On April 13, 2025, the Lebanese, to the day, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the start of Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war that, with hindsight, can be seen as the seminal event in the life of the country and the surrounding region. Today, it is hard to separate the legacy of the civil war from the prevalent political, economic, social, and security problems facing Lebanon, although many intervening events and developments—from domestic intra-Lebanese confrontations to regional interference, interventions, and wars—have added their own heavy weight and impact. How Lebanon escapes the deleterious effects of its fifty-year-old war will thus depend on how it addresses the old conditions that helped precipitate it, as well as on instituting the proper mechanisms of governance to replace those that have fallen prey to corrupt politicians interested in perpetuating their political power.
Many factors sparked Lebanon’s civil war, and each had its own complications that escaped successful mitigation. From Lebanon’s confessional political system that depended on sectarian elite agreements and compromises, to the country’s skewed laissez-fair political economy that long emphasized, and still does, banking and services, to the inability of state institutions to arrest socio-political chaos, to the presence of armed Palestinian factions operating outside of the writ of said state and army. What exacerbated this combination of factors was the sectarian elites’ inability to address the obvious problems or to find an acceptable compromise with armed Palestinian factions. Thus, when the war reared its ugly head on April 13, 1975, the elites could not force their followers to step back from the abyss nor could the Lebanese government order the confessionally based army to stop the chaos.
While not all the factors that helped start the war are present in Lebanon’s political life today—primarily, the armed Palestinian resistance that impinged on Lebanon’s state sovereignty before and during part of the war has disappeared—the country is still looking for a serious mitigation of structural problematic conditions. Although partly addressed in the Taif Agreement of 1989, intended to ensure equity in Christian and Muslim political representation, Lebanon’s confessionalism still acts as a hindrance to the development of a secular political system that reflects the profound social change in Lebanese society. Lebanon’s laissez-faire economy still depends on services and banking as its main contributors to the gross domestic product, to the detriment of the agricultural and industrial sectors. And as the Lebanese state works to revive its institutions following the weakening of Hezbollah after the latest war with Israel, political elites try to maintain their fiefdoms and interests. To be sure, 50 years after the start of the devastating civil war, Lebanon is still in need of what can assuredly be called a national project for the revival of institutions, economic endeavors, and social organization.
An important station on the road to ending the civil war was the Taif Agreement that—while not straying too far from the confessional political system consecrated at independence by the National Pact of 1943—continues to be unimplemented. Two important provisions stand out as needing to be enacted. First is the agreement’s abolition of confessionalism as a system of political representation for the lower house of parliament and creation of an upper house, a Senate, in which confessions would be represented. Such a provision awaits implementation as the Lebanese still elect a unicameral parliament on a sectarian basis, albeit equally between Christians and Muslims. Second is administrative decentralization, which was intended to allow for more say for local and provincial authorities. The Lebanese state, however, remains as centralized as ever.
A defining characteristic of the war was the striking division between Muslim and Christian religious communities in urban centers as well as in many rural areas, as the conflict progressed from mainly a contest between a leftist-Palestinian coalition and rightist forces in the 1970s to a clearly sectarian conflict between overwhelmingly Muslim and Christian militias. Following the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut after the Israeli invasion of 1982, Muslim militias controlled the streets of western Beirut, the south, the Beqaa Valley in the east, and the far north near the Syrian border, while Christian factions took over life in majority-Christian areas from eastern Beirut to the north of the country. In the first two years of the war, Christian militias succeeded in occupying Palestinian refugee camps in eastern Beirut, expelling their refugee populations to Muslim-controlled areas, and perpetrating massacres against unarmed civilians, as happened in the Tal Zaatar refugee camp. In some areas of the countryside, especially in central Lebanon, Druze fighters sacked and destroyed mainly Christian villages, expelled their inhabitants, and squatted with their families in their abandoned houses.
Divisions among Lebanese communities happened in parallel to Israeli and Syrian control over separate areas of the country. Between 1982 and 1985, Israel consolidated a security zone that it had established in southern Lebanon in 1978 following an invasion that year and organized a Lebanese, Christian-led military contingent to maintain order and protect its border from attacks. Throughout the 1980s, the Syrian Army, which invaded the country in 1976 to help maintain a balance of power between rightist-Christian factions and the Leftist-Palestinian coalition, reigned supreme in Muslim areas of Beirut and around the country as Syria played a controlling role of political life in West Beirut.
These internal divisions and outside control pointed to two clear and consequential facts surrounding the civil war and affecting Lebanon’s politics in the postwar era. The first was that the Lebanese state, as a collection of institutions and governing mechanisms, ceased to be the sovereign entity in control of the country and the arbiter between its political forces, however limited that role always was before the war. The second was that Lebanon as a unified entity and nation reached a state of partial de facto partition between Muslim and Christian areas that, had the civil war not ended, could have become de jure. This was especially a risk as Christian political factions resented the complete control Syria exercised over the country during the war and threatened to secede from the mother nation.
One important development accompanying the dominant role that Syria played in Lebanon during the civil war was the gradual but assured march by Hezbollah to become a dominant political force in the country in the postwar period. As Syria consolidated its position and strengthened its military hold of Lebanon following the civil war, Hezbollah began to act independently of state institutions. This culminated in the armed group’s practically becoming a state-within-the-state as Iran supplied it with weapons and financial wherewithal. The end of Syria’s military presence in Lebanon in 2005 following the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri and the resultant international pressure on Damascus to withdraw from the country secured a temporary period of political independence that ended with Hezbollah—as the only armed faction in the country—asserting itself as the most influential political force. It took a devastating assault in 2023-2024 by Israel against Hezbollah and Lebanon to roll back the party’s dominant role in the country, a development that could be a decisive factor in reviving the Lebanese state’s position as having monopoly over the use of force.
Indeed, with hindsight, Lebanon’s civil war of 1975-1990 was a consequence of domestic and regional complications that the country’s sectarian elites failed to ameliorate. In the postwar period, Lebanon’s politicians continued to act as if they learned no lessons from the civil war that could help the country address the serious problems that precipitated it. Lebanon today continues to face political, economic, social, and security challenges specifically because its governance system has not developed in a way that allows for the participation of new social forces in governance or that provides alternatives to the limitations of confessionalism. It is hoped that a secular political system with minimal attention to sectarian divisions can gradually replace the old political formula in the country in the service of its people.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: USMC
