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Abstract

After fifteen years of harrowing violence, none of the perpetrators of the Lebanese civil war have been criminally charged for human rights violations. Instead, the leaders of Lebanon’s wartime militias assumed control of the post-war government, absolving all crimes of a political nature committed against civilians between 1975 and 1990. This blanket amnesty law has long been framed as a form of “state-sponsored amnesia,” ushering Lebanon’s militia leaders into political power while denying the people meaningful opportunities for truth or reconciliation. To this day, there is no official narrative of the civil war—given the opportunity to establish a hegemonic memory of the conflict, Lebanon's political elite have suppressed discourse on the subject altogether. More recently, however, it has been argued that the absence of an official state narrative of the Lebanese civil war has inadvertently led to the proliferation of hyper-local, sectarian memory work to address the conflict’s enduring legacy and persisting trauma. This paper examines the two existing academic explanations of Lebanese postwar memory culture, the “collective amnesia” thesis and the “communal memory” thesis, with regard to local conceptions of transitional justice. Foregrounding both the repressive and restorative dimensions of memory work, I conduct semi-structured, qualitative interviews with Lebanese of various confessional backgrounds to understand how the 1991 General Amnesty Law was experienced at the local level with regard to three overarching themes: amnesia, memory, and justice. By integrating scholarship on transitional justice, collective memory, and sectarian fragmentation in postwar Lebanon, I ultimately refute the leading hypothesis that the Lebanese have passively forgotten their past to the detriment of the present.

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