Beirut Radical

A Global Microhistory from the Sixties to the Lebanese Civil War
The story of Imad Nuwayhid, a Lebanese student, communist, traveller, hotel employee, and “martyr” of the Lebanese Civil War, offering a global microhistory of this era of radical youth politics and culture, as well as how it is remembered today

Imad Yusuf Nuwayhid was born in 1944 in the Lebanese village of Ras al-Matn. He came of age in the 1960s, splitting time between Beirut and Europe. And he died in 1975, the start of the Lebanese Civil War.

But who was Imad Nuwayhid? Was he a leftist intellectual? A self-interested hotel worker? A fighter dedicated to Palestinian liberation? A tragic symbol of what happened to those caught in the crosshairs during the war? Through archival and oral history, Beirut Radical finds that Imad was none of these things alone, but all of them together.

Beirut Radical takes up Imad Nuwayhid as a global microhistory—a window into the global sixties, the war, and its aftermath. Baun argues that Imad’s beliefs and actions, crystalized during two tumultuous decades of the Cold War, signal a young generation of what he terms “practical radicals.” While much more is known about their politics and support for left-wing ideologies, Imad’s life highlights how they pursued them, equally, alongside their career aspirations. Imad’s death in the war, then, shows the twisting path by which some young leftists ceded their autonomy to liberation struggles. Lastly, Beirut Radical follows Imad’s afterlife, examining how multiple actors to Lebanon’s war, some in concert (party and family members), some in resistance (some family), claim individuals and their memory, during and beyond wartime. More than anything perhaps, Beirut Radical is a meditation on the intimate, the personal, the ethics, and the micro-level of history.

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