50 Years of Conflicts: Transitional Justice and the Issue of the Disappeared in Lebanon

Please join the Fares Center and the Fletcher INCR Program for “50 Years of Conflicts: Transitional Justice and the Issues of the Disappeared in Lebanon.” This event will feature a screening of the film The Soil and the Sea, directed by Daniele Rugo, with introductory remarks from Dr. Carmen Hassoun Abou Jaoudé.

Dr Carmen Hassoun Abou Jaoudé is a lecturer in politics and transitional justice at the Saint Joseph University of Beirut (USJ). She also taught at the American University of Beirut, the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik and the Lebanese University. She is an associate researcher at the Center for Modern Arab Studies (CEMAM-USJ). Her fields of research include Lebanon’s post-war memory, transitional justice and the issue of the disappeared persons. She worked between 2011 and 2015 with the International Center for Transitional Justice where she served as Head of its office in Lebanon and managed its multiyear project “Lebanon: Addressing the Legacy of Conflict in a Divided Society”, overviewed its reports and policy papers. She published peer reviewed articles and op-eds in Lebanese newspapers and co-edited a special issue “Lebanon: The Civil War in Retrospect” in Confluences Méditerranée, 2020, France. she co-produced the feature documentary “The Soil and the Sea”, directed by Daniele Rugo (2023) in the framework of the British Academy (BA) awarded research project ‘Memories from the Margins. Bottom-up Practices for Dealing with Conflict-Produced Heritage in Lebanon and Syria”. The film explores the presence and erasure of potential burial sites from Lebanon’s Civil War and aftermath. She is currently working on women’s struggle for justice and change as part of the BA grant “Sustaining struggles and working towards transformative change – women activists and transitional justice in Lebanon and Sri Lanka”. She was appointed between 2020 and 2025 member of the National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared in Lebanon.