Lebanese Academic begins with the region as its own center of meaning, tracing its peoples, religions, cities and ideas from Canaan to the present on their own terms. The result is a different map of history rather than a region understood through stories written elsewhere.
The latest essay
A fighter calls on Fatima, a grandmother calls on Mary, and an older Levantine habit appears beneath both: grief given a mother, a witness, and a name.
A wartime cry to Fatima opens a deeper Lebanese pattern: the religions are different, but the land keeps giving grief a feminine witness.
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Beirut Park · Interactive case study
We redesigned Beirut Park because this city deserves a public place that remembers what it keeps erasing.
We kept the path around the park. Inside it, we made room for a city to recognize itself.
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Lebanon's real constitution is not Taif or the National Pact. It is the generator: a private machine that turns every public failure into someone's kingdom, then teaches the pattern to replicate at every scale.
A generator in a basement explains the country: every missing public service becomes a private sovereignty, every private sovereignty defends the failure that made it necessary, and every household becomes its own small state.
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Film · Instagram
A walk through the streets of old Damascus.
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Downtown Beirut was not simply rebuilt badly after the war. It was rebuilt in a way that made later crises harder to absorb: vacancy became rational, repair became optional, ownership became distant, and the symbolic center of the capital lost the ordinary citizens who make cities heal.
A political-economy and memory essay on Downtown Beirut: how Solidere's reconstruction turned the symbolic center of the capital into a polished but fragile district, why archaeology and war memory were thinned into curated heritage, and why vacancy made later repair so weak.
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Film · Instagram
The reconstruction of Beirut's city centre, seen from its streets.
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The choice between resistance and sovereignty is a trap: Hezbollah and its rivals keep each other alive while the state remains the missing thing.
Lebanon can defend its land without pretending Hezbollah is innocent, and reject Hezbollah's permanent exception without pretending its rivals have built a real state.
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Film · Instagram
A question asked among the ruins in Lebanon.
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A generator dispute in West Beirut became a small national X-ray: the state arrived late, the neighborhood read it sectarianly, and everyone could see how public failure turns into private power.
The Abu Ali Itani generator incident showed Lebanon's political system in miniature: every missing public service becomes someone's private kingdom, and when the state finally arrives, it is read as faction before law.
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Film · Instagram
The old streets and the city centre that replaced them.
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The country's last official count is older than its living politics, and every serious reform crashes into the same forbidden question: who gets counted?
A census would force Lebanon to decide whether the diaspora, refugees, sects, and citizens belong to one political reality or several convenient fictions.
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Film · Instagram
A walk past one of Beirut's most recognisable houses.
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Every patron praises Lebanese sovereignty at the exact volume that keeps Lebanon useful.
From Resolution 1701 to IMF reform language, Lebanon supplies flags, signatures, and communiques for agreements that rarely travel downward into authority.
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Film · Instagram
A visual tour of the proposed public park for Beirut.
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Israel's old security-zone logic has returned to the south, promising calm through distance while producing the grievance Hezbollah knows how to use.
A buffer made of emptied villages can move the line of danger, but it also turns houses, orchards, roads, and schools into evidence for the next war.
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Film · Instagram
A question about what Beirut's reconstruction has preserved.
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Lebanon's scale should make government intimate; its borders within borders make public life feel like a series of counters, permissions, and local vetoes.
Municipal fragmentation, sectarian courts, village registration, waste politics, and personal-status law turn daily life into a geography lesson in distrust.
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Beirut's postwar center solved the problem of visible ruin while leaving ordinary citizens outside the place built in their name.
Solidere's downtown offers the cleanest version of Lebanon's postwar bargain: privatize the wound, financialize the repair, and call the absence of public life reconstruction.
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