Abstract
This chapter discusses the visions of peace held by Lebanese civil society peace workers. The interviewees from Lebanon work on three visions of peace, none of which is a political goal per se. Rather, they stress the importance of civil peace (silim in Arabic): the quality of the relations between the different groups that make up Lebanese society. Or, moving even further away from peace as a political phenomenon, they say that they work on peace as a personal endeavour: what every individual can do to maintain peaceful interpersonal relations. The few peace workers who do have a political view of peace stress that they see peace primarily as a method (non-violent activism), with ‘justice’ as its goal.
In Arabic actually we have two words for peace: salaam and silim . Salaam is about a conflict between countries, or some conflict related to governance. Like the war between Syria and Israel, or the pro-and anti-Assad forces. Silim is more like ‘civil peace’, the relations between people from the different groups in a society.
(Interview Mustafa Haid (Dawlaty))
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Notes
- 1.
See Chap. 2, Sect. 2.4.1.
- 2.
E.g. interviews Lama el Chaar (WILPF), Ramzi Merhej (Search for Common Ground (SFCG)), Rania Fazah (independent consultant) and Riad Jarjour (Forum for Development, Culture and Dialogue (FDCD)).
- 3.
E.g. interviews Hana Nassif (Association Justice et Misericordia (AJEM)), Jarjour and Ziad Saab (Fighters for Peace (FfP).
- 4.
E.g. interviews El Chaar and Ali Chahine (independent consultant).
- 5.
E.g. Maysa Mourad (independent educationalist), Saab, Nemer Frayha (Lebanese University), Fouad Dirani (FfP), Hoda Barakat (Adyan) and Elie Abouaoun (USIP). Analytically, it is possible to further subdivide this peace into a purely psychological ‘inner peace’ and a more outward-oriented ‘interpersonal peace’. In practice however, all interviewees who talked about peace as an individual-level phenomenon stressed that they see peace as multi-layered, with inner peace a precondition for working on peace with others.
- 6.
Interview Frayha.
- 7.
The inclusion of ‘hatred’ indicates that it is not just a choice about behaviour, but also an emotional disposition. See e.g. interviews Assad Chaftari (Wahdatouna Khalasouna) and Merhej. In conceptual terms, it is similar to what Anatol Rapoport called ‘personal pacifism’ (Rapoport 1992: 153–156).
- 8.
Anonymous interview employee#1, AJEM.
- 9.
Interview Abouaoun. Similar views were expressed by a.o. Chahine, Abouaoun, Merhej, Saab, Chibli Mallat (Right to Non-violence (RNV)) and Antoine Messara (Lebanese Foundation for Permanent Civil Peace (LFPCP)).
- 10.
Interview Barakat. Although the organization is not mentioned very often, the argument is reminiscent of UNESCO’s work on building a culture of peace. See http://en.unesco.org/cultureofpeace/.
- 11.
Interview Merhej.
- 12.
Interview Saab.
- 13.
Interview Merhej.
- 14.
- 15.
E.g. interviews Fazah, Mallat and Maan Abdul Salam (Etana).
- 16.
To paraphrase a quote we also encountered in Chap. 6: ‘there is no way to peace, peace is the way’. Interview Mallat.
- 17.
Interview Fazah. Similar views were expressed by a.o. Mallat, Nassif and Fadi Abi Allam (Permanent Peace Movement (PPM)).
- 18.
Interview Abdul Salam. Similar views were expressed by the other Syrians I interviewed: Salloum and Haid. Cf. also the opinion that ‘dictators wage war on their own people’ we encountered in Chap. 6.
- 19.
Interview Saab
- 20.
Interview Fazah. More on this hesitancy in Sect. 7.2.3.
- 21.
Lebanon is ranked 35 in the top-100 of smallest countries in the world. See https://www.countries-ofthe-world.com/smallest-countries.html.
- 22.
E.g. interviews Abi Allam, Chaftari, Abouaoun, Haid and Mazen Abou Hamdan (Chaml).
- 23.
Interview Abou Hamdan.
- 24.
Interview Abi Allam. Similar views were also expressed by Abouaoun and Haid.
- 25.
Interviews Chaftari, Abi Allam, Ouaiss and Fazah. (See also Zakharia 2011: 8, 16–17).
- 26.
Interview Abi Allam.
- 27.
See Chap. 5, Sect. 5.3.1.
- 28.
Anonymous interview diplomat #1 (MoFA, DSH).
- 29.
Interview Ernesto Braam (MoFA, DAM). Similar views were expressed by e.g. anonymous diplomat #5 (MoFA, DAM), former diplomat #1 and Dutch civil society peace workers Van Oosterzee, Sweeris and Ketelaar.
- 30.
Interview Chaftari.
- 31.
The rest of this section draws heavily on the interview with Haid. Other interviewees did not make the same sharp distinction between salaam and silim, but argued for example that salaam can also refer to a more spiritual notion of peace (interview Abdul Salam), or that the difference is somewhat semantic (interview Abouaoun (USIP). However, when asked directly, they all did concede that there is a difference and that most Lebanese organizations are not in fact working on political salaam but rather on social silim (see also, e.g., interviews Chami and Abi Allam).
- 32.
A 2015 report written for the EU confirms this observation for Lebanese civil society more broadly, stating that only 31% of all CSOs is engaged in lobby and advocacy efforts and fewer than 4% of the respondents considered their lobby to have been successful (Lteif 2015: 64, 108).
- 33.
Interview Abou Hamdan.
- 34.
Cf. interview Fazah, who said that ‘in Lebanon no-one is working on political peace. They have given up because it is too hard.’
- 35.
Interview Haid.
- 36.
Interview Haid.
- 37.
Interview Haid. There is an intriguing question here of where terrorist violence fits in. My guess would be that for the terrorists, it is an attempt to breach the political peace and start a war. With a few high-profile and highly destructive exceptions however, their effect is usually limited to breaching civil peace. In the Lebanese context this manifests as increased tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, in a Western context between Muslim immigrants and non-Muslim natives.
- 38.
The interviews were done in the summer of 2014, before the rise of Islamic State.
- 39.
The term ‘current confusion’ is a euphemism used by Salloum. The other Syrians also refused to openly speak about ‘civil war’. Haid, e.g., explicitly said that ‘the majority of Syrians, both pro and against Assad, and also the non-violent activists, say it is not a civil war.’
- 40.
Interview Haid.
- 41.
Interview Abdul Salam. For scholars of war this distinction between two kinds of intrastate war might be slightly confusing, since the terms civil war and intrastate war are often used interchangeably. However, in the Lebanese context this distinction serves to delineate the traumatic 1975–1990 civil war from other (and ongoing) episodes of violence. A Dutch peace worker residing in the region confirmed the idea that, at least in 2014, the conflict in Syria was not yet a civil war (Marjolein Wijninckx (PAX), private correspondence). See also (Setrakian 2012).
- 42.
Interview Merhej.
- 43.
The fact that the three peaces line up in a column does not necessarily indicate a hierarchical relationship, although it is tempting to see the argument in this light: personal pacifism underlies both civil peace and non-violent activism. However, there is no hierarchical relationship between civil peace and non-violent activism, as they are located in different domains (social and political)2.
- 44.
Interview Chami. Similar views with regard to the centrality of (non)violence to peace were expressed by a.o. Abi Allam, Mallat and Abouaoun.
- 45.
See Sect. 7.2.2. It could be noted that ‘justice’ does seem to be a rather holistic concept, encompassing both accountability for past crimes, equity in the socio-economic domain, upholding collective and individual rights and generally ‘everyone getting what she or he deserves’ (interview Rania Fazah). Visions of justice are not part of the present study, but it would be an interesting follow-up project.
- 46.
E.g. interviews Merhej, Moukaddem, Chaftari.
- 47.
Interview Chaftari.
- 48.
E.g. interviews Merhej, Abi Allam and anonymous employee #1, AJEM.
- 49.
Interview Mallat.
- 50.
Similar to the holistic vision of Peace Writ Large that inspires Dutch civil society peace workers. See Chap. 6, Sect. 6.1.
- 51.
Interview Barakat.
- 52.
Interview Chahine.
- 53.
Interview Merhej.
- 54.
Interview Fadi Daou (Adyan).
- 55.
Interview Merhej.
- 56.
Interview Saab.
- 57.
Interview Abi Allam. As far as I can tell he might be right about this claim as well. The others who stated that peace is a political phenomenon were either independent consultants mainly involved in peace projects outside Lebanon (e.g. Chahine and Chami), or people working on non-violence (e.g. Abouaoun, Mallat and Mourad).
- 58.
Interview Saab.
- 59.
See Chap. 3, Sect. 3.1.5.
- 60.
E.g. interviews Fazah, Merhej and Abou Hamdan.
- 61.
Interviews Barakat and Abouaoun.
- 62.
E.g. interviews Abi Allam, Chaftari, Abouaoun, Abou Hamdan and Haid.
- 63.
See Chap. 6, Sects. 6.1 and 6.4.1.
- 64.
Interview Chaftari.
- 65.
See Chap. 5, Sect. 5.2.
- 66.
E.g. interviews Jan Jaap van Oosterzee (PAX) and Guido van Leemput (UCP).
- 67.
See Sects. 4.4, 5.3.1 and 6.4.4. The distinction between peace as a collective and peace as an individual phenomenon is also made by, e.g. (Adolf 2009: 2).
- 68.
Interviews Messara, Chami, Abdul Salaam and Mallat.
- 69.
Interview Barakat.
- 70.
E.g. interviews Frayha and Mourad.
- 71.
The exception would be those military officers that say they work only on establishing a safe and secure environment in which people can experience everyday peace. However, even many of them say that the next step would be to implement political reforms and build a viable state. It is just that they do not see a role for themselves in this statebuilding process. Cf. also the high average group score of the military officers on vision V, peace as politics, in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.1.5.
- 72.
Interview Merhej.
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van Iterson Scholten, G.M. (2020). Lebanon: Civil Peace. In: Visions of Peace of Professional Peace Workers. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27975-2_7
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