132: The Lebanese Civil War With Emily Whalen

Making of a Historian

If you like the show, subscribe! Give us a rating on iTunes! Tell your in-laws! This episode we learn all about the Lebanese Civil War, which lasted a whopping FIFTEEN YEARS from 1975 to 1990. If you know anything about the Lebanese Civil War, you know that it is complicated. It’s sometimes presented as a sectarian conflict—Christians against Muslims; but it’s also a conflict between the city and the country, a regional conflict, and a stage for the Cold War. But this episode will help you understand all the ins and outs of the conflict. PhD Candidate Emily Whalen, from UT Austin (now on a pre-doc at Yale) explains the history of the Lebanese Civil War remarkably clearly. For Whalen, the civil war is a way of understanding democracy, pluralism, and the nation. Along the way we learn about the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Mandate system, and we talk about whether the nation-state is really worth it.