BEYOND THE LINES: SOCIAL NETWORKS AND PALESTINIAN MILITANT ORGANIZATIONS IN WARTIME LEBANON

Winner, Routledge Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence, American Political Science Association Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Related Group

Honorable Mention, Best Book on Middle East and North Africa Politics, American Political Science Association Middle East and North Africa Politics Organized Section

Reviewed in Foreign Affairs, Abu Aardvark’s MENA Academy, and Mediterranean Politics.

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How do rebel groups cope with crises such as acute repression, mass displacement, or fragmentation? What explains changes in militant organizations’ structures and behaviors over time? My book, titled Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, explores the social underpinnings of militant adaptation and resilience. Drawing on nearly two years of immersive research among Palestinian militants, in-depth interviews with over 100 current and former activists, and archival materials such as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO’s) original battlefront video footage, this book traces shifts in Palestinian militant groups’ internal structures and practices during the civil war and foreign occupation of Lebanon (1982-1990). It makes two arguments. First, I argue that rather than being combat-centered, most militants approach asymmetrical warfare as a series of information- and logistics-centric challenges characterized by problems such as supplying constantly mobile forces, identifying collaborators, disrupting rival belligerents’ operations, and providing essential services such as healthcare. The ability to negotiate those challenges—rather than compiling a scorecard of discrete acts of killing and wounding—centrally contributes to militant organizations’ resilience and survival. Second, I argue that the foundations of rebel resilience lie with militants’ ability to repurpose their everyday social networks to organizational ends. In the Lebanese setting, Beyond the Lines demonstrates how regionalized differences in Israeli, Syrian, and Lebanese deployment of violence, e.g. the institution of house arrest for male Palestinians in one region and the use of large-scale prison camps in another, triggered distinct social network responses that led to divergent organizational outcomes for Palestinian militants. The book empirically grounds this argument by tracing organizational adaptation across Palestinian communities in three Lebanese cities, detailing how network micro-dynamics produced personalized militias, clandestine logistics and intelligence apparatuses, civilian-based counterintelligence efforts, and eventually, locally-based defensive fronts that were largely separate from exiled elite commands.