Winning Lebanon: Youth Politics, Populism, and the Production of Sectarian Violence, 1920-1958

Description

By the mid-twentieth century, youth movements around the globe ruled the streets. In Lebanon, young people in these groups attended lectures, sang songs, and participated in sporting events; their music tastes, clothing choices and routine activities shaped their identities. Yet scholars of modern Lebanon often focus exclusively on the sectarian makeup and violent behaviors of these socio-political groupings, obscuring the youth cultures that they forged. Using unique sources to highlight the daily lives of the young men and women of Lebanon's youth politics, Dylan Baun traces the political and cultural history of a diverse set of youth-centric organizations from the 1920s to 1950s to reveal how these youth movements played significant roles in the making of the modern Middle East. Outlining how youth movements established a distinct type of politics and populism, Winning Lebanon reveals that these groups both encouraged the political socialization of different types of youth, and, through their attempts to 'win' Lebanon - physically and metaphorically - around the 1958 War, helped produce sectarian violence.

Dylan Baun is Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East and Islamic World History at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is the author of numerous articles on the history of youth and young people in the modern Middle East, in journals including Arab Studies Journal and International Journal for the History of Sport.

'Winning Lebanon provides a finely-grained examination of the techniques and rituals employed by populist youth movements in mid-twentieth century Lebanon combined with a reconsideration of the contingent and sometimes ambivalent positions taken by these movements in the civil war of 1958 that challenges conventional assumptions about the sectarian nature of that conflict.' James Jankowski, University of Colorado 'Baun brings unique detail and differentiation to the history of youth politics in Lebanon. As a corrective to widespread assumptions, he argues that conflicts between movements were not exclusively the product of sectarianism. Violence was triggered by extraneous factors and turned sectarian because of divisive practices and language learned under colonial rule.' Peter Wien, University of Maryland 'Baun's Winning Lebanon is a useful reminder to judge the past on its own terms, not on the basis of what happened later.' P. Clawson, Choice