memory and those countering sectarianism further complicating remembrance. This situation is misappropriated by communal actors – such as Hezbollah (Shiite), Future Movement (Sunni), Kataeb (Maronite) or Progressive Socialist Party (Druze) – trying to forward their communal narratives to the national level and gain the momentum of defining the past.6
The Role of Civil Society
Against this backdrop, however, most civil society actors work towards establishing a collective memory around the glocal war. They don’t want to counter the communal narratives but rather include them in a collective memory that acknowledges co-existing narratives. Such a memory needs private memory, personal remembrance, to be publicly accessible. Public access to memory requires archiving. Archiving the glocal war in Lebanon, again, witnesses a lack of state initiatives. While the National Archives Center is hardly accessible7, other archives are mostly academic and hardly reach out beyond the elite.8 However, there are several civil society organizations which are trying to make Lebanon’s historiography available for the broader society.9 UMAM Documentation & Research (UMAM) is well-known for their important documentation and research work, their archival collection of different media and their projects and exhibitions that deal with the past. Initiatives like Lebanon Memory Archive, ACT for the Disappeared, Fighters for Peace, Forum ZFD, or ICTJ Lebanon, add to the body of memory work. KAFA partially works with memory, offering a specialized focus on gender issues in their peace building projects. The importance of a civil society archiving practice becomes especially evident in interviews with Ayman Nahle from UMAM and Natalia Hawi from KAFA. The interviews were conducted for this article in May 2025.
Archiving for the Future
The visual artist and filmmaker Ayman Nahle curated the exhibition ‘50 years of Déjà Vu’ at UMAM displaying artworks related to the glocal war. Combining cultural practices with politics, the private and public memory, he lets the artworks and newspapers speak for themselves, “trying to narrate history in a different way”. He does not aim at establishing a single story about the glocal war but develops an approach where people “start digging in their own archives, the new generation researching it, and where we accept other narratives”. For him, it is especially irritating that the state itself isn’t commemorating or archiving the glocal war, but its leaders keep their memory private in private family museums. This is “a kind of totalitarian act”.
For Nahle, the art exhibition also serves as a research hub. While academia constates that the work of organizations such as UMAM is needed, even if the state would properly archive10, Nahle feels “it’s a pity that [they have] this role.” Especially in this vacuum of national efforts, the memory work of non-governmental organizations is indispensable.
For Nahle, Lebanon cannot move on without archiving memory, “you can’t imagine yourself without the past”. Without a common “starting point on how to see the future”, without a history book on how to remember the glocal war, “you can’t see the future”. For Nahle, the glocal war never ended and he “believe[s] it will never stop”. He refers this feeling to the economic crisis, the Beirut port explosion, the assassination of Lokman Slim (co-founder of UMAM), and the Israeli war against Hezbollah among others.
Archiving for Building Peace
Natali Hawi is the project coordinator of the peace building projects at KAFA and shares insights on the project ‘How to deal with the past’. With different age groups from women from different communities, KAFA started to collect the experiences from women during the glocal war, as their role isn’t documented. Afterwards, some women started to become peace builders in their communities and created initiatives for memory dialogue. Hawi shared stories in line with Nahle’s sentiments: “The older women said that we are still living the war. […] Like there is no guns and whatever, but there is war, like the economical, like the conflicts ongoing all the time, people hating each other, the hate speech. We are experiencing these conflicts all the time. So it’s important. This means that we didn’t heal, we didn’t reconcile. So there is a need to work on peace building.”
Hawi reaffirms the importance of archiving, as it raises awareness and contributes to humanizing the women’s experiences. Following this approach, KAFA’s work breaks with a history model that favors silencing the past. Despite the many numerical data about victims, the lack of documentation of what people lived through “unhumanizes us”, Hawi says – personal stories must therefore be part of collective memories. For Hawi, there are many stories left to tell: “Starting from the victims to the activists, to everything for daily life. [All] those details should [be] known. So, we can understand better where we are, what we are living and why we have this community structured this way.” KAFA is currently working on trying to pass a personal status law for women. A former and related attempt by Legal Action Worldwide and UN Women was rejected by the state. Hawi stresses that gender equality must be part of the reconciliation process: “Peace and protection and equality is all connected”.
Both Hawi and Nahle point out that reconciliation is impossible when the perpetrators from the glocal war are occupying leading state positions. However, Hawi is adding to Nahle’s hope for the future generations: “We hope, because we are touching […] the changes in [the] people.”
Towards Transitional Justice
50 years after the outbreak of the glocal war in Lebanon the country remains deeply fragmented in how to remember its past. In the absence of a state-led archival or commemorative effort, civil society actors have stepped in to preserve memories and offer spaces for dialogue. Their work demonstrates that documenting lived experiences is essential for a collective memory that embraces personal, communal, and marginalized narratives. Archiving these is an important step towards individual healing and collective transitional justice in Lebanon.
Conference
The Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB) hosted the conference “Catastrophe, Memory & Critique” from June 3-5, organized by Jens Hanssen (OIB) and Sami Khatib (HfG Karlsruhe). In eight different panels, 30 participants presented and discussed critical and catastrophic thinking, different catastrophes (Gaza genocide, Holocaust, Armenian genocide, Yezidi genocide, and Hiroshima) for different peoples (Palestinians, Jewish, Armenians, Yezidi, Syrians, and Lebanese), and finally, the importance of archiving all these memories for transitional justice. It builds upon the OIB conference “Crisis & Memory” in Beirut 1998. This conference proceedings’ will be published among other contributions in OIB’s BTS series. For more information click here.
Levke Sofia Christiansen is an undergraduate of International Relations and Social Sciences with a focus on decolonial & feminist studies in Southeast Europe and Southwest Asia. Currently, she is working for the Orient-Institut Beirut.
- Elsa Abou Assi, “Collective Memory and Management of the Past: The Entrepreneurs of Civil War Memory in Post-War Lebanon,” International Social Sciences Journal, 2010, 405, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&profile=ehost&scope=site&authtype=crawler&jrnl=00208701&an=66481240&h=2oy8gg4rngn%2biby6myqakyuqiwxfhkfuawhxrchzoj%2foe9iqzg0nghr%2bb3sr6trki45dad6icqayiena%2bv0g1g%3d%3d&crl=c. ↩︎
- Leyla Dakhli and Klaus Wieland, eds., The Cultural Memory of the Lebanese Civil War: Revisited, Mobilizing Memories; 4 (BRILL, 2024), 5. ↩︎
- Sune Haugbolle, “The Historiography and the Memory of the Lebanese Civil War,” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, 2011. ↩︎
- Dakhli and Wieland, The Cultural Memory of the Lebanese Civil War, 7. ↩︎
- Sune Haugbolle, “Public and Private Memory of the Lebanese Civil War,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 1 (2005): 197, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/article/185344/summary. ↩︎
- Eduardo W. Aboultaif and Paul Tabar, “National Versus Communal Memory in Lebanon,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no. 1 (2019): 98, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003229766-7, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003229766-7/national-versus-communal-memory-lebanon-eduardo-wassim-aboultaif-paul-tabar. ↩︎
- The Monthly, “National Archives Center-the Keeper of Nation’s Records,” The Monthly, July 25, 2014, accessed May 6, 2025, https://monthlymagazine.com/en/article/1403/national-archives-center-the-keeper-of-nation%E2%80%99s-records. ↩︎
- Sara Scalenghe and Nadya Sbaiti, “Conducting Research in Lebanon: An Overview of Historical Sources in Beirut (Part I),” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 37, no. 1 (2003): 68, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23063088. ↩︎
- Haugbolle, “Public and Private Memory of the Lebanese Civil War,” 203. ↩︎
- Michelle L. Woodward, “CREATING MEMORY and HISTORY: The Role of Archival Practices in Lebanon and Palestine,” Photographies 2, no. 1 (2009): 22, https://doi.org/10.1080/17540760802696930. ↩︎