REPOSITIONING ARMENIANS IN NEWLY POST-COLONIAL NATION-STATES: LEBANON AND SYRIA, 1945–1946

This is the first of four chapters investigating how Armenians in Lebanon re-situated themselves and re-imagined their place in that Middle Eastern country and in the world more broadly during a sensitive, transitional time of change: the early post-colonial period. This chapter focuses on the mid-1940s. Existential political questions shaped those years. Lebanon was manoeuvering from de jure independence, in 1943, to its de facto independence, which it gained ‘only’ in 1946. This path was strewn with political and military mines; in fact, the ultimate shape of independence and hence of the Lebanese polity was not self-evident ahead of time,