Mothers, Memories, and Mobilisation: How Intergenerational Trauma Shapes Lebanese Gen Z Women’s Civic Engagement

Literature Review: Intergenerational Trauma, Mothers, Gender, and Political Agency

The Lebanese Civil War officially ended in 1990, but its psychological and social effects persist in family dynamics.¹ This review synthesises research on intergenerational trauma, Lebanese memory studies, and feminist political psychology to examine how war memories influence Gen Z women’s civic engagement. It connects psychological focus on individual trauma with political neglect of family as sites of political socialisation.1Intergenerational trauma involves transmitting historical oppression’s effects generationally via family dynamics such as the ‘conspiracy of silence’, where survivors avoid discussing experiences.2 Danieli’s work on Holocaust survivors identifies key transmission mechanisms, including emotional withdrawal and overprotectiveness in survivor parents. Separately, research on families affected by the Rwandan genocide has shown how paternal trauma can manifest in children as heightened anxiety and reduced agency.3 This connects to the United Nations Security Council’s Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, which addresses the disproportionate impact of conflict on women and their role in peacebuilding, where inherited fears have been shown to shape young women’s security perceptions and political participation.4These dynamics take a particular form in the Lebanese context. Lebanon’s post-war ‘no victory, no vanquished’ policy fostered public amnesia, pushing memories into private family spaces.5 Haugbolle details this state-sponsored silence, while Larkin describes memory as ‘embodied’ in social landscapes for post-war youth.7 For Gen Z, these are ‘post-memories’ filtered through parental and especially maternal narratives of survival and vigilance.6

Gender plays a central role in how these memories are transmitted and how they shape political agency. Suad Joseph’s research positions Lebanese families as a core unit of political connectivity, with mothers adopting vigilant, insular roles during war that may constrain daughters' activism today.⁷ Yet trauma can foster resilience: family histories fuel moral convictions driving activism, as seen in women’s prominent roles during the 2019 Lebanese October Revolution and subsequent protest movements.8 This reveals a research gap on how maternal narratives such as the stories, silences, and emotional frameworks mothers pass to daughters shape the tension between fear and mobilisation in the next generation.9

Research treats civil war memory and youth activism separately but overlooks causal mother–daughter links in Lebanon. Recent studies on war-exposed families have further underscored this empirical void in intergenerational transmission.¹⁰ This article addresses this gap by probing private trauma’s public political impacts on young women, aligning with UNSCR 1325 (United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325) goals.¹¹ 

Methodology and Questionnaire

Target Group: Mother–daughter pairs (mothers who experienced the Civil War; daughters aged 18–25).

Semi-structured, in-depth interviews (20–45 minutes each) were conducted with mother–daughter pairs to explore intergenerational dynamics relevant to the WPS agenda.

Results and Analysis

War Memory as Protection

Across interviews, mothers’ recollections of the civil war were sensory rather than ideological. Memories were centred on physical fear, being in confined spaces, and interrupted routines. One mother described water cascading down the stairwell after shelling struck her building and being physically carried to a shelter when she was 12 because she was unable to move from fear. Another remembered having to do an exam while bombs were falling outside, completing it because her family needed documentation to leave the country.

These accounts were not framed in political terms but were narrated as survival episodes. However, their psychological imprint was visible even decades later. Mothers described how they were monitoring news, consuming distressing information privately, and protecting their daughters from exposure. There was an emphasis on not wanting their children to ‘go through what we went through’.

This is a clear example of how trauma does not disappear but reorganises itself into vigilance. Instead of mobilising political grievance, it often produces precautionary behaviour within the family.

Silence as a Form of Transmission

A consistent pattern emerged around selective storytelling. Mothers reported withholding details of their war experiences. Some described these memories as belonging to their ‘family of origin’, shared with siblings but not transferred to children. The intention of withholding such narratives was protective rather than secretive.

However, the daughters reported inheriting emotional dispositions despite limited narrative detail. One daughter described her mother as ‘resilient, but avoidant’, and reflected that this avoidance influenced how she herself tends to approach risk. Another noted that she did not know the full scope of her mother’s experiences but identified fear as a background emotional register; this was not attached to specific events but present as a general orientation toward instability.

Thus, silence does not prevent intergenerational transmission but alters its mechanism. Importantly, daughters did not report direct fear of the Civil War itself. They did not internalise specific images of violence but rather inherited interpretive frameworks, which are learned ways of reading and responding to political instability, shaped by their mothers’ emotional dispositions rather than direct exposure to war itself. Instability was approached carefully, and protest was assessed through a lens of escalation risk. Hence, transmission appears less about reproducing trauma and more about shaping threat perception.

Different Thresholds of Fear

The generational divergence in fear thresholds became most visible when discussing contemporary crises, including the Beirut port explosion of 4 August 2020 and the 2024 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

In the interviews, mothers described anxiety during these sudden and unexpected events. In one case, a daughter assumed a stabilising role in the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion, contacting relatives and managing communication, while her mother experienced visible panic. However, during the prolonged 2024 Israeli military offensive on Lebanon, the same mother adopted a calmer posture, reassuring her daughter that ‘This is nothing compared to the Civil War.’

This dynamic suggests trauma calibration, a process by which prior exposure to extreme violence recalibrates a person’s baseline for what constitutes a crisis, which in turn raises the threshold at which danger is perceived. For mothers who lived through the Civil War, the threshold of what is ‘catastrophic’ is significantly higher. Contemporary crises are measured against a memory of prolonged urban warfare. For daughters, whose formative political memory includes the financial collapse and the port explosion, threat assessment operates differently.

The result is not simple fear transmission; it is generational asymmetry in danger perception. In some moments, daughters regulate mothers. In others, mothers minimise daughters’ fears. This reciprocal dynamic complicates the linear models of trauma inheritance.

Caution, Protest, and the Boundaries of Participation

The most significant findings emerged in relation to civic participation. Mothers’ protective orientation extended most clearly into attitudes toward protests and political involvement.

Several mothers worried about their daughters taking part in the protest activities in Lebanon, attributing their concerns to the uncertainty of the political situation and the risk of escalation. On the other hand, the same group of mothers expressed fewer reservations in relation to protest actions taken beyond national borders. Civic engagement; which was considered humanitarian or charitable, such as volunteering with relief organisations or participating in diaspora advocacy, was often supported, as was involvement in international solidarity movements that did not carry the same perceived risk of domestic escalation.

This distinction suggests that intergenerational trauma does not uniformly suppress activism. Instead, it creates a conditional mobilisation pattern: high-risk political participation in unstable domestic milieus is discouraged, while lower-risk or humanitarian types of participation are more easily accepted.

The interviewed daughters recognised the power of maternal caution. Some reported not participating in protests because of fear of instability or practical consequences, including legal consequences or visa issues. At the same time, the women expressed a strong feeling of responsibility to break possible cycles of violence. One of the participants explained that her motivation was not to undo what her mother’s generation had suffered, which was irreversible, but to act so that future generations would not have to carry the same weight.

This dichotomy is one of the key points of the results. Mothers’ war memories can simultaneously limit specific forms of activism and support a moral belief. The transmission of trauma does not simply bring about apathy; it refigures the landscape of engagement.

Rather than presenting a binary of mobilisation versus fear, the data reveal a spectrum consisting of the following:

• Fear-informed caution

• Strategic participation

• Moral obligation

• Selective disengagement

In this sense, intergenerational trauma functions as both boundary and fuel. It narrows acceptable risk thresholds but may deepen ethical urgency.

Policy Recommendations

Based on these findings, the following recommendations are directed at policy makers, civil society organisations, and institutions working on youth civic engagement and the WPS agenda in Lebanon. They are intended to address the psychological and intergenerational dimensions that existing frameworks overlook.

• Integrate trauma-informed approaches into youth civic initiatives.

  • Civic engagement programmes should acknowledge the fact that many young women face perceived risks and inherited anxiety. Psychosocial awareness programming and creation of safe conversation environments can help reduce the perceived threat and instil confidence in participation.

• Support intergenerational dialogue initiatives.

  • Silence can be transformed into beneficial dialogue using structured mother–daughter or cross-generational forums. Development of spaces in which the collective processing of memory can be undertaken can reduce anxiety and maintain discourses of resilience.

• Expand safe and diverse pathways to participation.

  • Policymakers and civil society actors should recognise that engagement does not take a single form. Humanitarian work, community organising, digital activism, and local initiatives may serve as accessible entry points for young women who perceive high-risk protest as unsafe.

• Incorporate psychological dimensions into WPS monitoring and evaluation.

  • National reporting mechanisms under UNSCR 1325 should consider how intergenerational trauma influences participation rates and perceptions of security. Without this lens, participation gaps may be misinterpreted as apathy rather than calibrated caution.

Finally, to promote sustainable democratic engagement in Lebanon, it is important to recognise that political agency is shaped not only by institutions and statutory frameworks but also by memory, family relations, and emotional legacy. The targeting of these intergenerational levels strengthens gender-sensitive peacebuilding and inclusion approaches to youth.

Conclusion

This study has demonstrated that intergenerational trauma in Lebanon is not just a reproduction of terror or a political withdrawal; it is a reformulation of the landscape of civic participation. Mothers who survived the Civil War tend to become watchful and protective, controlling their families’ exposure to instability and preventing high-risk involvement in volatile domestic settings. However, their stories also pass on strength, moral beliefs, and a wish that their daughters will live in a better political world.

Instead of introducing a dichotomy of mobilisation and constraint, the results indicate a continuum of contingent engagement. Trauma redefines danger signals, affects the way risk is evaluated, and determines the types of involvement that are acceptable. Daughters do not receive inherited fear passively – they negotiate between caution and responsibility. 

These lessons have significant implications for the implementation of the WPS agenda and the National Action Plan in Lebanon under UNSCR 1325, adopted in 2021, which commits the state to integrating women’s participation into peacebuilding and security processes. However, the National Action Plan does not currently account for how intergenerational trauma shapes how women feel able or unable to participate. Existing policy frameworks focus on women’s involvement in peacebuilding and their political lives but pay very little attention to the psychological and intergenerational aspects that determine participation.

Incorporating these psychological and intergenerational dimensions into policy frameworks would allow institutions to design more responsive, trauma-informed participation strategies that meet young women where they are rather than measuring their engagement against standards that ignore inherited memory. In this way, Lebanon’s peacebuilding efforts would be not only more inclusive but also more honest about the conditions under which democratic participation takes place.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung e.V.

This contribution is part of our dossier
Gen Z: Voices of a Global Generation
The dossier examines youth-led movements and collectives, their strategies and their visions for a just future. It also explores the roots of their discontent and its expression in digital spaces and the arts by bringing together young voices and perspectives from across the globe. The publication presents the diversity of youth-led movements in various formats.