Making Sense of Violence: How the Lebanon War Became Sectarian

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the rise of sectarian political order in Lebanon during the Civil War. In the Middle East, religious differences are often seen as an intractable problem, and sectarian power-sharing rules, all-encompassing. When we look at the pre-war period in Lebanon, while religious differences played a role at the national level, most sectarian communities did not have robust institutions to maintain order and coordination amongst themselves. Internally, the groups were politically divided, and many political parties were ostensibly secular. Despite serious efforts to abolish sectarianism throughout the war, by the end, the system of sectarian order was more entrenched in all levels of society. At the same time, sectarianism remains just one of many relevant cleavages within Lebanon. How do we explain the trajectory of sectarian order in Lebanon? What does the persistence of sectarian order reveal about the challenges of nation building and political order? Conventional scholarship argues that violence can help construct both identities and order: external violence is thought to reinforce national identities instead of subnational ones, and intra-group violence is thought to reinforce subnational boundaries. By contrast, my argument highlights the role of framing in mediating these relationships. This inductive study is based on analysis of fourteen archives, novel event data, and a close reading of party ephemera and historical newspapers from 1958 to 1982. By combining this data within a micro-comparative framework, this dissertation reconstructs the dynamics of contention leading up to and throughout the early stages of the Lebanon Civil War. Comparing episodes of violence in Lebanon over time, I explore how external violence, inter-group violence, and intra-group violence shaped political order. I show that the relationship between violence and the creation of identity-based order is conditional on framing effects. These frames help decision-makers link specific threats to policies, including new rules and institutions to govern intra- and inter-group behavior. By examining examples of each type of violence over successive junctures, I unsettle the notion that sectarian political order in Lebanon was inevitable, instead showing how elites became trapped by their ideas as they attempted to make sense of problems that arose in the war such as Israeli interference in Lebanese politics, inter-communal massacres, and opportunistic violence. My work has general implications for how violence can shape behavior, the types of political order that emerge from civil conflicts, and the important role of ideational change during periods marked by uncertainty.