For Your Sake We Continue Memory and Mobilisation in the Aftermath of the 2019 Lebanese Uprising

In the fall of 2019, hundreds of thousands of people across Lebanon and in the Lebanese diaspora took to the streets demanding the downfall of the sectarian regime that has been in power since the end of the Civil War in 1990. The uprising sent shock-waves through society; however, it has yet to effect fundamental political change. This has left protesters and academics alike to question how it should be interpreted: as a revolutionary moment or as part of a long-term process of change. This paper aims to bring these two positions together by offering a memory studies perspective. It examines how the October 17 Movement, the social and political movement that emerged from the protests, uses the memory of the uprising to mobilise for action in the present. The paper focuses on the memorialisation of violent deaths, demonstrating how their particular mobilising potential has been invoked by activists after the uprising. Situating this within the context of a violently divided society and memory culture in Lebanon, I argue that the ways that the movement invokes the memory of the dead challenges, but in some instances also reproduces, the sectarian order it opposes.