Wooten, StephenBaxter, DianeRaisanen, ElizabethKhalife-Hamdan, Raimy2022-07-122022-07-122022https://hdl.handle.net/1794/27349This ethnographic research project on Shia-Catholic coexistence in Southern Lebanon centers on young adults’ voices and actions. Traveling between a Christian village (Maghdouché) and a Muslim village (Ghazieh) to conduct thirty-three qualitative interviews, I examine the interreligious relationship in which young adults engage. I advance an understanding that ordinary youth of different social identities have the ability to enact and bolster long-term peacekeeping. In the case of Ghazieh and Maghdouché, the vast majority of young adults re-conceptualize identity and religion to detach from sectarian master narratives, and they instead articulate a narrative underscoring a shared fraternal connection with religious neighbors. In the process, many young adults treat religious times and spaces as inclusive, surpassing the sectarian to become the neutral or sublime religious. Although tensions occasionally surge in the intercommunal relationship, I determine a general “common life” or “single life” (‘aysh mushtarak or ‘aysh wahid) marked by friendships, shared spaces, and mutual reliance. Lebanon’s history of sectarian conflict does not impel the youth I interview to reproduce sectarian narratives. This postwar generation craves an alternative Lebanon, one that disintegrates the sectarian sociopolitical structures and that constructs an inclusive, interreligious nationality centered on evolution, direction, productivity, democracy, and youth representation.en-USCC BY-NC-ND 4.0South LebanonReligious CoexistenceYouthInterfaith RelationsMiddle EastThesis/Dissertation0000-0002-4517-9783