One afternoon in the early 1980s, three teenagers are running through the empty streets of war-torn Beirut, holding up a bra as a form of laissez-passer to prevent snipers from shooting them. They are trying to reach Zaytouna Bay, close to the demarcation line that divided Beirut during the civil war. They have heard about Um Walid’s, a place where women sell their bodies and fun is to be had. This scene, depicted in Ziad Doueiri’s film West Beirut (1998), is a fictional account of a war that was all-too real, as was the brothel in which it is set. Um Walid’s brothel was located across the Green Line that divided wartime Beirut into a Christian-identified East and a Muslim-identified West. The protagonist, Tarek, stumbles upon the place earlier in the film, when he seeks refuge inside a car that happens to drive him right into the brothel’s parking lot. The car has a bra flanked on the car’s side, “a code to snipers,” as the driver explains. At the entrance to the brothel, machine guns are lined up. Inside, Tarek encounters men of every fighting faction drinking, smoking, and sharing stories while women dance around him. Um Walid, the female custodian, tells her young visitor, “There is no East or West in this place … it’s Beirut, period!”Footnote 1
Um Walid’s statement should not be interpreted to imply that sex stopped the war because opposing factions met and partied inside. Quite to the contrary, I argue that the war continued by other means inside brothels right from the start of the Lebanese Civil War, when militia fighting broke out close to Beirut’s red-light district, which prompted brothel owners to move their business to the western side of the city. This move proved lucrative both for brothel owners and for militias, who demanded fees from brothel owners in return for keeping their businesses safe from sniper attacks. Civilians, like the teenagers in Doueiri’s film, soon learned that displaying oneself as a customer of the brothels provided a mobility otherwise denied in a war divided by checkpoints. The sex economy therefore allowed for other traffic to flow, of people, goods, and information.
I engage the concept of traffic to understand how militias used sex to govern the city, and how they governed civilians through a parallel traffic in women, a patriarchal system of protection through which they maintained power over their constituencies.Footnote 2 In conversation with former militia fighters and with civilians, I argue that the way militias governed sex as an exception to the war and yet central to its traffic parallels the way that they governed civilians in the war: dividing them into sectarian-based zones under their control and “protection,” while extracting from them. Sex, like civilians, therefore appears hidden and protected from the war, neatly tucked away into brothels and homes, when in fact the political governance and extraction of sex enabled the war to go on.
The roles of sex and sexual violence in the war appear hidden, too, in scholarship on the war. Although scholars have pushed conversations on gender roles in the war by foregrounding the experience of women and examining the role of militiamen and soldiers as both perpetrators and victims of the war, sex itself has been left unexamined.Footnote 3 In contrast, Lebanese cinematography and literature particularly provide a rich archive on sexual relations and sexual violence in the war. What do we make of this seeming disjuncture between the normalization of sex in Lebanese war-era popular culture and its silencing in academic knowledge production?
In this article, I engage critically with the war era’s cultural archive through an intertextual ethnographic reading, combining cultural texts with oral history interviews and urban mapping that I conducted with former militiamen and militiawomen from opposing factions, and with cis and trans women who had transactional sex with, or were married to, militia members.Footnote 4 Building on materialist readings that foreground the primacy of cross-factional trade in the war, I propose an intersectional reading of the war that combines the political economy and the sexual as interlinked zones of governance.Footnote 5 I map what I call the political economy of sex in the war, moving from brothels and gay cruising of public beaches, through checkpoints into neighborhoods and civilian homes, which militias invaded under the guise of protecting them. My argument is twofold, according to this movement.
First, I argue that militias used sexual violence, and the threat of it, as a tool of economic governance within “their” neighborhood constituencies, through taxing and preying on civilians, under the guise of protecting them from enemy attack. This violence of protection allowed for a sectarian-based and gendered division of space for the stated purpose of keeping neighborhoods and civilians “intact” from enemy invasions. The price of this relative protection was an entitlement to those civilians. For example, I show how families who faced economic hardship would sometimes marry their daughters off to militiamen at a young age, in the interest of protecting them, through a logic that reinforced sectarian boundaries and perpetuated patriarchal power structures.Footnote 6 These marital constellations with militia fighters placed young women in a predicament of economic dependence on and exploitation by the militias that, in the case I examine, continued long after the war was declared over.
Relatedly, I examine how the traffic in sex and the traffic in women manifested as a spatialized class divide. The militiamen I spoke to tended to distinguish between women based on their social position as either civilian “neighborhood women” (nisaʾ al-ḥayy), whom militias “protected” and violated through marriage, in contrast to women on the street and widows, whom they considered sexually up for grabs, and in contrast to sex workers, whom militias transacted with through a traffic in sex. Militiawomen who shared experiences of intimacy and solidarity with their male comrades in the barracks represent yet another category within this gendered hierarchy of violence and protection.
Second, I argue that the militias marked out violence committed by the enemy faction as political violence proper, which worked to excuse or disguise sexual violence committed within the sectarian, or “sextarian,” unit of the militia-family.Footnote 7 This sectarianized logic of protection underscores an already existing social hierarchy of sexual violence, not unique to Lebanon, in which domestic violence is invisibilized, whereas forms of spectacular and politicized violence gain more attention.Footnote 8 In making this observation, I build on the pioneering work of Lebanese feminist scholars and civil society. In 2022, a watershed report on sexual violence in the civil war, based on interviews with 150 women, found that sexual violence in the Lebanese Civil War was systematic and widespread, and took place both within and across sectarian enemy lines.Footnote 9 My discussion of this material also contributes to current transnational debates about the politicization of sexual violence in armed conflict.Footnote 10
Research Methodology and Ethics
I conducted oral history and cultural archival research in Lebanon between April 2023 and March 2024 with four groups of interlocutors: former militia members, civilians who had sex with them, cultural producers who documented sex in the war and, finally, civil society advocates from feminist organizations. First, I conducted individual as well as focus group interviews with six former militiamen and four former militiawomen who had fought in opposing factions, and who are now members of the civil society organization Fighters for Peace.Footnote 11 Interlocutors included former members of the secular, cross-sectarian Lebanese Community Party (LCP), the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Druze-based Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), the Shiʿite-based Amal Movement, and the Maronite Christian Lebanese Forces (LF). Together, these former fighters provided a diversity of perspective on the war from different geographical, gendered, and class backgrounds. I mention the sectarian identification of my interlocutors only to establish the diversity of the research participants, stressing that the sectarian and political-ideological differences between the militias did not have any qualitative impact on my analytical treatment of them. In addition to oral history interviews, I also conducted participant urban mapping with several of these former fighters, in which we walked together in the city while they recounted memories from the war pertaining to those sites.
As a second group, I interviewed five civilian women who had grown up in the war—including a trans woman who had transactional sex with militiamen during the war—all of whom I recruited through personal relations. The research participants included the generation who came of age during the civil war, as well as the generation who was born after the war. This approach enabled an intersectional examination of how women were differently positioned and sexualized in the war, based on their social status as civilians, militia members, widows, or trans women.
I conducted interviews with both groups in different spaces based on their preferences, including offices where they worked, coffee shops, and domestic spaces when they invited me to visit them. Although the difference between these semipublic and private spaces may have impacted our conversation, I established a degree of confidentiality with my interlocutors across the different settings. My position as a foreign woman who has lived in Lebanon for years and speaks Lebanese dialect with an accent enabled, perhaps, a different kind of access and ease with former militia members, because I do not carry intergenerational trauma from the war. My gender position perhaps also allowed for a different confidentiality than that of male-to-male research encounters, in which acts of performative masculinity often become heightened.Footnote 12
As a third group, I interviewed Lebanese filmmakers, writers, and artists whose documentation contributed to building an alternative cultural archive of sex in the war. Finally, I interviewed members of civil society and feminist organizations in Lebanon—Kafa, Legal Action Worldwide (LAW), and UN Women—which enabled me to establish a comparative framework between contemporary and past practices in sex work legislation and sexual violence.
Adding Sex to the Equation: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Civil War
“Sex is the bread of war,” declared Hisham, a former PFLP fighter.Footnote 13 Animated and chain-smoking, he drew a map with his hands on the coffee table between us, displaying the different economies that fueled the war. Hisham grew up in South Lebanon but moved to Beirut for college before the war and worked at the port. There, he witnessed a constant flow of contraband goods; he also saw militias trading with one another. “Nothing was one thing only in this war, and nothing was as it seemed,” he told me. “Everything was mushabaka” (networked or connected in Arabic). The Black Saturday massacre of 6 December 1975, when the Christian right-wing Phalangists attacked Muslim workers in Beirut’s port, was a turning point for him. After witnessing his coworkers being killed, and almost facing death himself that day, he joined the PFLP, whose cause he identified with, having grown up with Israeli military aggression in the south.
In photographs from the civil war, militia fighters often appear anchored in their neighborhood barracks, hiding behind sandbags from which only their heads (and guns) peek out to shoot at occasional enemy movement.Footnote 14 Although these depictions certainly capture some experiences of the war, a different image presents itself when we follow the traffic of the war and the labor that sustained it. After all, what is a neighborhood worth in political economic terms if nothing and no one crosses through it?
Hisham’s account of the war economy as interconnected correlates with scholars who argue that militias relied on trading across enemy lines, even as they maintained those lines territorially, and that civilian movement across the demarcated city presented a primary source of extraction.Footnote 15 This insight correlates with comparative scholarship on militia rule in other international contexts where militias gain power through cross-territorial mediation, rather than through holding static territorial sovereignty.Footnote 16
Scholars of Lebanon’s civil war have periodized it by two phases.Footnote 17 In its first phase, from 1975 to 1982/83, the war did not disrupt so much as exacerbate the political economic system of hypercapitalist clientelism that had characterized Lebanon in the 1960s.Footnote 18 Yet although the national economy remained somewhat intact, militias gained ground through a form of “organized chaos.”Footnote 19 This chaos relied on “pillage, seizure, occupation, forced taxation, smuggling and other forms of forced transfer.”Footnote 20 “A modern form of piracy” took hold first in Beirut’s souks and in the port, as Fawaz Traboulsi has described it, with militias storing and smuggling clandestine goods and pillaging at their whim.Footnote 21 Militias “inflicted U.S. $20 billion to $30 billion of destruction on public and private property through intentional, blind shelling of civilian targets,” Georges Corm observed.Footnote 22 Already, during the first years of the war, their operations expanded from “banditry” to “organized extraction”; as Elizabeth Picard wrote, “Militia fighters were relentlessly seeking to destroy the very infrastructures they also sought to appropriate for themselves.”Footnote 23 The logic behind this destruction was twofold: first, destruction of shared infrastructure to fracture the country into communal enclaves, and second, ensuring these communities’ reliance on militia rule through distribution of resources. Militias exchanged goods internally and resold looted goods at a higher price to civilians.
While militias profited from this trade, “the standard of living of most Lebanese remained stable or even improved” during the first years of the war. Salim Nasr suggests that a number of national economic and geopolitical factors led to an increase in growth at this time. The regional oil boom of the 1970s attracted Lebanese labor power, whose remittances contributed considerably to keeping the national economy afloat, not to mention the “political money” that poured into the country from various transnational actors in support of the different militias. Adding to this, militias recruited manpower mainly from the country’s peripheries, who experienced “substantial social mobility” through a “redistribution” of wealth that largely benefited “the popular classes at the expense of the old bourgeoisie.”Footnote 24 Leading up to the war, social disparity had grown along Beirut’s frontiers, to which the rural population had been displaced from the diminishing agrarian sector, and this growing class was recruited to the ideological struggles of the war.Footnote 25
The militias’ redistributive system enabled “mini-states” that by the mid-1980s employed “one-third of Lebanon’s population,” according to Picard. By this time, the militia-run “parallel economy” had outsized the state’s functions; Lebanese currency, which had remained stable until 1982, devalued at a bewildering rate, and incomes plummeted.Footnote 26 In the end then, “It was the average Lebanese who paid the price.”Footnote 27
How did sex figure into these processes of extraction and class disparity? Scholarship on sex work and sexual violence in other civil war contexts has emphasized how sex functions as an economic weapon.Footnote 28 In Lebanon, sexual transactions contributed to an economy of traffic, characterized by cross-factional trade and checkpoint control. To understand how sex became “the bread” of this war, as Hisham put it, let me first map the brothel economy as it appeared on the eve of the war.
The Traffic in Sex
“Um Walid used to run her business from the third floor of this building,” Hisham told me as we passed by the Starco building in downtown Beirut on a spring day in 2023.Footnote 29 Um Walid closed her brothel around 1995, when the state’s postwar reconstruction forced many residents and shopkeepers out of the area.Footnote 30 Hisham’s comrades whom I spoke to remembered Um Walid vividly.
“You had to say a code word to enter,” Malek, a fellow Lebanese PFLP member, recalled of his time at Um Walid’s brothel.Footnote 31 Malek was rejected on his first visit there in the late 1970s, when he was 12 years old. On his second try a few weeks later, he came better prepared, having memorized the code word. The women were older than him and a lot more experienced. He managed to lose his virginity that night to a woman named Jocelyn. What Malek remembers most vividly from this visit is not the sex itself, but the smell that permeated the room: “Smoking, drinking, men’s sweat, drugs everywhere.”
“Um Walid was nothing like how Ziad Doueiri portrayed her [in the film], that’s a romanticized image. In reality, she was vulgar, and violent! Slapping people left and right,” Malek recalled. Yet he agreed with Doueiri’s Um Walid that inside the brothel, “there is no east or west Beirut,” and customers did leave their guns outside the door before entering. He saw snipers from opposing factions laughing together. Someone poured him a glass of champagne, which made him very tipsy. The next day, his mother grounded him after discovering spots of dried sperm in his pants, thinking that he might have made a girl pregnant.
Um Walid’s famed brothel has inspired many accounts like this one, but Lebanon’s history contains many lesser-known tales of transactional sex that are just as suggestive of how sex entered the war economy. Sex workers provided a “key” to the war, Hisham told me, because they allowed for things to flow and circulate, at the same time as they were a source of “venting” (tanfīs) for fighters, a “fishing rod” (ṣayed al-samak) to another kind of life, as he put it. His comment underscores that militia fighters were young and often from poor class backgrounds, who entered a world they did not have access to prior to becoming men of arms and cash.
For young militia recruits, the sex industry provided a path to another kind of life. A communist fighter who was interviewed for a documentary after the war describes going to downtown Beirut during the war and encountering “another world,” where “porn cinemas, drugs, thugs and fighters” were lined up next to one another. “At night, I felt like hanging around in risky places, in this environment of another world,” he recounts to director Randa Chanda Sabbag in her 1995 documentary, Our Heedless Wars. Little did these men know that this wondrous new world would soon become theirs to control.
Hisham’s description of sex workers as a “fishing rod” for fighters also suggests the fetish power of sex. Sex as a commodity has the peculiar characteristic of being at once clandestine, like drugs, while at the same time being common to all; most people cannot live without it, and it is the source of endless fantasy and desire. The war’s traffic played into this demand and kept fighters awake and on edge with pleasurable and addictive economies running ad libitum.Footnote 32 An Israeli Mossad agent brags in his memoir of visiting Beirut’s fancy nightclubs where belly dancers entertained guests, in the company of Lebanese “casino kings” and petty crime “smugglers,” whom he reportedly recruited to his side.Footnote 33 As his account suggests, the traffic of clandestine goods bled into the traffic in sex across different sites of the city.
Brothels, casinos, and “super nightclubs” that hosted sex workers were important both as a source of extraction, including the bribes that brothel owners (patronas) paid to militias, but also as a cover for other transactions that took place inside. A class hierarchy operated in the sex-war economy between militiamen who socialized across enemy lines in sites of the city, and their leaders who preferred the privacy of their homes, where sex workers were sent out for “delivery” at a higher hourly rate. Snipers and foot soldiers from different militias went to the regular brothels as well as to bars where women sold sex and to hotels and super nightclubs north of Beirut, which are still known for their sex enterprise. Sex-working women reportedly also were sent to work in militia barracks, where they would “train” young recruits in the arts of sex.Footnote 34 Women who sold sex may have preferred these alternative sites to working in the brothels, where patronas reportedly kept their employees in prison-like conditions.
Many of the women employed in the sex economy were foreigners, including Arabs, Europeans, and East Africans. The writer Yusef Bazzi, who fought in the war with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), recalls in his memoir buying an hour with a “blond woman from Aleppo” and later with an Egyptian woman, both of whom he met in a bar in Hamra, the busy heart of West Beirut.Footnote 35 Fighters became infatuated with these women, yet they never trusted them, according to Hisham. He spoke of one famous Italian “Bianca” who was reportedly working as an undercover agent for an Italian leftist guerilla group in the 1960s and 70s and fled Lebanon once her double play was revealed. Like Bianca, women working in the brothels were often accused or suspected of spying for their clients and punished for it; many were even killed because of these associations.Footnote 36 “The woman’s body became her weapon in the war, but it also was used against her,” Hisham observed. The patronas’ iron hand may then have been a preventive act of protection as well.
The name patronas points to the patron-clientelist form of capitalism that informed Lebanon’s economy preceding the war, but which scaled up to a militarized system.Footnote 37 Small business owners survived by maintaining clientelist relations with militias.Footnote 38 Patronas had to pay fees to the militias that controlled the areas where they operated, and at the same time maintain business relations across this political spectrum. An anecdote from the first phase of the war (before 1982) reveals this balancing act. When neighbors complained about the surging business at Um Walid’s brothel, Fatah, the Palestinian faction who controlled the neighborhood around Starco at the time, threatened to bomb the place to appease their constituency. Yet Um Walid made a swift phone call to the faction leader, and the attack never happened.Footnote 39 This incident was not the first time that brothels were subject to military aggression in the war, as I observed in the opening.
Sex workers who ventured outside the brothels faced an altogether different degree of violence. In Lebanese dialect, brothels are often referred to as karkhana, which in Ottoman Turkish means “factory.”Footnote 40 This meaning explains why this term was used to designate women who worked in the silk factories in 19th-century Mount Lebanon.Footnote 41 The word gained a stigmatizing association with women who worked outside the house.
A classist perception of women with female sexual promiscuity on the street enters the frame in Beyrouth ya Beyrouth, Marwan Bagdadi’s film about the student strikes in Beirut following the 1967 war. In one scene, a group of young leftist students pick up a young woman in their car and take turns having sex with her. Although we never see a monetary transaction take place, the scene suggests that the sex is transactional; the woman enters the car with little persuasion, and the men do not ask for consent before grabbing her. Their male-entitled behavior is strikingly different from how they interact with the film’s main female character, the bourgeois Hala, who is taken out to respectful cafés, quiet dinners, and long walks by the Corniche, without ever being stripped naked. The film underscores a class divide between women whom militiamen encountered in their homes and considered marriage-worthy (even if they violated them), and women whom they encountered on the streets and at checkpoints and therefore considered theirs for the taking.
A brief look at the history of sex work in Lebanon reveals that this classist demarcation of transactional sex as separate from bourgeois civilian life did not emerge in the civil war era.
The City As Brothel
Where there is militarized labor, there tends to be an increased demand for sex work, and Lebanon was no exception to this pattern.Footnote 42 Prostitution had been an active economy already in late Ottoman-era Beirut, and during the French Mandate rule (1923–43) the French legalized prostitution, primarily to serve the needs of overseas soldiers who were stationed in Beirut.Footnote 43
The city’s growing sex economy attracted rural-urban migrants who came to the city in search of work, and cultural production has captured some of their stories. One such migrant was “Aunt Naziha,” a fictionalized character in Alawiya Sobh’s novel Maryam: The Keeper of Stories, who came in the 1940s with her sisters from the remote southern village of Bint Jubail to work as maids in Beirut. They shared an apartment with other young women in the mixed neighborhood of Zuqaq al Blat. Some of those girls flashed jewelry which, it turned out, they had acquired from working nightly for patronas on al-Mutanabbi Street, where, as mentioned, Beirut’s red-light district was located before the war (close to the now reconstructed Saifi district).
Naziha, eager to change her fate, soon joined this labor force at the brothels, where she scrubbed floors and waxed hair for the more experienced women. Naziha eventually built a career in the brothels, and disappeared from her family and her surroundings, “with no documentation but a prostitution license.”Footnote 44 Contemporary cultural productions have, like Sobh’s novel, strived to recover the stories of women like her. A cabaret show staged at Beirut’s Metro al-Medina theater in 2024, for example, brought to life the sex workers on al-Mutanabbi Street.Footnote 45
In the 1950s, following international abolitionist trends and growing public concern over Beirut’s booming sex economy, the Lebanese government stopped issuing legal licenses to brothels, but it continued to give so-called “artistes” work permits to sex workers; many also began working “freelance” outside the fold of the patronas. Footnote 46 “It’s like a souk with prostitutes for sale,” recounts the Yemeni feminist protagonist in Sonallah Ibrahim’s Warda of her visit to Beirut in the early 1960s. “Posters are lit up in red: Mareika, Sonia, Firecracker.”Footnote 47 The fire cracked in more than one sense when war broke out in 1975 around the corner from the brothels.
A growing sexual liberation discourse emerged in the decade leading up to the war, and sex work gained a new audience as literary magazines began to feature half-naked pin-ups on their covers, and published noir stories of sex and murder in the city and reviews of cabaret shows, which hosted many of the city’s sex workers.Footnote 48 These magazines brought Beirut’s nightlife performers into homes that could not afford to attend the shows. Many young men, who would soon become fighters in the civil war, learned the names of sex workers first from reading magazines and, later, from visiting pornography movie theaters. Bazzi, the SSNP fighter (also known by his nom de guerre, Devil), recalls seeing “the first pornographic scene” of his life in a cinema in downtown Beirut and later in Hamra, where “the audience consisted of more than 300 fighters outfitted with their entire arsenal,” who “unzipped their pants and fondled themselves.” The smell of the place stayed with Bazzi, “reeking of accumulated mold, urine, semen, warm breath, and congealed filth.”Footnote 49
In novels set in the war, the city becomes a stand-in for all kinds of sin and desire.Footnote 50 “Beirut syphilis-carrying whore,” “this center of all prostitutions,” decried the queer feminist writer Etel Adnan about her hometown in her writings from the late 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 51
“I played with my body as we did with the wounded city,” observes Maryam, the female protagonist of Maryam: The Keeper of Stories, Sobh’s novel in which sexual play often blends into violence.Footnote 52 Beirut becomes an extension of the destroyed and destroyable woman in several civil war–era novels, in which militiamen discover their own sexuality through the destruction of the city’s women.Footnote 53 In Bazzi’s memoir, the “fantastical appearance” of a woman staggering alone down the street late one night provokes unsolicited desire in him and his SSNP comrades. They argue over who gets to “have a go” at her first. Yet, to their surprise, the woman fights back, and after a while they give up.Footnote 54 The raped or “rapable” woman remains unidentified—nameless and, notably, sect-less. Rather than intersectarian violence, sexual violence is displayed here as individual acts symptomatic of a moral crisis of excess and masculine entitlement.Footnote 55
“Beirut is like a whore,” declares Elias Khoury’s protagonist in Little Mountain, which describes the city as an extractive economy to which the man falls victim.Footnote 56 “What a city—a whore of a city. Who could imagine a whore sleeping with a thousand men and continuing to live?”Footnote 57 What prompted this widespread cultural association of Beirut with female sexual promiscuity, and the consequent destruction of it (or “her”)? And how were the city’s residents gendered through this violent cultivation of masculinity and femininity?
For Khoury’s protagonist, “The total and violent destruction of this woman is seen as the only way out of an inextricable situation,” Evelyne Accad suggests in her reading of the novel, implying by “woman” the generalized figure of the city.Footnote 58 Toward the end of Little Mountain Khoury’s protagonist is surprised to find that the city is still standing: “She wasn’t destroyed.”Footnote 59 This surprise observation that the city-as-woman has agency recalls another familiar stereotype of Beirut—and of its residents—as a phoenix who can rise from the ashes of armed conflict, seemingly unharmed despite suffering multiple traumas.
In contrast to fictional writing and memoirs, sexual violence does not count among the forms of violence that key scholars of the war list in their assessments.Footnote 60 It is telling, then, that rape emerges as an analogy in Salim Nasr’s analysis of the war as an illegitimate child of Lebanese society, and a product of nonconsensual sex, when he writes:
Certainly, the emergence of a war system in Lebanon implies an accumulation of tensions, contradictions, and imbalances in the pre-war social and political order (and in this sense, war is a child of that society). But to what extent is it a legitimate child—or the product of a rape—even if significant segments of that society were consenting or at least complicit?Footnote 61
Indeed, “War is a relationship,” as ʿAli, a member of Amal, told me over coffee one morning.Footnote 62 How did sex figure into the relational traffic of the war, I wondered? When I asked civilian women who grew up in the war whether and in what contexts they experienced the threat of sexual violence, several mentioned everyday encounters with militias that involved monetary extraction. The threat of rape was particularly heightened at checkpoints, where militiamen worked long hours for little pay and where they demanded customs fees from those crossing. A scene in Bazzi’s memoir features a Christian woman “driving from east to west” whom his militia, the SSNP, intercepts at their checkpoint. When she talks back, accusing them of sectarian harassment, the commander scolds her: “I’ll fuck the seed that brought you into this world. Shut up, you whore!” then detains her and drives her away.Footnote 63 Like so many other women who were forcibly disappeared in the war, we do not learn of her fate.
The City As Checkpoint
Female and femme sexuality became bargaining chips in an economy of need and consumption, where sex was interchangeable with other desired commodities. Jana, a trans woman who experienced the sex economy firsthand during the war, understood that women could gain mobility or essential supplies such as gas, bread, and fuel by tapping into the war’s traffic.Footnote 64 She would bring home-baked mana’ish (plural for mana’oushe, a form of flatbread) to militiamen guarding the checkpoint to be allowed to cross from West to East Beirut, whenever she had to visit friends on the other side of the city.Footnote 65 “They must have been hungry!” I remarked when Jana told me this story, surprised that a piece of bread was enough to cross a militarized checkpoint. “They could not resist my zaʿatar,” she responded, laughing.
Jana and her friends would cruise and gather around Beirut’s seafront Raouché and the public beach Ramlet al-Bayda, which Jana described as “a safe space of sorts” for queer people and sex workers, who picked up customers there. Their experience, as she recounted it to me, suggests that trans women and gay sex workers had more mobility than both neighborhood women, who were kept indoors by militias, and brothel workers who were kept by their patronas. Yet trans women also faced many risks on the street. “Militias would target us because they knew we were tantes”—especially militiamen who had sex with them, she clarified.Footnote 66 “One militiaman told me after we had sex, “If I ever run into you on the street, I will kill you.”
Jana recounted with dry humor how “One of the girls went with a guy and came back looking like a street cat.”Footnote 67 Experiences like this prompted them to move in groups: “If one of us went up with a customer, the rest of us would wait nearby to make sure she came back down alright.” For the same reason, they preferred to make their income as “delivery girls” at clubs and at private parties, where members of the elite, including diplomats, often hired trans women to perform.Footnote 68
Women who sold sex were differently positioned than women whom the militias protected, violated, and traded through marriage. In her work on nationalist political violence, Veena Das describes a distinction between the “chaste woman” who is “protected”—albeit not from violence within her marriage and family—and the sexually “loose” woman, who is not deserving of protection.Footnote 69 As a sex worker, and as a trans woman, Jana was positioned outside the traffic in women-as-kin, which gave her a different degree of mobility, while exposing her to violence on the street. Women whom the militias considered kin, meanwhile, faced a different threat of violence within the domestic traffic of the neighborhood and family.
The War’s “Little States” and the Traffic in Women
“If you’re studying sex and prostitution in the civil war, you have to look at rape too,” Tony, who fought with LF, told me, raising his eyebrows. He mentioned in passing that he had participated in the Shatila and Sabra massacre of 1982, which his militia carried out against Palestinians. We were sitting at one of Beirut’s old cafés by the waterfront with Hisham, from the Palestinian faction, and their friend Lamia, who had fought with the communists.Footnote 70 Representing opposite factions and ideologies in the war, the three had since become close friends through their work with the civil society advocacy group Fighters for Peace. Just a minute before Tony’s comment about rape, they had been joking with each other. Now, Lamia interjected: “Rape only took place between enemies.” But Hisham disagreed: “Rape took place among friends, too.” I asked him to elaborate.
“Militias used rape for different purposes: to attack the enemy, by taking their women, for territorial control in neighborhoods, and to make money for their own survival,” Hisham told us. He continued: “Neighborhood women were the most exposed to sexual violence because they were the heads of household. Also from members of their own sect.”
By instilling fear in the neighborhood residents, while also transmitting a sense of mutual obligation, the militias both exploited civilians and ensured the continuation of loyalty. Tony seemed to agree with this take. He reckoned that “civilians feared their militias, but they preferred them to the enemy militia.”
The militias acted like “little states,” as Racha, a Lebanese journalist who grew up in East Beirut’s Ashrafiyeh during the war, told me.Footnote 71 Residents were reliant on militias to provide basic services such as water and electricity, and this involved paying a monthly tax, or “protection fee,” to the militias in charge.Footnote 72 Racha recalled the militia visits with dread. “Ahrar, Marada, Kataeb, LF, they all came to our house, acting like the state,” she said, listing the names of the Christian right-wing militias who operated in the neighborhood where her family lived. The faces of the men changed with the shift in power between the militias, but the visits continued.
During the war, Racha’s father worked in Kuwait and her mother was alone with her and her sisters. “She told us to stay inside, not to sit on the balcony, because she didn’t want the men to see us. It was understood that if we could not pay, they would take us.” Like Racha’s mother, many Lebanese women became the main household providers during the war, in the absence of fathers, husbands, and sons who were disappeared or killed, or working abroad.Footnote 73 As Jonathan Hassine has observed, different sorts of capital operated in the war economy, and “if a family lacked these capitals, the (threat of) violence was heightened.”Footnote 74 A female-only household lacked a certain masculine patriarchal capital, which had to be compensated for with socioeconomic capital. Racha’s family’s relative economic power spared her the violence that others, who could not pay, experienced.
That intrasectarian violence was more prevalent than intersectarian violence in the war, although less reported on, has been noted by scholars.Footnote 75 “Contrary to common representations,” Picard observed decades ago, “the danger came from within, from the routine exercise of intimidation and criminality by the very people who represented themselves as providers of security.”Footnote 76 Militias in effect reinforced a sectarian kinship logic whereby they would threaten women from “their” community under the guise of protecting them from violation by men from an enemy faction. Another example of this is a scene in Khoury’s Little Mountain in which a Christian militiaman enters a Christian household and tells the mother, “We’re here to protect people, not to loot,” as he invades her home in search of her leftist son, whom they consider a traitor to their cause. “He is not here,” the mother tells them over and over again as they search his room, penetrating the home as an extension of the woman.Footnote 77 With the same logic that allowed for a conflation between the “raped” city and the “rapable” women living in it, the neighborhood and its women remained “intact” through this logic of protection.Footnote 78
The militias’ violence of protection, although sometimes overt, also relied on more subtle techniques, such as neighborhood-based surveillance, societal regulation, and institutional inscription; a disciplinary violence that kept families like Racha’s in line.Footnote 79 This “privatization of public order,” by which militias governed families through the regulatory violence of sex, can be understood as a form of state-making, in the absence of the state.Footnote 80 In this lens, Racha’s perception of the militias as “little states” can be read as a critique of the militia state that reveals a desire for a different kind of state, as a governing body that might protect her.Footnote 81
The militias’ use of sectarianizing disciplinary protection created a hierarchy of sexual violence, which marked out sexual violence committed by an outsider/enemy as political violence proper. This materialized in conversations with former militiamen who blamed the other part for participating in the sex economy. For example, when I asked a former prominent fighter of a Christian faction, who is now a member of the Fighters of Peace, about the brothels, he said: “Only one type of soldier went to those places in Zaytouna, not us Christians.”Footnote 82 Hisham made a similar accusation the other way around, when he casually associated sexual crimes with “the Christians,” making the accusatory discourse almost comical in its circularity.
What this sectarianized logic disguises, meanwhile, is sexual violence committed in the home or “within” the sectarian (or what Maya Mikdashi calls the “sextarian”) family unit, which is rendered a necessary violence of protection.Footnote 83 A similar pattern can be traced in the UN’s action framework, which, as Jacquie True observes, “prioritizes sexual violence as a threat to security when the perpetrators of this violence are from a belligerent party,” but often leaving violence committed in private and between civilians in the dark.Footnote 84 As Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has observed, “The consequence of equating the raped woman with the ‘dishonoured’ country, is that all members of the ‘enemy’ army are viewed as rapists,” and this reinforces a sectarian logic of division.Footnote 85
The sectarianized protection clause also became a recruitment tactic for militias, when they faced a waning political motivation and increased their pressure on civilians to supply men to the front “as if obliged, like they were family,” as Ronny, a former LF fighter, told me. His observation emphasizes how militias stressed the kinship bond for gain. Some militias also used the threat of sexual humiliation as a recruitment strategy, by threatening women in the families of the recruits.Footnote 86
The division between political and “private” violence is reproduced spatially in the carving up of the private as a (feminine) safe space and the public as the (masculine) space of warfare. Yet the home, of course, was not protected from the violence of the street; rather, the effect of this violence was kept hidden by the stubborn association of the home with feminine safety.Footnote 87 Another zone that broke the binary illusion of public and private comprised the shelters, built into most of Beirut’s apartment buildings, in which residents hid during the frequent bombardments, sometimes for whole nights. The atmosphere of tension, combined with the low lighting, invited all forms of sexual encounters in the shelters, both consensual and coercive, according to different fighters I spoke to.Footnote 88
Although the brothel upheld a law of disarmament that allowed it to appear as a zone of nonviolence (although it was not), in the home, arms could and did enter at any time. Whether by armed men entering the house, or bullets crashing through the walls and windows, the home became a war zone.
The City As Widow
In a war in which militias “produced social and economic devastation for the communities that they claimed to represent and protect,” the classed aspect of sexual violence revealed itself for those who could not afford militia protection.Footnote 89 Poorer families sometimes chose to marry their teenage daughters off to fighters who operated in their neighborhood or village, to gain militia protection and to prevent them from being violated by militiamen outside the house.Footnote 90 Yet marrying militiamen placed women in a relationship of economic dependency with the militias; a dependency that, for widows, often continued long after the war officially ended.
For Aya, the violence of the war continued well into the 1990s. She had married a sniper from the Druze militia, the PSP, who died in the late 1980s. Aya had grown up in Jal al Bahr, an ethnically mixed neighborhood by Beirut’s seafront next to Ain Mreisseh, and her Druze parents were terrified that she would date men of other sects. “My mom used to beat me if I came home five minutes later than promised,” she shared. They married her off when she was 17 years old to prevent her from being sexually abused by militiamen. But by 1989, at the age of 19, Aya had become a widow when her husband was killed in an ambush by the Lebanese Army. Their toddler son was playing on the floor in their apartment in Beirut when she saw on TV that a number of PSP fighters had been killed; her husband’s name was listed among them. He had “terrorized” her during their short-lived marriage, and the tears she shed at his funeral were not out of sorrow for him, she assured me, but for her son’s future.Footnote 91
When I asked Aya when her husband died and she responded “at the beginning of the war,” I first thought that she had misunderstood my question, since he died in 1989, approaching the end of the war. But as she recounted her story, I understood that for Aya, the real war only started after his death and continued well into the next decade. The party stepped in for the father and took on some administrative responsibilities, ensuring that her son would not be considered an orphan. But this support brought her into an exploitative and violent bond with the party. “Widows were considered sexually available, but we were not considered attractive for marriage anymore.”
Aya started working at the PSP’s office in Beirut. She was the only woman in the office and her male colleagues would make sexual advances on her. The PSP employee responsible for distributing widow support for the party was “the worst harasser,” she recalled. She needed a paper signed by the party to register her son in school at the beginning of each semester. The first time she went to collect the paper, the employee responsible for this locked the door and forced her to have sex with him. His advancements continued for three years straight. Twice a year she went to collect the paper, and he would rape her every time. There was no room for negotiation, and no one in the party whom she trusted to report this to. The stigma of rape was so pervasive in her community that some women who had been raped were sent away; some of them reportedly ended up forced into prostitution.Footnote 92 Because sex outside marriage was socially stigmatized, Aya only ever shared her traumatic experience with one friend, who had an affair with a married man and therefore, she thought, would not judge her.
After three years, Aya could not take it anymore, and she quit relations with the party. “I worked night and day, but it was better than working for the party.”Footnote 93 To raise her son on her own, she had to work four different jobs at the same time. She worked as a cashier in an ice cream parlor, as a caretaker at a home for the elderly, as a hotel receptionist, and as a nanny. She stayed single for a long time, but in 2000 she met a man who was willing to raise her son and she married him “out of convenience, not out of love.” Their two children are now in their twenties and know very little about their mother’s experiences. Her son, who as a martyr’s son is an honored member of the PSP to this day, has no idea of her experiences with the militia.
“This was a widow’s suffering,” Aya reckoned. “What happened to me happened to so many women in the war.” Her story is suggestive of how the traffic in women through marriage to militiamen did not protect women.Footnote 94 Civilians were trafficked for their sacrificial value in a war that was waged as a war between men (even as some women fighters participated), but became in effect a war against women. Aya’s story also shows how sexual violence was covered up and enforced with a secrecy that made it circulate as rumor rather than fact in its aftermath.
When Rape Becomes Rumor
“Rape didn’t happen in the war,” Ronny said, shaking his head, when we met in his office in downtown Beirut.Footnote 95 He had fought in the Lebanese Forces and might have been Tony’s comrade in the war. “Some women worked as double agents, and they were punished for it, but that’s it,” he explained.Footnote 96 I pointed out that brothel workers in particular were often accused of spying for the enemy, due to their contact with customers from opposing factions, and, as other militiamen told me, they were sometimes punished for this social position. “It was an ugly war, yes, but we were not like Boko Haram or ISIS, who rape women systematically,” Ronny responded, evoking the African Muslim war rapist as the racialized specter of sexual violence.Footnote 97 When I told Ronny that I was not making a judgment on anyone, he loosened up a little. “Of course it happened, but on individual occasions here and there, it was not systematic at all,” he said. I then told him a story that a young woman had shared with me.
Nada, a Druze woman in her twenties, was born a decade after the war had ended, but in the Shouf Mountains where she grew up, the threat of violence continued to structure what women could and could not do, and what people said about them.Footnote 98 “Don’t stay out late, the quwāt (Lebanese Forces) might take you!” Nada’s grandmother would warn her whenever she went out with her friends. Her warning was made in reference to the kidnappings of young women, which the LF carried out during the so-called War of the Mountain between Christian and Druze forces in the Shouf.Footnote 99 For Nada’s family, who had lived in relative isolation up in the mountain during the war and often married cross-cousins, sexual violation by a stranger from a different sect meant social suicide for a young woman. Faced with this threat, her grandfather told her grandmother that, if ever she heard the men coming, “kill the girls and then kill yourself.” Nada was raised amid the intergenerational repercussions of this warning.Footnote 100 The fear was so ingrained in her grandmother that, Nada reckons, she really did believe that the men could come back at any point.
Although civil society actors have made efforts to document forced disappearances in the war, kidnappings like the one Nada’s grandmother recalls have been rendered rumors, in contrast to the publicly documented massacres in the civil war.Footnote 101 One obvious reason for this imbalance in documentation is that journalists were present in public places, whereas violence in domestic and semiprivate zones was not accessible to them, did not attract photographic attention, and consequently left no public trace.Footnote 102 Another reason sexual violence was not documented during the war is that the perpetrators held the power. After all, as Rosalind Morris observes, “in the case of sexual violence … secrecy is sought and presumed mainly by those who can identify with the ideal forms of political subjectivity operative in the public domain.”Footnote 103
The report by LAW and UN Women breaks this silence by documenting both the spectacular instances of cross-sectarian sexual violence, when militias raped to humiliate and terrorize the enemy, and everyday forms of sexual violence that occurred during the war. Fatima Shehadeh from LAW, who coauthored the report, told me that all the militias, as well as the different national and foreign armies involved, sexually violated women “systematically” and for different reasons: to evict groups from neighborhoods where they were taking control, to extract information and money, and to terrorize and shame the enemy. Some militias also used the threat of sexual humiliation as a recruitment strategy, by threatening women in the families of the recruits. The report therefore suggests that rape for the purpose of recruitment and extraction also happened within sectarian communities. This point correlates with what I learned.
The former militia members I spoke to did not contradict my findings when I presented them. After all, it was Tony who first encouraged me to “look into rape.” Yet his comrades disagreed over the scale of sexual violence in the war.
“Look, it was chaos,” Ronny allowed, after I told him how the actions of his former militia, Lebanese Forces, still haunt grandmothers in their sleep up in the Druze Mountains. “Those perpetrators, they were children, they did not fear death, and they were drugged,” he pointed out. “The leaders could not control what went on, so it went unpunished. Even the leaders were young.” The distinction between victim and perpetrator breaks down in Ronny’s discourse, as he questions the agency of a child soldier.
“We Were Children after All”
Age became a leitmotif in my conversations with militiamen and women who all began military training as minors, at the age of 12 to 14, and came of age fighting. Wissam, for example, joined the Lebanese Communist Party after learning in school about the men from his village who resisted the French colonial occupation in 1925. He became a faction leader while still a teenager.
“We would collect our monthly cash [from the militia] and go straight to the Luna Park to spend it,” Lamia, Wissam’s earlier comrade, told me. She laughed at the irony of it: “We were children after all.”Footnote 104 Bazzi also recounts in his memoir how he was turned away from donating blood at a local clinic, because he was too young to donate blood, yet somehow old enough to fight. He was still in high school when he joined the war in 1981.Footnote 105
Others were deprived of this relative sense of innocence. “We lost our childhood at the age of seven,” Hisham said of his upbringing in South Lebanon, where he was born in 1949 to a family of tobacco farmers. His village became a battleground for Israeli military aggressions that provoked in him a sense of responsibility for protecting his family and community against this imminent threat.
How did this environment of violence, in which militiamen and militiawomen came of age, impact gendered and intimate relations within the militias? Several militiawomen told me that they had their first romantic experiences with men in the barracks. “The food in the barracks tasted bland because they put camphor in it,” Lamia recalled. Her remark prompted Nadine and Alia, who were her comrades in the LCP, to bend over laughing, as we sat smoking and chatting on a steamy August afternoon.Footnote 106 “Camphor?” I asked, feeling lost in translation. “Yeah, you know, so the men couldn’t get it up,” the women explained. “Camphor” is an herbal drug believed by some to dampen sexual desire in men. But Wissam, who as a faction leader oversaw the barracks, dismissed this claim, saying they did not put anything in the food.Footnote 107
Nadine told me that society considered her mufafada, a “loose woman,” unlike their militia “brothers” who were widely depicted as martyrs and sex symbols.Footnote 108 The appearance of militiawomen in Lebanon’s war is sometimes celebrated in public discourse as an indication of gender equality, but women fighters were still a minority, and they faced different, gendered expectations than their male comrades. Tony indicated the same when he gave me a brief statement that he had written about the challenges facing women who fought in the war. “To live with men in offices or on the battlefield differs, but problem[s] still exist… . The presence of men who have not seen women for long time and he wants to have sex … (bmc) bitch for men company,” he wrote, teaching me yet another category of female sexuality.
The adolescent experience of the war as a violent playground also manifested for civilians. Racha, who grew up in the war amid the threat of militiamen, also fell in love with her future husband during the conflict and remembers the excitement of crossing checkpoints to see him. For her, the war had bred a sense of radical uncertainty and possibility, which in her postwar life was supplanted by a sense of immobility and foreclosure. “You want to do something, be productive, you are used to moving around. Should we take office jobs and live normal boring lives now? Impossible. In the war we used to dream, but after the war we had no excuse, this was it. It was our great disappointment.”
Racha’s statement evokes a nostalgic mode of remembering the war that is common to fighters as well, who described waking up from a dream, or a nightmare.Footnote 109 For the first six months after the war had been declared over, in 1990, Wissam sat in his living room cleaning his weapons, not going out. “I joined the war as a teenager, and when it ended I was 32 years old… . I had no idea how to act or be in the world outside war.” Reversing the erotic appeal of coming of age as a fighter, his account suggests that the transformation back to civilian life can have an infantilizing effect. “After the war, people didn’t want to associate with the war, and fighters were seen as part of it,” Tony from the LF told me. The lack of education and transferable skills, along with stigma and fear, made it hard for fighters to find decent work; many became security guards and truck drivers, for lack of better-paid jobs.Footnote 110 Others were saved by political connections, like those who found work as clerks in Lebanon’s Ministry of the Displaced, which was set up after the war.
The sense of aborted dreams also concludes Alawiya Sobh’s novel, in which the female narrator likens the forced disappearance of women and children to the city’s disappearance as a whole.Footnote 111 “All of us aborted foetuses and dreams and memories,” she writes. “The city aborted the city, the street aborted the street and the buildings aborted their walls. The villages aborted the villages, and humans aborted their lives.”Footnote 112
Conclusion: Relational Binds of War
“A man has died in Beirut. A woman too,” Etel Adnan wrote in 1989.Footnote 113 Like these deaths, recounted in the passive voice, violence became an expected occurrence during the war. But unlike deaths, there has been little scholarly attempt to count or otherwise document the number of rapes and incidents of sexual violence that occurred.Footnote 114 Asking what role sex played in the violence of Lebanon’s long civil war necessitates grappling with why we are only asking this question now, fifty years after the war first broke out?
Sexual violence appears, in contrast, across Lebanese cultural production of the war, to such a degree that it almost naturalizes sex-as-violence. This cultural framing allowed for a binary narrative that either blamed women for sexual promiscuity, or blamed men for lacking moral guidance, suggesting either way that rape happens due to a lack of social control. My findings challenge both the silencing and the scandalization of sex in the war by foregrounding instead how sexual violence became integral to the political and economic governance of civilians; a form of patriarchal governance which was not unique to militia rule, but rather imitated state rule. When militiamen violated their “own” constituency, it served to inflict fear and so to uphold civilians’ loyalty to them, through a logic that reinforced sectarian divisions and perpetuated the patriarchal social order.
I have argued that militias governed sex through two parallel systems, the traffic in sex and the traffic in women; the former by integrating the sex economy with the war economy, and the latter by controlling civilians through a patriarchal, sectarian logic of protection. The two traffics intersected and contrasted: the valorization of sex and of femme sexuality could be instrumentalized to cross the city’s sectarian boundaries, whereas the governance of civilian women through militia marriages reinforced those boundaries socially.
When examining how sex was governed in the war, we are faced with a series of appearances. First, in the cultural archive, Beirut appears as a city where sex (and women) roamed uncontrollably, when in fact sexual relations were highly governed by patriarchal political interest. Second, in militiamen’s discourse, Beirut’s women appear demarcated according to categories of publicly available and private sex, when in fact transactional sex occurred across these spaces and there was no place kept “private,” because militiamen governed and invaded civilian homes. These appearances and disappearances of sex in the war remind us of what Hisham first taught me: that “nothing was one thing only” in the war, and that everything was connected.
Acknowledgments
In embarking on this research, I have relied on the insight and expertise of many who experienced the civil war firsthand and have studied it much longer than I have. I wish to thank in this regard members of Fighters for Peace, their research assistant Nour who helped me facilitate group interviews, and everyone else who shared their stories with me. I am grateful to IJMES editor Joel Gordon and the reviewers for trusting this work and helping me improve it, and to Pelle Valentin Olsen, Joshua Craze, and Jonathan Hassine for giving invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this article. In Lebanon, I relied on the expertise and kindness of Jan Altaner for navigating new archives, and on Alfred Tarazzi, Monika Borgman, Ghassan Salhab, Ziad Doueiri, Anthony Tawil, Evelyn Accad, Mohammed Soueid, and Tracy Chahwan for sharing their work, insight, and connections with me. Leah Zraika kindly assisted with translating certain terms. A number of mentors in Beirut encouraged me early on to pursue this research, and I am grateful for our conversations and the advice you have given me: Nadya Sbaiti, Akram Khater, Andrew Arsan, Ghenwa Hayek, Sune Haugbolle, Rima Majed, Maya Mikdashi, and Jens Hanssen. Conversations with Rosalind Morris helped me clarify my ideas. Participants of the Political Anthropology Working Group at the CUNY Graduate Center helped push this research in new directions, as did the panel audience at the Historical Materialism Conference in London in 2024, where I first presented it. The New School’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility trusted me with financial support, time, and resources to conduct this research. Last but certainly not least, Kaja Blattman hosted me on four consecutive research trips to Beirut and I am forever grateful for her friendship, generosity, and wisdom. This research is dedicated to everyone who lived through the war and is indebted to those who are still alive to tell its story.
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