| Summary/Abstract |
In 1989 SOLIDE, a grass root movement from within the right wing Christian opposition to the Syrian military security emerged in order to campaign for the recovery of the disappeared. Drawing on oral history, interviews, fieldwork at SOLIDE's protest tent in downtown Beirut, and documentary analysis, I trace the genealogy and politics of SOLIDE's activism from the late 1980s to the present, showing that SOLIDE's activism underwent profound changes in response to Lebanese political developments. Beginning as an avowedly political campaign, in the aftermath of the war it turned into a human rights-focused NGO, a shift that was only possible because of an alliance with a group of the mothers of the disappeared; gender stereotyping enabled SOLIDE to present itself as fundamentally apolitical. With the establishment of a protest tent in downtown Beirut in 2005, in the period after the Syrian withdrawal until the end of its sit-in in 2015, SOLIDE took on the characteristics of a social movement. Analysis of the various phases of activism demonstrates that in Lebanon the boundaries between humanitarianism, often of religious inspiration, and human rights activism, supposedly secular, are porous, as too the boundary between party-political activism and civil society.
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