University students and Lebanese political society: tracing roles, attitudes and change

Since the advent of mass higher education in Lebanon in the early 1960s, university students have represented an integral component of the Lebanese political society. This centrality reconfirmed itself throughout the Lebanese Uprising of October 2019, whereof university students represented one of the most vibrant and active actors. As part of the IRHAL project, the following paper aims at analyzing the role that the massive participation of university students to the Lebanese Uprising exerted on their political positionalitis and its implications for the future of Lebanese politics. To this end, it will first provide a historical overview of the changing patterns of student activism in Lebanon, to then present and analyze the results of the four focus groups carried out by IRHAL in July 2021 to assess the impact of the Uprising on students’ political attitudes and behaviour.