Ara Sanjian Lectures on Armenian ‘Positive Neutrality’ During the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990)
May 15, 2025.
On May 12, 2025, Dr. Ara Sanjian spoke at the American University of Beirut as part of the History and Archaeology Department’s year-long series, “50 Years of Amnesia,” marking the 50th anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War.
Sanjian discussed how the outbreak of the Civil War on April 13, 1975 coincided with global Armenian preparations to mark the 60th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The renewed violence across Lebanon evoked among the country’s 200 thousand-strong Armenian community memories of intracommunal killings it had experienced during Lebanon's previous civil war in 1958. Sanjian’s talk examined why and how Lebanon’s Armenian political factions—bitterly divided in 1958—faced the new wave of violence just 18 years later with a resolute determination not to turn their weapons on one another, a steadfast political commitment that has endured for the past fifty years. Sanjian examined the various factors within the global Armenian Diaspora that contributed to this transformation in attitudes, and emphasized the role of Lebanese Armenians in driving this change across the Diaspora. He further showed how this transformation from 1958 to 1975 gradually shaped the patterns of Armenian involvement in the Lebanese intra-communal politics of the same era.
