The complex and stratified confessional composition of the country accounts for the Lebanese civil war. Among the causes, it is important to remind: the difficult internal and regional economic situation; the impossibility of solving the religious tensions, also due to the rise and positioning of the Shiite Muslims, who modify the balance among the communities that were present at that time; the confessional features of the army, which prevents it from playing a decisive role with respect to the creation of communitarian militias (independent armed groups of each community); the Palestinian presence in Lebanon, that the 1969 Cairo Agreement legitimates to exert guerrilla actions against Israel.

The civil war has a preliminary internal phase and a second phase (starting from 1976), during which the conflict becomes international, due to the participation of important regional stakeholders such as Siria, Israel, Iraq. The Lebanese civil war concerns a basic contraposition between Muslims and Christians, although it is not just a religious war. Several clashes, especially during the ultimate period of the conflict, take place among the Muslim communities and among the Christian communities, too. After the massive Israeli invasion, in 1982, and the expulsion of Arafat from Lebanon, the cedar country faces a worsening of the internal situation, which prevents an easy solution of the ongoing conflict to take place. Only thanks to external inputs (and, in particular, to Syrian pressures) the 1989 Ta'if Agreement will be possible.

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