LEBANON ARCHIVE

Watch kim discuss the 2020 beirut explosion in a series of interviews for GZero World with Ian Bremmer

Financial Times: "Lebanon’s Constitutional Void Is An Opportunity For Regional Players"
December 6, 2022
Not just the presidency but a slew of key positions need to be filled.

The Atlantic: "What the Loss of Freedom Feels Like"
October 21, 2021
In three distinct and different places, Afghanistan, Hong Kong and Lebanon, a similar sense of loss—of liberal values, of hope—is overwhelming.

The Atlantic: "America’s Future Might Be Lebanon"
November 1, 2020
The Lebanese know that waiting for the end of something does not truly provide a fresh start, and certainly not a return to the way things were before.

PBS NewsHour: “How Deadly Beirut Blasts Pushed Lebanese to their Breaking Point”
August 11, 2020
Since the August 2020 explosion in Beirut, Lebanese have experienced sadness, rage and recrimination, with many blaming the blast on decades of government corruption and incompetence.

The Guardian: “Lebanon Is No Stranger to Disaster – But This Is Like Nothing We've Ever Seen”
August 6, 2020
Decades of stoic resistance in the face of tragedies has turned to rage after the devastating explosion in Beirut’s port.

The Atlantic: "How Lebanon Transformed Anthony Bourdain"
June 9, 2018
In 2006, he found himself in a country falling into war—an experience that forever altered how he would understand people, culture, history, and conflict.

Foreign Policy: "Lebanon's Shining Island of Example Is Shrinking"
September 12, 2017
In Lebanon, a country that had a population of 4.5 million in 2011, before the refugee crisis, and that strives to maintain a delicate balance among its Sunni, Shiite, and Christian minorities, many worry about the long-term impact of the influx in recent years of around a million mostly Sunni, mostly conservative Syrian refugees on the fabric of society.

WUFC (PBS): Global Perspectives
May 15, 2017
Host John Bersia asks about what it was like living in Lebanon during a time of civil war. 

Foreign Policy: "Beirut's Lovable Losers" 
May 26, 2016
A group of 24 citizens who had just run in the city’s municipal elections — many of them young professionals, most of them secular, half of them women — had actually lost. So what were they celebrating?

Project Syndicate: "Lebanon's Model of Moderation"
September 25, 2014
Despite the shortcomings of its political system, Lebanon can provide a template for managing cultural diversity and rejecting radicalism in an unstable and fragmented setting.

The Daily Beast: "Beirut Letter: In Lebanon, Fighting ISIS With Culture and Satire"
September 22, 2014
Lebanon may be small and a mess politically, but it brandishes weapons against ISIS that no other Arab country can.

BBC article and radio documentary (at right): "Lebanon Dances Into The Abyss as Syria Conflict Crosses Border"
February 19, 2014
Lebanon is hosting around a million refugees from the conflict in Syria, which means that one in four people in the country are Syrian. But the impact on Syria's neighbor goes well beyond a humanitarian crisis.

Financial Times: "Syria Withdraws Last Troops from Lebanon"
April 25, 2005
The day I went to meet Rustom Ghazaleh, the man who ran Syria’s feared security apparatus in Lebanon. After almost 30 years of occupation, Syria was about to withdraw its troop from Lebanon, in the wake of international pressure on Damascus because its alleged role in the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. Ghazaleh is reported to have died or been killed recently in Syria’s conflict.

de Volkskrant: "Het Is Lente in Libanon" [It's Spring in Lebanon]
March 2005
Personal reflections on what was termed Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution: its uprising against Syrian occupation. An Arab spring before the 2011 Arab Spring. (In Dutch)

Philadelphia Inquirer: "Tentative Dance With A History Many Would Rather Forget"
April 20, 2000
Twenty-five years after the start of the war — a brutal 15-year conflict involving several religious factions and many military interventions — Lebanon has hardly begun to face its past.