Author's note: An earlier draft of this article was first presented at the 2007 Middle East Studies Association conference in Montréal and then at the conference “Marginalisation and Mobilisation of Arab Youth,” American University of Beirut, Centre for Behavioural Research, 29–31 May 2009. I thank the participants of both conferences for their questions and comments and the anonymous referees of IJMES for their constructive criticism and guidance. I am also indebted to the Lebanese students who generously allowed me to interview them. Finally, I thank “Conflict in Cities and the Contested State,” funded by the Economic and Social and Research Council (RES-060-25-0015). Transliteration of Arabic in this article generally follows the IJMES system, adjusted for the Lebanese dialect as appropriate. Lebanese names of people and places follow conventional English spelling in Lebanese media and general use. Names of interviewees have been changed to protect anonymity.

¹ This quote is from a personal interview transcript, part of a series of interviews conducted with Lebanese youth from June 2005 to June 2006. The interview took place on 2 March 2006 in a Bliss Street cafe in the Hamra district of Beirut.

² Haugbolle, Sune, “Memory as Representation and Memory as Idiom,” in Breaking the Cycle: Civil Wars in Lebanon, ed. Youssef Choueiri (London: Stacey International, 2007), 121–33Google Scholar.

³ See, for example, Khalaf, Samir, Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj (London: Saqi, 2006)Google Scholar; and Makdisi, Saree, “Beirut, a City without History?” in Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Makdisi, Ussama Samir and Silverstein, Paul A. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006), 201–14Google Scholar.

⁴ For a selection of such work on Lebanese war memory, see Haugbolle, Sune, War and Memory in Lebanon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barak, Oren, “Don't Mention the War? The Politics of Remembrance and Forgetfulness in Postwar Lebanon,” Middle East Journal 61 (2007): 49–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nagel, Caroline, “Reconstructing Space, Re-creating Memory: Sectarian Politics and Urban Development in Post-war Beirut,” Political Geography 21 (2002): 717–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kassab, Elizabeth, “The Paramount Reality of the Beirutis: War Literature and the Lebanese Conflict,” Beirut Review 4 (1992): 63–84Google Scholar. See also Larkin, Craig, Memory and Conflict in Lebanon: Remembering and Forgetting the Past (London: Routledge, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

⁵ For a detailed outline and exploration of the concept of postmemory, see Hirsch, Marianne, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29 (2008): 103–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 418–46; and idem, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

⁶ Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁷ See Butler, Toby, “Memoryscape: Integrating Oral History, Memory and Landscape on the River Thames,” in People and Their Pasts: Public History Today, ed. Ashton, Paul and Kean, Hilda (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 223–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Personal interview, 30 November 2005, Luwayzeh.

⁹ Although the interviews were carried out during a one-year period, many of the contacts, observations, and ethnographic insights come from having spent five years living in the region.

¹⁰ These included activists involved with the Centre for Conflict Resolution and Peace-building based in Hamra and Umam Documentation and Research based in Haret Hrayek.

¹¹ Interviews were conducted in Lebanese-dialect Arabic, English, and a mixture of the two, a common trait among urban youth. Phrases such as “Anā ktīr tired” or “Sorry, would you like musāʿada shwaī?” are not unfamiliar hybrid terms used in Beiruti streets, shops, and campuses.

¹² Various titles have been given to the political period between February 2005 and May 2005 in which protest, euphoria, and popular mobilization followed the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In Lebanon, among supporters of the emerging loyalist coalition—led by Saad Hariri (the Future Movement), Samir Geagea (the Lebanese Forces), and Walid Jumblatt (the Progressive Socialist Party)—it was commonly known as the Independence Intifada or Uprising (intifāḍat al-istiqlāl); in the West it was dubbed the Cedar Revolution or the Beirut Spring.

¹³ Safa, Ousama, “Lebanon Springs Forward,” Journal of Democracy 17 (2006): 22–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Hanna Ziadeh perceptively summarizes the geopolitical shifts: “Syria's control over Lebanon was abruptly ended by a Lebanese, regional and international alliance: a Druze–Christian–Sunni coalition backed by an anti-Syrian American policy of intervention in the Middle East in alliance with a Saudi–French understanding on ending Syrian monopoly over Lebanon.” Sectarianism and Intercommunal Nation-Building in Lebanon (London: Hirst, 2006), 175.

¹⁵ Charlesworth, Esther, Architects without Frontiers: War, Reconstruction and Design Responsibility (Oxford: Elsevier, 2006), 57Google Scholar.

¹⁶ For more details on the phases of the war, see Hanf, Theodor, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation (London: The Centre for Lebanese Studies in association with I. B. Tauris, 1993)Google Scholar; and Johnson, Michael, All Honourable Men: The Social Origins of the War in Lebanon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ These statistics vary according to different sources. I am relying on Samir Khalaf's analysis of the postwar consequences in his work Civil and Uncivil Violence: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict in Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 3–4.

¹⁸ Ibid., 1.

¹⁹ Ahmad Beydoun, “Movements of the Past and Deadlocks of the Present,” in Choueiri, Breaking the Cycle, 15.

²⁰ See Choueiri, Breaking the Cycle; Makdisi, Ussama, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar; El-Khazen, Farid, The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000)Google Scholar; El-Solh, Raghid, Lebanon and Arabism: National Identity and State Formation (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies in association with I. B. Tauris, 1996)Google Scholar; Nasr, Salim, “The New Social Map,” in Lebanon in Limbo, ed. Hanf, T. and Salam, N. (Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2003), 143–58Google Scholar; and Gilsenan, Michael, Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996)Google Scholar.

²¹ This phrase was first coined by Lebanese journalist and civil activist Kassir, Samir in “Ahwal al-Dhakira fi Lubnan” (The Situation of Memory in Lebanon), in Memory for the Future: Actes du colloque tenu a la maison des nations unies, ed. Makarem, Amal (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2002), 195–200Google Scholar.

²² This narrative was popularized by Tueni, Ghassan in his work Une guerre pour les autres (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1985)Google Scholar, which examines the role of non-Lebanese factions (Syria, Palestinians, Israel, the United States) and Cold War dynamics in the civil violence that consumed Lebanon from 1975 to 1990.

²³ The dominant text on the “politics of memory” perspective remains Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), in which they argue that traditions and rituals are deliberately created or invented to support changing political realities, legitimate state power, define nations, and “inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.” Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” 1.

²⁴ Schudson, Michael, “Lives, Laws and Language: Commemorative versus Non-commemorative Forms of Effective Public Memory,” The Communication Review 2 (1997): 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona, Frames of Remembrance (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1994), 118Google Scholar.

²⁶ Khalaf, Samir, “Culture, Collective Memory, and the Restoration of Civility,” in Peace for Lebanon?, ed. Collings, Deirdre (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1994), 273–85Google Scholar; and Young, Michael, “The Sneer of Memory: Lebanon's Disappeared and Postwar Culture,” Middle East Report 217 (2000): 42–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ The titles of two events run by the Umam and Documentation Unit and Research are “Confronting Memories” (9–11 October 2008) and “Rethinking Memory” (27–30 November 2007), which presented a series of film screenings challenging the psychological effects of disappearance in Lebanon and exploring how other postwar societies have initiated local processes of truth, justice, and reconciliation.

²⁸ Hanssen, Jens and Genberg, Daniel, “Beirut in Memoriam: A Kaleidoscopic Space out of Focus,” in Crisis and Memory: Dimensions of Their Relationship in Islam and Adjacent Cultures, ed. Pflitsch, Andreas and Neuwirth, Angelika (Beirut: Orient Institut, 2002), 233Google Scholar.

²⁹ Khalaf, Heart of Beirut, 35.

³⁰ See Sune Haugbolle's discussion of war memory as an idiom for political change in “Memory as Representation,” 121–33.

³¹ Hirsch, Family Frames, 2.

³² Ibid., 22, 24.

³³ Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 106.

³⁴ Personal interview, 2 November 2005, Hamra.

³⁵ See “Poverty, Growth and Income Distribution in Lebanon,” Country Study, International Poverty Centre, United Nations Development Programme, No. 13, January 2008, http://www.undppovertycentre.org/pub/IPCCountryStudy13.pdf (accessed 1 July 2009). For deeper statistical analysis, see the Lebanese Republic's Central Administration for Statistics, http://www.cas.gov.lb (accessed 1 July 2009).

³⁶ Karam, E. G., Mneimneh, Z. N., Dimassi, H., Fayyad, J. A., Karam, A. N. et al. , “Lifetime Prevalence of Mental Disorders in Lebanon: First Onset, Treatment, and Exposure to War,” in Public Library of Science Medicine 5 (2008): 61Google ScholarPubMed.

³⁷ Sibai, T., Tohme, R. A., Beydoun, H. A., Kanaan, N., and Sibai, A. M., “Violent Behavior among Adolescents in Post-war Lebanon: The Role of Personal Factors and Correlation with Other Problem Behaviors,” Journal of Public Health Medicine 31 (2009): 39–46CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

³⁸ See Munir Bashshur's account of the process of finding a Lebanese history curriculum: “The Deepening of Social and Communal Cleavages in the Lebanese Educational System,” in Hanf and Salam, Lebanon in Limbo, 159–79.

³⁹ Makdisi, “Beirut, a City without History,” 201.

⁴⁰ Messara, Antoine, “Madha Yataʿllam al-Talamidha fi Kutub Taʾrikh Lubnan al-Madrasiyya” (What Do the Students Learn in School Textbooks on Lebanese History?), al-Difaʿ al-Watani al-Lubnani 13 (1995): 78Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Personal interview, 22 February 2006, Mansourieh.

⁴² For a deeper analysis of the concept of emplacement, see Flynn, Donna K., “We Are the Border: Identity, Exchange, and the State along the Benin–Nigeria Border,” American Ethnologist 24 (1997): 311–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Bevan, Robert, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Solidère is a Lebanese development company founded by Rafik Hariri in 1994 in charge of planning and redeveloping Beirut's city center after the devastation of war. Its thirty-year master plan (1994–2024) focuses on reconstructing Beirut as a global tourist commercial center, replete with beautifully restored churches and mosques, gardens, and Roman ruins.

⁴⁵ For more details on Tel al-Zaʿtar, see Cobban, Helena, The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Harris, William, Faces of Lebanon: Sects, Wars, and Global Extensions (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996), 165Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ These themes, while the concern of the three interviewees, are primarily Christian anxieties.

⁴⁷ Personal interview, 12 September 2005, American University of Beirut.

⁴⁸ Personal interview, 19 September 2005, Moseitybe, West Beirut.

⁴⁹ Theses quotes are directly transcribed from recorded video footage of the project, which Umam Documentation and Research generously allowed me to view at their Beirut center.

⁵⁰ For more details, see Manal Sarrouf's journalist account, “Rage in Ain al-Remmaneh after Tuesday Night's Violence,” Now Lebanon, 7 October 2009, http://nowlebanon.com/NewsArchiveDetails.aspx?ID=118492 (accessed 11 November 2009).

⁵¹ The exact number of deaths remains somewhat disputed, with Israel Defense Forces sources suggesting 700 to 800 were killed, while the Palestinian Red Crescent gives figures closer to 2,000. I am opting for the figure of 1,300 based on Bayan Nuwayhed Al-Hout's detailed analysis of victim lists in her book Sabra and Shatila, September 1982 (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

⁵² The political manifesto of the Lebanese opposition (al-muʿāraḍa) was first delivered at the Bristol hotel in December 2004 and later published as the “Beirut declaration.” It proclaims: “We have a common responsibility, Christians and Moslems, for the war which devastated our country; we believe that recognizing this responsibility is the essential condition for learning the lessons of the war so we will not be condemned indefinitely to repeating our past errors . . .” For more details, see http://www.beirutletter.com (accessed 4 July 2006).

⁵³ Personal interview, 13 October 2005, Verdun.

⁵⁴ Subsequent to the interview, the Wimpy café has been refurnished and taken over by the Costa Coffee chain.

⁵⁵ The shelling of Qana, a village in southern Lebanon, took place on 18 April 1996 as part of Israel's Grapes of Wrath operation, targeting Hizbullah fighters. The air strike hit a United Nations compound sheltering local residents and killed 106 civilians. A subsequent United Nations report concluded that it was “unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors.” United Nations Security Council Document S-1996-337.

⁵⁶ Personal interview, 1 November 2005, Zgharta.

⁵⁷ The most notable incident was the violent confrontation between Bashir Gemayel's Kataʾib and Suleiman Franjieh's Marada militias, which resulted in the death of Franjieh's eldest son Tony and his family in the summer resort of Ehden, just above Zgharta, on 14 June 1978. As a consequence the Christians in the northern mountains broke permanently from the Lebanese Front, and a family feud developed between the Franjieh and Gemayel clans. For a more detailed account see Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon, 235–37.

⁵⁸ Steven Seidman, “Streets of Beirut: Self and the Encounter with the ‘Other,’” Idafat: Arab Journal of Sociology (2009): 7–8.

⁵⁹ Khoury, Elias, The Kingdom of Strangers (Mamlakat al-Ghurabaʾ), trans. Haydar, Paula (Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 1996), 5–7Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 67–68Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Carr, David, Time, Narrative, and History (Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991), 9Google Scholar.

⁶² Personal interview, 10 December 2005, Luwayzeh.

⁶³ Geagea was arrested in April 1994 and subsequently convicted of instigating acts of violence and assassinating former Prime Minister Rashid Karami and National Liberal Party leader Danny Chamoun. He served eleven years in solitary confinement before his sudden release in July 2005.

⁶⁴ Personal interview, 19 December 2005, Dahiyya.

⁶⁵ Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon, 305.

⁶⁶ All of these sources of victimization were mentioned by students during the course of my interviews.

⁶⁷ Personal interview, 11 December 2005, Hamra.

⁶⁸ Personal interview, 11 February 2006, Hamra.

⁶⁹ Robert Fisk is the ubiquitous war correspondent and Beirut-based journalist who has devoted much of his life to covering politics and violence in the region.

⁷⁰ Seidman, Streets of Beirut, 17.

⁷¹ Pamela Chabrieh, “Breaking the Vicious Circle! Contributions of the 25–35 Lebanese Age Group,” in Choueiri, Breaking the Cycle, 70.

⁷² Personal interview, 13 October 2005, Beirut Downtown, Nijmeh Square.

⁷³ See Patrick Galey and Josie Ensor, “Thousands to Join Laique Pride March in Name of Secularism,” Daily Star, 23 April 2010.