The Lebanese civil war was not just a series of violent events that happened and then ended in the past. Rather, its memory has sustained political, social, economic, and, more importantly, “symbolic” structures to this day. Instead of being a window into understanding the crises facing the Lebanese national question, the civil war’s memory has turned into clusters of polarizing, divisive, and spirited narratives, still present nowadays, and more relevant than ever before.
Following the end of the civil war, the 1991 general amnesty law absolved all political and military actors of wartime crimes, effectively erasing the distinction between perpetrators and victims. Rather than addressing the past, the political settlement institutionalized impunity as a foundation for postwar governance.
The sole exception was the prosecution of Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces, who was tried and sentenced not within a framework of justice, but in line with the political interests of the Syrian tutelage that dominated Lebanon during the 1990s. His imprisonment served as a symbolic act to consolidate Syrian influence and neutralize opposition, rather than to establish legal precedent or moral reckoning. Accountability became selective and instrumental, used to discipline dissent while shielding all others who shared responsibility for the war’s destruction.
The end of the war was scripted in the Taif Agreement’s promise of a secular state, yet the hands that once held rifles were allowed to rebuild the ruins in their image, turning amnesty into a tool to forget.
Lebanon’s postwar political order was built around a doctrine of coexistence, presented as both a moral imperative and a structural necessity for peace. In practice, coexistence evolved into a mechanism for perpetuating sectarian division rather than transcending it. Power was distributed through a confessional quota system that reinforced sectarian identities as the primary basis for political representation and access to resources. Difference was managed through balance rather than integration. The resulting system prioritized stability over reform, consensus over accountability, and sectarian parity over citizenship.
Officially, Lebanon’s current government is tasked with a security transition and economic recovery. On their own, however, technical solutions are inadequate to address the country’s chronic ailments, whether its economic collapse, rampant corruption, localized crime, and despotism, or the presence of arms outside the state’s control. What is needed is a new national pact that challenges citizens’ attachment to sectarian forces and distrust toward any state-building project. Without unpacking the myths, ideological attachments, and visualized solidarities unleashed by the civil war period, it will be increasingly difficult for sectarian partisans to take a unified and cross-sectarian vision seriously.
A “post-civil war politics” is the country’s ultimate necessity today. The rise of an anti-establishment secular movement following the Arab Spring, the 2015 garbage protests, and the October 17 uprising provided new meanings for popular, national belonging, separate from confessional identification and inconsistent nationalist sentiments. Today, this movement faces a series of challenges in terms of its capacity to impact public opinion. University spaces can be outlets with the potential to intersect with reformist governmental policies and can play a proactive role to allow this alternative political framing to resurface.
New national symbols are needed
The different warring sides in the civil war produced their own narratives, struggles, heroes, and symbols. Despite this cross-sectarian heroism did emerge during the civil war, seen in actors such as the Permanent Peace Movement (PPM) and the families, most notably mothers and wives, who had been protesting for their disappeared relatives for decades.
Wadad Halwani, whose husband Adnan was kidnapped from his home in 1982, refused to be reduced to a “victim.” Instead, she, alongside others, initiated the Committee of the Families of Kidnapped and Disappeared in Lebanon in that same year. Despite the risks, Halwani and her companions transformed their positionality as grieving family members to become political actors advancing a different picture of what the reality of the war looked like for ordinary people.
Halwani and members of the committee spent the past almost 44 years building a hub of social workers, activists, artists, filmmakers, psychologists, journalists, and writers who have, each in their own way, narrated, communicated, and supported the cause of the disappeared. Halwani’s approach to unmasking the taboos of the civil war and resisting the collective push to forget, naturally encouraged a cross-sectarian narration of the war, bringing in actors from opposing factions to exchange lessons on the inter-generational trauma and social crises informed by the violence.
But Halwani’s initiative, and many others like hers, cannot pursue this struggle alone: educational institutions and state leaders, with support from progressive media organizations, need to bring their heroism back to the mainstream.
Universities as a laboratory for accountability
Lebanon’s official high school curriculum makes no mention of the civil war, nor does it teach a pre-war period that highlights the contradictions that continue to make up Lebanon’s debate. This makes the roles of universities essential as spaces for bold and honest conversation for young Lebanese graduating from school and discovering the complexities of Lebanon’s past.
One example of how these spaces serve such a function can be seen in the Secular Club at the American University of Beirut (AUB). It was founded in 2008, at a time when sectarian forces were fighting off in the streets of Beirut following a heated domestic contention around Hezbollah’s weapons and security control. Despite starting out small, the club gradually grew in size and successfully competed in every university election since then. It engaged thousands of students over the years as they embarked on rethinking sectarian politics. Most recently, the club won 20 percent of the student vote in AUB during the last 2025 elections.
Every year, the club organizes the “Civil War Week,” as an avenue to give an alternative narrative of what happened during the war, with a special focus on the victims of the civil war, too often cast aside to make more space for the belligerents. The initiative features stands across campus, public discussions, and displays, all enabling unfiltered political expression about the country’s issues. During this initiative, the club hosted survivors, historians, and activists who shared testimonies and perspectives rarely found in official curricula.
This model expanded beyond AUB to other universities via the Mada Network, a youth network. Its impact was particularly felt in the Lebanese University, the country’s only public university, with its scattered campuses across regions that often mirror sectarian and regional divisions. Political parties exert control over campuses to ensure certain sites carry certain political or sectarian colors, further entrenching cultural and ideological hegemony.
In such a context, the Secular Club plays a vital role in restoring trust in citizenship and breaking the boundaries established by the war. It counters various attempts to depoliticize the university landscape and the activity of university clubs. By continuously challenging the status quo, it invites students to learn and critique the various narratives of the civil war.
Different conceptions of heroism and sacrifice continue to forge political identity and inform choices and behavior today. The only way forward is to unpack and critique these concepts openly. Under the umbrella of the Mada Network, students represent a stubborn and persistent vehicle resisting sectarian and violent discourse and the depoliticization university administrations hide behind—under the guise that education must remain apolitical to stay impartial.
The government needs to break the taboo
Yet, the university landscape cannot pursue bold pro-citizenship politics alone: it needs the government’s support. In September 2025, President Joseph Aoun commemorated the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of President Bashir Gemayel, emphasizing the enduring significance of his vision for a “strong” Lebanon. The gesture, while symbolic, reflects the persistence of sectarian memory within Lebanon’s official political discourse.
Commemorating warring figures, be it Bashir Gemayel or his leftist opponent Kamal Jumblatt, may appear as a gesture of national reconciliation, yet the general population is politically exhausted and yearning for a new posture in Lebanese politics. The model advanced by the student movement—where historical consciousness is revived through open debate and critical engagement—offers a path forward.
Foundations and civil society organizations on content, events, and open conversations which put “civil war amnesia” to the test.
The first item on the agenda of such a collaboration would be to devise a unified historiography of Lebanon into school curricula, informed by the works of historians and educators such as the late Kamal Salibi, assassinated journalist and historian Samir Kassir, and others including Fawaz Traboulsi and Charles Hayek. The second item ought to be a nationwide cultural campaign in various education centers to communicate the “lessons-learned,” one which centers the experiences of those who paid the price of the violent encounters throughout.
Students with limited resources and time are attempting to break the discursive cycles left by the civil war. The state must reciprocate this effort, by investing in a new model of memory and citizenship, one which prioritizes recognition between peoples and not factions. What it should not do is retreat behind the language of “technocracy” and depoliticization to avoid confronting inherited divisions.
Our collective task, youth and otherwise, today is to cultivate a new, cross-sectarian narrative of heroism that competes politically and electorally with the “old legends”. Breaking the taboo around Lebanon’s civil war is not merely a moral imperative; it is a strategic necessity for any genuine project of national recovery.