War-weary works

Special report: Syria and Lebanon. The circulation of activist networks during war
A “Weak field,” narrative approaches, and the long term in the writing on the civil wars in Syria and Lebanon
By Pierre France
Vol. 25, 2018/1, pages 147 to 187
English

Based on a bibliographic database about the Lebanon War’s historiography and supplemented by a work on the nascent historiography of the war in Syria, this article is a series of working hypotheses on shared narratives of these two civil wars and their link with a particular social situation. It takes into account the dynamics of both conflicts as well as the particular situation in which those who recount them are immersed. Two key elements are discussed: the emergence of a “weak field” during these two civil wars, where the scientific work is confronted with a saturated space of interpreters and discourse, and secondly the situation of co-temporality (Rivoal 2014), in which objects of study are unstable and characterized by the fact that they fall within long time sequences (fifteen years for Lebanon, eight years for Syria). The article also details several topoï of the writing on these wars (privileged objects, scales, narrative approaches, and so on), which are used to circumvent or integrate the social situation experienced by those who witnessed these two wars.

Go to the article on Cairn-int.info