Craig Larkin: The Politics of Memory, From Mosul to Beirut to Gaza

This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on April 17, 2025. Listen to the podcast here.

Jon Alterman: Craig Larkin, welcome to Babel.

Craig Larkin: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jon Alterman: You've written a lot about social reconstruction in conflict-affected environments. What is social reconstruction? What are its components?

Craig Larkin: I've been really interested in the intersection of memory, conflict, and identity, and particularly looking at how cities can be both destroyed and then the attempt to rebuild and reconstruct. While there's been a lot of focus on physical rebuilding, I’ve been interested in the restoration of society. I would argue there's not enough focus on how communities heal.

How can you reintegrate communities and people after conflict? I would say social reconstruction is about—as one of my Iraqi interviews said—it's not about rebuilding the stones; it's about rebuilding the people.

Jon Alterman: In a lot of conflict-affected environments, there are a lot of preexisting power structures—like tribal leaders, sectarian leaders—some of whom may have contributed to the violence in the first place. How do you think about their roles? It seems to me that, in some ways, having these kinds of leaders can help you get things moving in the near term, but it can also plant the seeds of division in the longer term.

Craig Larkin: The reality is, after conflict and war, we have a post-war status quo that often has integrated hierarchies or integrated inequalities. Any type of process of moving a society forward has to deal with what the war has left behind.

How do you deal with political elites? Whether it's been my work in Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, or Iraq, it's a very difficult challenge of negotiating those hierarchies and power structures, also recognizing that they are a consequence and a result of violence.

Perhaps the violence has created new elites and new hierarchies that you don't want to consolidate, maybe you want to attempt to create a more egalitarian society. Now, in many post-conflict settings, that's not viable. There are all sorts of moral questions—who you should be speaking to, who you should be funding.

Jon Alterman: How do you think about it? What are the limits to what you should allow? What are the alternative arrangements that emerge?

Craig Larkin: We have to be very open with our approach. We need to talk to local inhabitants and not assume certain social norms. I was struck by the peace-building jargon—even around forgiveness and reconciliation—that was controversial in certain communities. It's useful to ask local communities what they actually believe transitional justice should look like. What do they prioritize? Again, this goes back to reconstruction, where there was a pushback in Iraq on the question of timing.

Should the focus be on the reconstruction of key symbolic sites or monuments, as opposed to rebuilding houses, hospitals, or social services? The Western international community has focused on cultural heritage, on monumental rebuilding of the mosques, the churches, the sacred sites, whereas many people from Mosul, many Iraqis, prefer to focus on things related to everyday life, related to service provision. That's one factor where we need better engagement with local communities. We also need a greater sensitivity to the language, culture, and conceptual differences, to ensure we're not imposing new neoliberal, neocolonial frameworks.

Jon Alterman: In your experience, are a lot of Iraqis or other people in these conflict-affected environments interested in the ideas you have about social reconstruction, or are they interested in services, infrastructure, more tangible things? How much support is there for some of the softer ideas that you think are important?

Craig Larkin: What you can see is mobilization around grassroots issues. Take Mosul, for example, a site that I’ve researched quite a bit with the XCEPT project. While UNESCO's vision for reviving the spirit of Mosul was an excellent idea—this was one of Iraq's most cosmopolitan cities, destroyed by ISIS, where minorities were displaced and killed—and the idea of reuniting the city, of reconstructing the mosques and churches, was valued. What ultimately proved very significant were the local grassroots initiatives of heritage homes, local initiatives around rebuilding souqs, the marketplaces, because there's a recognition that they can't just wait on the symbolic large sites to be built.

They needed everyday spaces to allow people to interact, to allow people to really imagine their city and to engage with each other. That is happening on a grassroots level. There's great mobilization, particularly among Mosul's youth, that want to move beyond the trauma and violence of the past, but need some help in the direction that they're heading.

Jon Alterman: How does the international community play in this space? Clearly, there are people who have business interests that they want to advance, and they’d love international money to help them do it. There are sectarian leaders who want to have more money that they can direct to their people. There are local business folks who see their own compelling business reasons for rebuilding one thing or another. How should the international community think about untangling the different motivations and the different needs of a community that, in many ways, understands each other much better than anybody on the outside could ever understand them?

Craig Larkin: It often comes down to the funding direction, and how the West creates large-scale projects that then trickle down, where there's always room for corruption. It should be reversed, and there should be greater funding of grassroots, local-led initiatives that are not just based on very small two-year projects, but have greater longevity. There should be greater investment in local people, local activists—those who have invested in their community, who are committed to their community—and not in this professionalization of an NGO class. We should go back to grassroots initiatives.

Now, of course, I'm not naive to the complexities of that—the reality that there will be opportunities for corruption, opportunities for manipulation—but also I think there's great potential within that, if we go back to a grassroots approach, if we fund from below, if we try to encourage local communities, and also just to capture the different visions that many of these organizations have for their communities.

Iraq and the Nineveh Plains, for example, have complex multi-ethnic communities that have suffered in different ways, and the tensions are not always felt around religious division. In Mosul, there's actually greater intra-religious division. There’s tension within the Sunni community, between longstanding residents and newcomers, or those displaced.

In fact, some of this is class-based. Part of the problem comes from a very Western reading that is often sectarian-driven, that is often ethnically-focused, when, in fact, we need to have a more fine-grain understanding that there are class dynamics at play, that there are issues of displacement, and issues of how communities can be reintegrated or whether they should be reintegrated into those particular cities or spaces that they've been forced out of.

Jon Alterman: As you think about a smaller-scale bottom-up process, is there a place you think it's been done especially well, where the support from the international community was able to catalyze something that was really important, really durable, and went very much in the right direction?

Craig Larkin: It's easier to pick out spaces that haven't been done very well than to pick out success stories. I would go back to Beirut. That was the start of my research many years ago on memory and conflict. I think that downtown Beirut is a good example of a space that was not constructed well and became incredibly elitist and exclusive. This was the downtown, Solidere’s project, that even now is still barricaded off. For many Lebanese, they feel dislocated from that center. It's a good example of where Mosul in Iraq shouldn't go in the rebuilding project.

In other words, this vision in Beirut was very much based on creating a commodified cosmopolitan center that would basically be funded by tourism. It excluded many Lebanese who couldn't afford to live there, who couldn't afford to shop there, and excluded them from their center, whereas it used to be a meeting place. It used to be a pluralistic center. As for Mosul, the danger—and this is happening a little bit in Baghdad—is the funding of these huge malls, like Western shopping malls, as opposed to the older souqs that were more informal, and that had much better interaction between communities.

In Mosul, there is an opportunity to fund the local souqs that helped to network and knit communities together, as opposed to these grander shopping centers that very often can simply be linked to political elites and wealthy entrepreneurs. In Mosul, we are beginning to see localized activists that are trying to reclaim the city. Of course, this is against the backdrop of political uncertainty and violence in the region, which makes any type of reconstruction very hard.

Jon Alterman: As I think about American cities and Middle Eastern cities that I know, a process of renovation almost necessarily involves gentrification as a way to finance the renovation, and people who were more marginal get squeezed out. Is there an example of doing this in a very different way? I think of Faneuil Hall in Boston. The Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland—all the examples seem to involve taking what is considered to be urban blight, creating infrastructure, creating transportation so people can come in, and creating some sort of commercial viability that can then spawn other areas where, again, traditional communities adapt, some people get jobs, and some people have to move. Is that a necessary part of reconstruction?

Craig Larkin: The gentrification of cities in the West is almost an inevitable consequence of that process. I grew up in Belfast, and its downtown was gentrified. What becomes more complex, however, and Belfast is an example of this, is when you have a divided city inside a contested state, the marginalization of communities goes beyond just a class-based issue. It can lead to greater instability.

For Beirut, the fact that Solidere had a gentrification model, that might be okay, but it becomes problematic in a Lebanese state that is based on power-sharing, that is based on intercommunal arrangements, and therefore, the exclusion of particular communities from that center is problematic.

That’s what marks it differently from Western gentrification. We're not just talking about gentrification; we're talking about the consolidation of sectarian elites and the exclusion and marginalization which can have a destabilizing effect on the future.

I saw through my work in Lebanon, young people felt like they were excluded and marginalized from the center, that they didn't have a space where they could interact and come together. The public protests—we go back to the thawra, in 2019, the Lebanese uprising against the sectarian elite—this was also an attempt to reclaim the city, an attempt to reclaim the spaces that the youth felt marginalized from. The youth felt that they had no place within the city. There were similar processes that happened in Baghdad at the same time, a protest against the political elite and corruption, but also about housing, about social provision, about welfare. It calls to mind Henri Lefebvre, in terms of the “right to the city,” to actually belong there and to have space within these cities.

Jon Alterman: How much similarity do you see across the Middle East, which has, as you note, a wide range of conflict-affected societies? To what extent are the problems similar? Do they rhyme? What are the key differences that you see from site to site?

Craig Larkin: Beirut was my entry point to the Middle East. I was interested in intergenerational memory among Lebanese youth that were coming out of the civil war. These are young people that didn't experience the civil war but were living with the consequences of it. I was curious, perhaps because of my own background from Belfast, being raised at the end of the Troubles. And the fact that we were in a society that was very much silencing the past publicly, but privately, memory was everywhere, stories were told, history and traumatic events were reworked and relived through narratives and then through particular sites.

I felt that in Lebanon, young people were struggling to process the public silences and the attempt at amnesia after the war, and the reality that they lived in a divided society, that the street, the school, the neighborhood that they grew up in was very often segregated, that the war was not taught in their education syllabus, but yet it was lived out in everyday life.

That then moved me to understand how memory can also be embedded within urban landscape, so part of that is the reconstruction process. With Iraq, I focused on what happens after urbicide, after your city is destroyed purposely, how do you reimagine the past, how do you live with that past when there are competing memories and competing actors that have got a very clear vision for the future?

Memory is an ambivalent concept and is an ambivalent tool of analysis, but we can see how more recently it can be weaponized and politicized and can lead to all sorts of divisions. Likewise, I found that there's an opportunity to address the past, acknowledge the past, create a space for dialogue and encounter. My research has always held that ambivalence of memory and conflict, that it's not just a catalyst for future violence, but it's a lens for understanding how people are interpreting the past to try to deal with their present demands and their future vision.

Jon Alterman: How does all of that affect how you believe governments should think about the reconstruction of Gaza, which itself was a complex society with people displaced from different parts of historic Palestine, different kinds of divisions inside, and a huge amount of physical reconstruction that needs to be done? What's the advice you would give, not being a Gaza expert, but having thought through these processes, that people need to put front of mind that probably isn't front of mind?

Craig Larkin: What's happened in Gaza is not just urbicide, but more than likely moving toward genocide or urbicide as part of a genocidal attack. There's a purposeful focus on destroying Palestinian life there, cultural heritage, mosques, museums, churches, and that will be part of the rehabilitation, the reconstruction. It's not just about Gazans as a people, but Palestinian cultural heritage and identity that has developed over hundreds of years in that area.

Very often, there's a reduction applied to Gazan people or Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, as if the reconstruction is just about their homes—as if they can be moved around, or there's no attempt to bring them back into that space. If we want to envision a future for Gazans, it needs to be a complete reconstruction, not just of housing, not just of social services, but of their cultural heritage. That is going to be very difficult, but it's very necessary.

Jon Alterman: Let me ask a hard question, which as somebody who grew up in Belfast, you must have an especially nuanced understanding of: How can you tell whether the kinds of things you're recommending are working?

Craig Larkin: It's very difficult to say how effective such policy decisions are. We can clearly see where there's been dangerous consequences, perhaps because they're not properly thought through. My work would point to that, that memory needs to be understood in its entirety. There is danger whenever we try to silence it; these sorts of silences are often very noisy. There's a generational component, and it might look like a cold peace; it might look like societies are healing.

I'd come back to the Belfast example. While there hasn't been concerted violence for over a decade, it does not mean that societies are integrated. Education is 93% segregated, people live in segregated communities, paramilitaries still function, and, in some ways, criminal gangs as well. There's a challenge to state authorities. There are many things that have not been resolved inside this cold peace in the Good Friday Agreement. That's where I believe we need to go back to deal with the memory of the Troubles, open up about what's actually happened.

Similarly, in Lebanon, it's very clear there's been multiple cycles of violence. We're almost up to the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, but there's been multiple conflicts: the Israeli war in 2006, ongoing Israeli attacks, the port explosion, and the thawra. These are cumulative traumas that affect Lebanese society, and they don't replace the last trauma; they're embedded, they add to it.

I interviewed ex-Islamists from Roumieh prison in Lebanon, mostly from Tripoli, and these were ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra fighters. We interviewed about 40 ex-prisoners that were fighting in Syria, and I was curious to understand their motivation. For many, the historic memory of violence and their upbringing in Tripoli and Lebanon had a mobilizing component.

The violence of the past has real-life consequences on the present. That's where there is policy relevance. It’s a problem to say, “We just want to focus on the current issue, but we don't want to address some of the deeper historic issues.”

Jon Alterman: It seems to me that, as I think about the places you study, what we now think of as successful models of coexistence themselves emerged from earlier cycles of violence in earlier centuries without the kinds of solutions you're describing. There are some communities, whether it's Baghdad, Jerusalem, or cities that have had histories of remarkable cosmopolitanism and coexistence, which broke down into cycles of horrific violence, exile, massacres, and then were able to reconstruct and emerge as these cosmopolitan societies again, which now people look back and say, "Oh, if we could only recapture that moment." In that environment, where we almost have cyclical violence and cosmopolitan coexistence, how should we think about what success really looks like? How long should we think about success lasting?

Craig Larkin: It could be easy to read this as a romanticization or a nostalgia for a previous mixed past, but that's embedded in the historical memory of the communities as well, that they live together, they work together, and they're very much Muslawis or Beirutis or Jerusalemites. There's a shared cultural heritage that needs to be encouraged, but that doesn't mean that you neglect what led to a rupture. This came through in some of my work on Mosul, that the focus can be about reviving a unified past, but unless you address how ISIS emerged, why they emerged, and what some of the underlying factors were for that emergence, then it can lead to cycles of violence again.

I think you almost approach the past with that double-handed approach of the unifying cosmopolitanism, but trying to grapple with what destabilizes that, what are the factors that cause the fragmentation within society, and can they be critically addressed? Can they be addressed in a way that better integrates and unifies?

I would say Lebanon is a perfect example of a society that's got such a rich cultural heritage of cosmopolitanism, but right now, in schools, they're not teaching students any history of the civil war or up-to-current politics. It's too controversial. They can't agree on it, and that is a little bit dangerous. There has to be an attempt to at least allow students to grapple with the different narratives to try to understand, or it can easily be mobilized again. The same critique that I would have for Lebanon, I would have for my own community. Similarly, there is no teaching on the Troubles within most schools in a Northern Irish context.

Jon Alterman: Let me close with a question on what outsiders really can do. You're describing processes that have very deep roots, people who have tremendous stakes, not only for their children but their grandchildren, and an international community whose attention is often not sustained, that often moves from issue to issue. How can the international community maximize its constructive impact when, in so many ways, its input is transient?

Craig Larkin: We're trying to deal with a dynamic and moving situation, and very often, the international community lacks focus, lacks a willingness to commit to particular projects. That's a reality, particularly if this political movement that we find ourselves in leads to a retreat from an international vision to intervene in such communities.

I would push back against that. There is still an important role for the international community and actors to support and work alongside communities. This is part of a peace-building process; this is part of helping toward transitional justice that doesn't conform to a very structured Western approach, but encourages a more contextual, local partnership to help communities move forward together and be able to work collaboratively.

Jon Alterman: Craig Larkin, thank you very much for joining us on Babel.

Craig Larkin: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure.