Registration is now open for the May 2026 class!
Beware of Small States: Lebanon since 1975
In this 5-parts class, you will get an overview of Lebanese history and politics from 1975, with a focus on the so-called ‘postwar’ from 1990 onward.
We will go beyond sensationalist headlines and shallow coverage, and beyond simplistic, top-down explanations for the country. Instead of a linear timeline of events, which you can get from Wikipedia anyway, you will get a messy one. After all, politics is not linear. Political actors evoke events from the recent or not-so-recent past as part of their politics in the present.
I will also use personal stories as someone who grew up in Lebanon in a very conservative, at times even Far Right, Christian environment, to explain how my own personal journey away from right-wing and towards left-wing, quasi-anarchist, politics helped me understand Lebanon better.
Classes are on average 2 hours long, once a week.
When?
(Finished) Class 1: Saturdays, 4-6pm UK time: Jan 17, Jan 24, Jan 31, Feb 7, Feb 14.
(Ongoing): Class 2: Saturdays, 4-6pm UK time: Mar 14, Mar 21, Mar 28, Apr 4, Apr 11
Registration is now open for
Class 3: Saturdays, 4-6pm UK time. May 2, May 9, May 16, May 23, May 30.
See info below
Syllabus
Each class is different from the previous one, but the syllabus remains more or less the same — with new updates each time. This is to make sure that we cover important themes and frameworks that would help you understand Lebanon better, while making sure it’s always up to date where relevant.
Week 1 : The stories we tell ourselves about this painfully ordinary country.
(2+ hours)
We will start with an exploration of the ruling political classes of Lebanon. How do they deal with contradictions within them? How do they appeal to Lebanese nationalism, sectarianism and xenophobia? This will help us ask: What are some of the dominant stories told by the Lebanese about Lebanon? Did the Lebanon wars (1975-1990) really end? If no, why? And why is it worth questioning the ‘postwar’ discourse?
Questions and comments are encouraged throughout.
Week 2 : Five academic-y concepts that are easier to understand than they seem.
(2+ hours)
Sectarianisation is the process through which sectarianism is created and recreated. Bordering is the process through which borders, physical or otherwise, are created and recreated. Wartime is the temporality whereby the past is ‘activated’ to frame the present. Anticipation of Violence is the sense that violence is always around the corner in times of ‘peace.’ All contribute to a sense that the present keeps on being extended, which is how we get the permanent now.
We will go through these one by one and back them up with examples. The idea is that by the end of the session you’ll have five new frameworks that will allow you to better understand Lebanese politics.
Questions and comments are encouraged throughout.
Week 3 : “We are the haunted children of the children of war.” The postwar that never was, and the post-memory generation that inherited its traumas.
(2+ hours)
We will look at the generation that grew up in the aftermath of the Lebanese wars: the one I belong to. We will use some personal examples to talk about crucial concepts in the field of memory studies, and in particular postmemory, and ask: how can a hauntological approach help us understand ‘postwar’ Lebanon?
Questions and comments are encouraged throughout.
Week 4 : “From life in the midst of history to the collapse.” From the hopes of 2015 and 2019 to the horrors of 2020.
(2+ hours)
We will go through two major protests that happened in the past decade: ‘You Stink’, in 2015, and the biggest one to date, in 2019. I was an organiser in 2015 and a participant in 2019.
We will ask: What were these protests about, and how did they differ from one another? We will also look at the aftermath of the 2019 uprising, with a focus on what is referred to in Lebanon as the collapse: the Covid-19 pandemic, the economic crisis and the port of Beirut explosion – all of which occurred/started within months of one another in 2020. We will ask: How did we go from hope to despair in such a short time span?
Questions and comments are encouraged throughout.
Week 5 : Lebanon yesterday, today, tomorrow.
(2-3 hours)
We will have an open-ended final session in which we go through the past month of classes. Depending on the interests of the class, we can also talk about current events, and where Lebanon might be heading next.
A special guest will be joining us in the second half of our session.
What you’ll get
- Access to all 5 sessions of course + audio recordings
- Lifetime access to the Google Drive with links and resources, continuously updated. These will include texts with my commentary, my PhD dissertation, selected books, papers, articles and films
- Lifetime access to the Hauntologies newsletter for free
- Discounts on future classes
- An invitation to join a Signal group with the other participants
Fees
This class costs £220 (around $300).
Discounts
For previous participants
- 30% off if you have taken another class with me before
- 80% off if you are retaking the same class
If you cannot afford it at all: there will be a few free / discounted spots reserved per class. In that case, you will be asked to pay what you can. All I ask is that should your financial situation change one day to please pay the rest, whenever that may be. I genuinely want to make this as accessible as possible.
How to Register and pay
I am working on automating the booking system, but in the meantime:
To register your interest in a class, all you have to do is:
- Send an email: ayoub@thefirethesetimes.com
- Or send a Signal message: Ayoub.02
- And tell me if you prefer Saturdays, Wednesdays, or can do either
For security reasons, introduce yourself and mention the class you’re interested in in the subject line. I don’t respond to anonymous messages.
Please pay as soon as you can to book your spot — and let me know when you do.
The easiest way to pay is:
- Through my Ko-Fi account as it allows Debit/Credit Card, Stripe and Paypal.
- Through Stripe directly
- By direct bank transfer. Let me know if you prefer this option.
Once that is done, I’ll send you the extended syllabus and Zoom link.
Resources
I use multiple books, films and articles to help me with the class, most of which were used for my PhD.
You won’t have to read or watch any of them. The idea is that I share what I feel is relevant to the class, and we can use our extra time together to talk about them.
Besides that, think of this list as a free bibliography and filmography for further explorations.
They include but are not limited to:
Books on Lebanon:
(Participants get access to many of these in a Google Drive folder)
Andrew Arsan’s Lebanon: A Country in Fragments (see my review for Al Jumhuriya and my interview with Arsan on TFTT), The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (Bassel F Salloukh, Rabie Barakat, Jinan S Al-Habbal, Lara. W Khattab and Shoghig Mikaelian), Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon (Maya Mikdashi), Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East (David Hirst), A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (Kamal Salibi), La Guerre du Liban (Samir Kassir), Beirut (Samir Kassir), Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East (Nicholas Blanford), Citizen Hariri: Lebanon’s Neoliberal Reconstruction (Hannes Baumann), Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God (Joseph Daher), The Lebanese Forces: Emergence and Transformation of the Christian Resistance (Nader Moumneh), The Lebanese Media: Anatomy of a System in Perpetual Crisis (Sarah El-Richani), Octobre Liban (Camille Ammoun), Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon (Chad Elias), Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut (Mohamad Hafeda), The Ruin to Come, Essays from a protracted war (Walid Sadek), Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power (Joanne Randa Nucho), War Is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (Sami Hermez), ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East (Joelle M Abi-Rached), Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (Lina Khatib), Lebanon: After the Cedar Revolution (Are Knudsen and M. Kerr), Love and Resistance in the Films of Mai Masri (Victoria Brittain), Mélancolie Libanaise: Le Cinéma Après La Guerre Civile (Dima El-Horr), Lebanon Adrift: From Battleground to Playground (Samir Khalaf), Memory and Conflict in Lebanon: Remembering and Forgetting the Past (Craig Larkin), Spoils of Truce: Corruption in Postwar Lebanon (Reinoud Leenders), Dignity (R)Evoked: Art in Lebanon – A Reading in Between Lines, (Zena M Meskaou), Beirut to Carnival City: Reading Rawi Hage (Krzysztof Majer), Beyrouth Ou La Fascination de La Mort (Issa Makhlouf), Cinema in Lebanon (Raphael Millet), The Fragmenting Force of Memory Self, Literary Style, and Civil War in Lebanon (Norman Nikro), The Films of Jocelyne Saab: Films, Artworks and Cultural Events for the Arab World (Mathilde Rouxel and Stefanie Van de Peer), Images D’Apres: L’Espace-Temps de La Guerre Dans Le Cinéma Au Liban (Ghada Sayegh), Regards Sur Le Cinéma Libanais, 1990-2010 (Elie Yazbek), Sectarianism and Intercommunal Nation-Building in Lebanon (Hanna Ziadeh).
Related books:
(Participants get access to many of these in a Google Drive folder)
The Future of Nostalgia (Svetlana Boym), 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (Gail Weiss, Gayle Salamon and Ann V. Murphy), The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 (Ilham Khuri-Makdisi), Capitalist realism: is there no alternative? (Mark Fisher), Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point of View (Peter Meusburger, Michael Heffernan, Edgar Wunder), Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations (Jessica Auchter), Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Avery Gordon), Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice (Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering), Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Ussama Samir Makdisi), Hanan Al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (Laura U Marks), Surviving Images: Cinema, War, and Cultural Memory in the Middle East (Kamran Rastegar), Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Michael Rothberg), A Region in Revolt Mapping the Recent Uprisings in North Africa and West Asia (Jade Saab – I co-wrote in chapter), City Limits: Filming Belfast, Beirut and Berlin in Troubled Times (Stephanie Schwerter), Two or Three Things I am Dying to Tell You (Jalal Toufic)
Films and Documentaries:
(Participants get access to many of these in a Google Drive folder)
Where to? (George Nasser, 1957), Whispers (Maroun Baghdadi, 1980), A Suspended Life (Jocelyn Saab, 1985), Suspended Dreams (Jean Khalil Chamoun and Mai Masri, 1992) Phantom Beirut (Ghassan Salhab, 1998), Asfouri (Fouad Alaywan, 2002), Terra Incognita (Ghassan Salhab, 2002), The Kite (Randa Chahal, 2003), On Three Posters (Rabih Mroué, 2004), A Perfect Day (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 2005 – my review), We Were Communists (Maher Abi Samra, 2010 – my review), Here Comes the Rain (Bahij Hojeij, 2010 – my review), Where Do We Go Now? (Nadine Labaki, 2011), Tomorrow We Will See (2012, Soraya Umewaka), Sleepless Nights (Eliane Raheb, 2012 – my review), The Lebanese Rocket Society (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 2013 – related interview), Waves ’98 (Ely Dagher, 2015 – my review, and my interview), Submarine (Mounia Akl, 2016 – my review, and my interview), Bachir: The Series (Mouna Mounayer, 2016), Those Who Remain (Eliane Raheb, 2016), Manivelle: The Last Days of the Man of Tomorrow (Fadi Baki Fdz, 2017), Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible (Ghassan Halwani, 2018 – my review), Costa Brava, Lebanon (Mounia Akl, 2021), Memory Box (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 2021) and Anxious in Beirut (Zakaria Jaber, 2023 – my review).
Papers and articles:
(Participants get access to many of these in a Google Drive folder)
The Families of the Missing in Lebanon: On The Potentials of Participatory Art in Transitional Justice (Sara Abdel Latif), Collective Memory and Management of the Past: The Entrepreneurs of Civil War Memory in Post-War Lebanon (Elsa Abou Assi), The Disappeared of Lebanon: The Unfinished Story of a Finished War (Sawsann Abou Zahr), The Truth of Fiction: Some Stories of the Lebanese Civil Wars (Elisa Adami), Writing History Under Erasure: Radical Historiographical Practices in Lebanese Postwar Art (Elisa Adami), Le Corps ‘Mort-Vivant’ et La Ville ‘Détruite’ Dans Le Cinéma Libanais d’après Guerre (Celine Barakat), Frozen Grief: Transitional Justice in Lebanon (Laura Bell), On Three Posters 2004 by Rabih Mroué (Chad Elias), Lebanon’s Waste Crisis: An Exercise of Participation Rights (Joe F Khalil), Spatial Erasure: Reconstruction Projects in Beirut (Marwan Ghandour and Mona Fawaz), Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige on ‘A Perfect Day’ (Antonia Carver), Art as Resistance in Postwar Lebanon (Fares Chalabi), Ex-Militia Fighters in Post-War Lebanon (Dima De Clerck), Bourdieu in Beirut: Wasta, the State and Social Reproduction in Lebanon (Martyn Egan and Paul Tabar), How ‘Memory Box’ Directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige Mined Their Own Past (Ben Croll), Displacing Evil: The 1991 Lebanese Amnesty, the City and the Possibility of Justice (Jonathan Hall), The Historiography and the Memory of the Lebanese Civil War (Sune Haugbolle), The Secular Saint: Iconography and Ideology in the Cult of Bashir Jumayil (Sune Haugbolle), Where to? Filming Emigration Anxiety in Prewar Lebanese Cinema (Ghenwa Hayek), Letter to Oneself: Acknowledging Guilt in Post-War Lebanon (Sonja Hegasy), Objects of Transgenerational Memory: Challenging Hegemonic Historical Narratives of War in Lebanon (Lynn Hodeib), General Amnesty Law: Current and Historic Implications (Danah Kaouri), Lebanon’s ‘October Revolution’: An End to the Civil War? (Alexandra Kassir), Three Posters: Reflections on a Video/Performance (Elias Khoury and Rabih Mroué), Acquiescence to Assassinations in Post-Civil War Lebanon? (Are Knudsen and Nasser Yassin), Political Violence in Post-Civil War Lebanon (Are Knudsen and Nasser Yassin), Trashing the Sectarian System? Lebanon’s ‘You Stink’ Movement and the Making of Affective Publics (Marwan M Kraidy), Archiving the Present in Beirut’s Southern Suburb: Memory, History, and Power at Umam Documentation and Research (Katherine Nora Maddox), Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere (Saree Makdisi), The Modernity of Sectarianism in Lebanon (Ussama Makdisi), Queering Beirut, the ‘Paris of the Middle East’: Fractal Orientalism and Essentialized Masculinities in Contemporary Gay Travelogues (Ghassan Moussawi), War, Art and Propaganda (Rabih Mroué), Beyond Ethnic Entrenchment and Amelioration: An Analysis of Non-Sectarian Social Movements and Lebanon’s Consociationalism (John Nagle), Will the ‘October Revolution’ Finally Bring Lebanon to a Reckoning with Its Past? (Nour El Bejjani Noureddine), Paper House: The Revolution, the Disappeared, and the Historicity of Lebanon (Elsa Saade), Ghassan Salhab’s Terra incognita (Clément Chéroux), Lebanon: Contesting Trash Politics (Adham Saouli), Missing, and They Never Came Back: Confronting Lebanon’s Inescapable History. Photo Exhibition in Progress (UMAM Documentation and Research), The Historiography of Sectarianism in Lebanon (Max Weiss), Catastrophic Subjectivity: Representing Lebanon’s Undead (Mark Westmoreland), Cinematic Dreaming: On Phantom Poetics and the Longing for a Lebanese National Cinema (Mark Westmoreland), Making Sense: Affective Research in Postwar Lebanese Art (Mark Westmoreland), Life Swept Away: How the Work of a Lebanese Filmmaker Reflects His Country’s Anguish (Lydia Wilson), Let the Dead Be Dead: Memory, Urban Narratives and the Post-Civil War Reconstitution of Beirut (Maha Yahya), Peace by Unconventional Means: Evaluating Lebanon’s Ta’if Accord (Marie-Joelle Zahar)
My PhD dissertation
(Participants get access to it)
My lived experience as somehow who grew up in Lebanon + that of my friends, family and acquaintances where relevant.
My own articles, essays, papers, podcast episodes and interviews including:
(Participants get access to all of these in a Google Drive folder)
Papers/Chapters:
The revolutionizing nature of the Lebanese uprising (co-written with Jade Saab, 2020), The Civil War’s Ghosts: Events of Memory Seen Through Lebanese Cinema (2018), The Politics of Environmental Activism: Lebanon’s Successful Save Bisri Valley Campaign (2024), Memes and Collapse: An Alternative View of Lebanon’s October 17 Protests (2020).
Articles/Essays:
Israel left Lebanon 20 years ago. We’re still fighting for our liberation (972Mag, 2020), Hezbollah couldn’t ask for a better enemy than Israel (972Mag, 2022), An elder is someone who is older than olive trees (Hauntologies, 2026), How Hezbollah lost Everything (Hauntologies, 2026), Lebanon’s Lost Communist Future (Hauntologies, 2025), Lebanon: A Revolution against Sectarianism (Crimethinc, 2019), Lebanon: The Revolution Four Months In (Crimethinc, 2020), Memory, violence and fear: Why Lokman Slim’s murder must not be depoliticized (L’Orient Today, 2021), resilient: broken (Mangal Media, 2020), Lebanon’s multiple crises also expose the racist Kafala system (Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, 2020), ‘Revolution everywhere’: A conversation between Hong Kong and Lebanese protesters (Lausan Collective, 2020), Syrian melancholy in Lebanon’s revolution (Al Jumhuriya, 2019), The Lebanese revolution must abolish the kafala system (Al Jazeera, 2019), A look at the Lebanon uprising through its chants (Shado Mag, 2019), Lebanon, our painfully ordinary country (Al Jumhuriya, 2019), Lebanon’s militarised masculinity (Al Jumhuriya, 2018), How one mapping project is challenging Lebanon’s ‘amnesia’ towards its own past (Al Araby, 2018).
Interviews:
Popular Front (2024), Novara Media (2024), The Lede (2022), Popular Front (2021), Popular Front (2021), The World PRI (2021), Mangal Media (2020), Final Straw Radio (2020), Sortir du Capitalism (2019), Radio Onda Rossa (2019), Arab Tyrant Manual (2019), Popular Front (2019), Behind the Bastards (2019).
TFTT Lebanon episodes:
Future Classes
I’m planning on doing more of these in 2026, inshallah. If you’d like to be contacted about any of these, lemme know. You’d get 30% off for any of these if you already took a class with me.
Postwar Hauntings: Modern Lebanon Through Its Cinema. Details coming soon.
- Estimated: Either 5 weekly sessions or various one-offs
- To express interest: email or Signal
The Ghosts of Israel’s Future. Details coming soon.
- Estimated: Either 5 weekly sessions or various one-offs
- To express interest: email or Signal
AMITAI: Against Multipolar Imperialism, Towards Anti-Authoritarian Internationalism. Details coming soon.
- Estimated: 5 weekly sessions
- To express interest: email or Signal
James Baldwin’s Radical Optimism. Details coming soon.
- Estimated: Teach-in over one or two sessions
- To express interest: email or Signal
Cancelling the Apocalypse — the Political Power of Storytelling. Details coming soon.
- Estimated: Either 5 weekly sessions or various one-offs
- To express interest: email or Signal
Requests:
You can also request classes. If there’s a topic that I cover on TFTT, Hauntologies or anywhere else that you’d like to explore in a class format, reach out to me. I enjoy doing these and I’m always looking for an opportunity to do more of them.