Chapter 2 discuss the roles that rituals, gatherings, and confrontation played in the rising popularity of these groups during the mid-twentieth century. Through analyzing multiple rituals, ranging from a protest on the streets to a Ping-Pong tournament at the group headquarters, I argue that through gathering, these groups produced a space – symbolic and physical – within the public sphere to practice their identity and recruit new members. However, autonomy was not easily won, as organizations were the site of surveillance and repression by the Ottoman, French colonial, and early independence state. After analyzing multiple types of gatherings and state control over them, Chapter 2 focuses on two episodes of street and state violence: one in the 1930s between the Kataʾib and French security forces, and one in the 1950s between the Progressive Socialist Party and Lebanese security forces. Following these clashes, these groups mobilized a history of violence in yearly events commemorating the battles. All popular organizations had confrontation narratives and rituals, and as a by-product, embedded violence – or at least struggle – within group culture. While being mindful not to essentialize violence within these groups, this point helps to foreshadow how they could conceive violent practices under extreme circumstances and threats.

Chapter 3 explores the expansion of membership beyond the core demographics of these groups during the 1940s and 1950s. I argue that these groups encouraged the political socialization of new groups and categories of people in new places. By setting up organizational outposts throughout the country, establishing wings for marginalized populations, and connecting the group with relevant populations outside Lebanon, these organizations started to incorporate the countryside, young women, and émigrés into national and regional politics. In turn, this chapter finds that these groups expand the notion of who constituted “youth,” and accordingly, they played a significant, albeit not exclusive, role in solidifying mass, youth politics in Lebanon and the broader Middle East. And although these groups were building a cosmopolitan base in many ways, they were circumscribed by the national, sociopolitical system (whereby sect determined how, or if, people could participate in official politics) in Lebanon, and linked class, gender, and regional inequalities. In turn, contradictions emerged within groups, including membership distinctions between the middle-class, male, urban ideal, and everyone else. Furthermore, competition between these groups played out in terms of overlapping claims of who was – and was not – deemed as backward, or in some cases, “sectarian.”

Chapter 4 examines what transformed popular organizations from allies to enemies in the late 1950s. On one side of the conflict were those groups against the government and Lebanese President Camille Chamoun. They included the Progressive Socialist Party, Najjadeh, Lebanese Communist Party, and the Arab Nationalist Youth. In speeches, petitions, and articles, these groups claimed that Chamoun’s recent actions in domestic and foreign policy were authoritarian, represented a threat to sovereign Lebanon, and were grounds for armed revolution. On the other side were the Kataʾib and Syrian Social Nationalist Party. They made the point that foreign interference from Syria and Egypt, and its leftist sponsors in Lebanon (most notably, the Progressive Socialist Party), challenged Lebanon’s sovereignty, the constitution, and their group. Given that defending Lebanon and its sovereignty was not, at least in the eyes of multiple popular organizations, sectarian, Chapter 4 represents a need to rethink sectarianism among sociopolitical actors in and beyond 1958. Indeed, whether groups had clear sect majorities (the Kataʾib and Najjadeh) or not (the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and Lebanese Communist Party), I argue that their perspectives before the conflict were quite complex, linked to multiple factors, and cannot be reduced to sectarianism alone.

The introduction sketches the history of youth politics and youth-centric organizations in modern Lebanon (what I refer to as “popular organizations”), and the fields of study that they are linked to, including popular politics, populism, young people, and sectarianism.

Chapter 5 analyzes the dynamics of the fighting itself, starting in the summer months of 1958. First, it takes up the place of ritual in the 1958 War. By focusing on the Kataʾib’s shift, from the sidelines to frontlines, I argue that routine practices linked to youth belonging, play, and order were mobilized to perform violence. More broadly, whether it was singing a group anthem at an initiation ceremony before battle or marching in a funeral procession for a fallen fighter, popular organizations of all shades mobilized the youth cultures that were cultivated over past decades to win Lebanon. Chapter 5 also discusses several fronts of the war, including the final battle in Beirut between the Kataʾib and Najjadeh. While some scholars contend this phase was one of sectarian bloodletting, the reality was more complex. Neither side used exclusively sectarian discourse to describe other popular organizations. Instead, they deployed coded language, describing their enemies as maddened punks. This reality leads to Winning Lebanon’s main conclusion on sectarianism and sectarian violence. In the course of this conflict, youth, or youthfulness, terms with little connection to sect, became linked to sectarian violence, in practice and discursively, a trend that continued beyond 1958.

Chapter 1 explores the architecture and architects of youth politics in mid-twentieth-century Lebanon. It moves chronologically from the 1920s to 1950s, describing the historical background of multiple popular organizations, and taking an individual group as a means to explore one theme in the construction of youth politics – that is, building a group culture, flair and feel, and organizational capacity among youth-centric organizations. I argue that these groups were collectively the shapers of a distinct manifestation of popular politics in the Middle East, what I refer to as populism. This trend found its earliest expression with the Lebanese People’s Party in the 1920s, continued with youth organizations like the Najjadeh in the 1930s, and culminated with transnational student groups like the Arab Nationalist Youth in the 1950s. Using the source material of these groups, I find that although they were deploying radically different worldviews to win Lebanon, based on the different, competing ideologies of the time – Arab nationalism, Lebanese nationalism, international socialism – there was more continuity than difference between these groups in their early years. They all channeled anger with colonial rule, the complicity of Lebanese elites in this subjugation, and used a discourse of populism to launch public awareness and protest.

The epilogue of the book explores this legacy and makes a call for more research on the 1958 War, both as a rupture point in modern Middle East history, and as a site for understanding global, disruptive, youth politics.