Lebanon marks the fiftieth anniversary of the start of its civil war on April 13, 2025, in a state of institutional disrepair, economic collapse, and political exhaustion. The war is officially past, but its infrastructures remain deeply present—reflected in who holds power, how decisions are avoided, and what history is allowed to be told.

As memorials are staged, reports issued, and headlines briefly nod to the past, a deeper question emerges: what does it mean that we have spent decades refusing to know this war? And what possibilities remain foreclosed until we do?

On Silence, Knowing, and the Architecture of Forgetting

Fifty years have passed since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. A conflict that lasted fifteen years and reshaped every institution in the country continues to define Lebanon’s political present—not just through the ruins it left behind, but through the systems of forgetting it entrenched. The violence of the war was never meaningfully confronted; it was deferred, obscured, and ultimately instrumentalized.

So, does knowing still matter? This question—ethical, political, and institutional—sits at the center of Lebanon’s postwar condition. The refusal to reckon with the war’s history is not an accident of trauma or cultural fatigue. It is a governing strategy. And it has produced a hollow political order: one that repackages wartime elites, disables public accountability, and sustains a fragile peace built on silence.

Historiography as Absence

Most Lebanese begin engaging with the war through absence: stories cut short, photographs without context, and institutional narratives that say little or nothing. Archives, when they exist, are elusive. Key records remain classified, destroyed, or simply withheld. Foreign repositories—from the United States to France and the United Kingdom and elsewhere—offer only selective access, shaped by strategic priorities rather than genuine historical integrity.

This is not simply a question of missing documents. It reflects the uneven distribution of historical access—who can write history and whose memories are denied authority. With minor exceptions, knowledge production around the war is still shaped by sectarian, geopolitical, and academic alignments that insulate power and fragment truth.

Any serious attempt to address the war’s legacy must begin by enabling plural, critical access to history. This means declassifying official documents, investing in public and local archival infrastructure, and protecting civil society efforts that document war crimes, personal testimonies, and the disappeared. These are not scholarly luxuries—they are preconditions for rebuilding institutional trust.

Postwar Memory as Policy

The postwar order was not designed to remember. The 1991 amnesty law, passed under the banner of reconciliation, was, in fact, a legal shield for impunity. Law No. 84/91 pardoned political and war-related crimes, including murder, kidnapping, and forced displacement, committed before March 28, 1991. Former militia leaders were folded into formal politics without scrutiny. No truth commission was created. No reparations were made. No national curriculum was reformed. The disappeared—estimated at around 17,000 people—remained unacknowledged.

What followed was a politics of managed forgetting. The power-sharing system codified in the 1989 Taif Agreement did more than halt the fighting; it disincentivized collective memory. Historical clarity would have threatened the very consensus that allowed the war’s architects to govern its aftermath.

Forgetting, then, became a function of governance—not a cultural defect, but a deliberate strategy. And yet, policy can still play a corrective role. Revising curricula—particularly the history textbook, which still halts at 1975—supporting critical pedagogy, and confronting the war’s multiple narratives are all actionable steps. The goal is not to impose a single narrative but to prevent institutionalized silence.

Beyond the Local: Regional and Imperial Entanglements

The war is too often reduced to a breakdown in sectarian coexistence. This framing obscures the fact that Lebanon served as a strategic arena for Cold War rivalry, Israeli regional aggression and atrocities, Syrian tutelage, and broader imperial entanglements. These actors, and many other foreign players, were not background participants—they structured the very terms of conflict.

Postwar historiography has largely depoliticized this dimension, rarely presenting external influence as more than inevitable interference. In fact, arms flows, donor conditions, intelligence coordination, and reconstruction contracts were central to how the war was fought and how the postwar order was built. New and emerging scholarship has begun to seriously unpack the role of regional and international actors in Lebanon’s civil war, placing it within broader patterns of foreign military and political intervention.

Lebanon is not unique in this regard. Post-conflict states such as Bosnia, Iraq, and El Salvador similarly reveal how proxy warfare and international negotiation often produce unstable political settlements. Reckoning with Lebanon’s war requires tracing these entanglements. Policy and research communities in Lebanon—before anywhere else—must take the lead in supporting this reframing in order to understand the war’s global dimensions and their continued relevance today.

Knowing as Praxis

The refusal to confront the past has had consequences far beyond the historical record. It has produced a political culture allergic to accountability, one in which impunity is normalized, and dissent is structurally constrained. Institutions suffer not only from corruption or mismanagement but from a foundational disconnection from the truth.

Memory work, in this context, is not symbolic. It is a political act—one that disrupts the conditions that allow violence to be disavowed and redistributed. Artists, historians, and grassroots initiatives that seek to preserve testimony and expose complicity are engaged in a form of democratic repair. Their work has rarely been supported and often actively obstructed.

Reform agendas that do not address this epistemic rupture remain superficial. Institutional rebuilding that ignores history only reproduces the dysfunction it claims to fix. Transitional justice is not a post-conflict luxury—it is a structural necessity.

Reckoning as Reform: What Should Be Done?

Addressing the legacy of the war requires more than acknowledgment. It demands structural, policy-driven interventions across education, archival access, and justice mechanisms:

• Reform historical education
  Update national curricula to reflect rigorous, multi-perspective accounts of the war. Support teacher training in historical literacy, civic ethics, and critical thinking. A 1997-1999 attempt to produce a unified history textbook failed due to political obstruction; future efforts must be safeguarded from sectarian vetoes.
  
  
• Enable public access to archives
  Declassify key documents, especially those related to disappearances and foreign interventions. Fund and protect independent and community-based archives like UMAM Documentation & Research and Act for the Disappeared, whose work remains at risk without institutional backing.
  
  
• Support truth-telling and victim-centered justice
  Institutionalize testimony gathering, particularly from families of the disappeared and survivors. Build on existing legal frameworks—such as Law 105 (2018) on the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared—and ensure the National Commission on the Disappeared has full political and financial support.
  
  
• Integrate Lebanon into comparative research
  Situate Lebanon’s war in broader studies of foreign intervention, post-conflict governance, and transitional justice. Partnerships with regional scholars and comparative cases—such as Argentina’s truth commissions or Rwanda’s memorial processes—can offer both caution and guidance.
  
  
• Anchor institutional reform in memory work
  Ensure that any state-building or political reform initiative includes serious engagement with the country’s unresolved past. Without truth, neither institutional resilience nor accountability can take hold. 

After the Ruins

Fifty years on, Lebanon remains suspended between knowing and unknowing—between a state that refuses its past and a public increasingly aware of its importance. What we need is not commemorative slogans but a confrontation with the political structures that made forgetting so durable.

The real question is not whether knowing matters. It is whether we are willing to accept what knowing demands—and whether those who have benefited from amnesia are ready to relinquish its protections.