Introduction

Summary

This book, Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon their Own, is a post-genocide history of Armenians and of what was. It is not a history of absence, or of what should or could have been. Rather than a history of loss or simple rebirth, two interlinked viewpoints omnipresent in writings on modern Armenian history, it is a history of power – often of manipulating and managing loss and renewal, in this case in early post-colonial, Cold War Lebanon, centred on Beirut. The absence of a national homeland accepted by all and the absence of an official state did not mean that Lebanon's Armenians lacked a real, and really momentous, political life. Despite the genocide and even after it, Armenians still knew thriving political, social, cultural, ideological and ecclesiastical centres. This book gives a case in point: an often-surprising story of Armenian sociopolitical life in one such centre, Lebanon.

At the same time, this book asks: what can we learn about Lebanon, and the Arab world more broadly, by looking at it through the lens of everyday Armenian sociopolitics? This analysis of Armenians in Lebanon does not, then, only contribute to the study of Armenians. As a matter of fact, Armenians Beyond Diaspora is not principally concerned with demonstrating how something ‘Armenian’ was created. Rather, it shows how Armenians in Lebanon experienced politics everyday, and what those experiences can teach us about interlinked national and global events. By examining changing aspects of belonging, and by exploring how these concepts travel over time and space, Armenians Beyond Diaspora simultaneously challenges the supremacy of the nation-state and the role of state power in regional and Cold War histories.

By demonstrating how Armenian experiences in Lebanon informed Lebanese, Middle Eastern and Cold War histories and vice versa, this book also illustrates that there is no single narrative of the modern Middle East. This argument builds on recent studies of the history of the modern Middle East that focus on hitherto ignored or lesser-known actors, and helps to move marginalised segments of society centre-stage. This move is particularly crucial for studies of Lebanon, where scholars struggle to include, within a dominant narrative, members of society who have been excluded from power by design as a retort to Lebanon's sectarian formation. Armenians