Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon (review)

Despite Khalaf's wish to find the socioeconomic sources of violence in a country at war with itself since the first clash of Christians and Druze (1860), this study provides ample evidence that civil wars are based on primordial ethnic differentiations. The ethnic factions in Lebanon speak the same language and share mostly the same history and cultural heritage, yet each has preferred its elements of uniqueness to the equally deep reality of what all these factions share. The Lebanese case undermines the recently popular fad of describing national consciousness as "invented" or "imagined." Ottoman Islamic tolerance toward the two other Religions of the Book helped to sustain and even fortify the distinct confessional communities in Lebanon during those centuries in which European empires experimented (in some cases successfully) with melting tribal traditions into a common patriotism delineated by the borders of sovereign states. To explain why this project failed in Lebanon is essentially Khalaf's undertaking. He is convincing in his assertion that violence has its own dialectic that can explain its permanence, repetition, and escalation. Nevertheless, it seems that tribalism is the main force that has defeated the homogenizing effects of modernization, urbanization, and now globalization. In a tribal context, Khalaf's distinction of civil strife and uncivil violence is just too couth and cannot hold.