The Blood of Brothers: Violence in Civil Wars

The book's centrepiece: a comprehensive analysis of violence in the Lebanese civil war through the lens of Hannah Arendt's distinctions between power, force, and violence. Traboulsi dissects the rituals of collective killing — from the carnival-like looting of Beirut to checkpoint identity verification, the sacralization of militia leaders, the sniper as tribal avenger, and the mechanisms by which entire communities become "surplus" to be eliminated. A foundational text in the anthropology of Lebanese wartime violence.

An essay on the visual culture of the Lebanese civil war, introducing Zeina Maasri's research on political posters as weapons in the conflict. Drawing on Horst Bredekamp's theory of the "image-act," Traboulsi analyses how posters functioned as symbolic battlefields — simultaneously icons to be venerated and targets to be destroyed.

A meditation on the Cathar heresy and its radical dualism — the belief that the material world is the creation of an evil god. Traboulsi uses the Cathar rejection of images and the body to explore the deeper relationship between theological dualism, iconoclasm, and the depiction of evil in Western art.

A study of the German artist Käthe Kollwitz — the anti-war mother who transformed personal grief into universal art. From the Weavers' Revolt engravings to the Pietà-like memorial in Berlin, Traboulsi reads Kollwitz's work as the definitive artistic statement on the cost of war borne by mothers — a theme that echoes through the Lebanese civil war's own culture of martyrdom and maternal sacrifice.

A multi-layered essay on guilt, shame, and memory in the aftermath of civil wars. Traboulsi moves from a critique of culturalist explanations of violence (Lewis, Huntington) through the guilt/shame binary in Orientalist thought, to Caravaggio's paintings of David and Goliath as images of the killer-victim duality. The essay culminates in the question of post-war Lebanon: can guilt be productive? Through Assad Sheftari's rare public repentance and Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness, Traboulsi argues that civil wars demand both remembering and forgetting — following Renan's insight that every nation is built on shared amnesia.

On the East German playwright Heiner Müller, who lived under two dictatorships — Nazi Germany, then the GDR, then reunified capitalist Germany. Traboulsi reads Müller's theatre as a sustained "aggression against reality," tracing the line from Brecht through Müller's own radical fragmentation of dramatic form. The essay opens with the foundational trauma: the child watching his father arrested by the Nazis, a scene Müller returned to obsessively.

Analysis of Bosnian director Ademir Kenović's film The Perfect Circle (1997), set during the siege of Sarajevo. A man takes in two orphaned brothers; in the circle of violence, the child who was victim becomes perpetrator. Traboulsi draws parallels between the Sarajevo and Beirut sieges — the daily rituals of survival, the transformation of children by war, and the terrible symmetry of the "perfect circle" of violence.

A literary essay on the Syrian poet and playwright Muhammad al-Maghut and his masterpiece The Hunchback Sparrow. Traboulsi reads al-Maghut's work as a sustained cry against the violence inflicted on the poor and the powerless — the rural migrant in the city, the prisoner, the hungry child. Al-Maghut's "hunchbacked sparrow" becomes a figure for all those deformed by the violence of class and state.

A sweeping essay tracing the afterlife of Picasso's Guernica across Arab wars. From the original 1937 bombing through Franco's denial and Goering's confession at Nuremberg, to the mural's return to democratic Spain, Traboulsi charts how each new war — Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Lebanon — generates its own artistic response to the archetype of aerial terror that Picasso captured. Guernica becomes not one painting but a template for representing the bombing of civilians.

The book's final and most historically grounded essay, beginning at the Syrian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Architecture Biennale and tracing the entire history of aerial warfare against civilians in the Arab world: from the first Ottoman plane over Damascus in 1914, through the British RAF bombing of Iraq's 1920 revolt and the French bombardment of Damascus in 1925, to the drone and the barrel bomb. The essay ends where it began — at Venice, where the Syrian team's response to the "excavations of the sky" was to drill a well in Daraa province: excavations of the earth, life against death.