Executive committee Lyna Comaty

Lyna Comaty

Born in Beirut in 1985 and raised there, Lyna has been an activist in civil society and political movements since 2005. She holds a PhD in Development Studies and is the author of “Post Conflict Transition in Lebanon; The Disappeared of the Civil War” published with Routledge in 2019. Over the past 10 years, her policy interests have included peacebuilding, transitional justice and dealing with the past, as well as governance and institutional reform.

Lyna likes to dream of a different scenario for Lebanon’s exit from the civil war. During her PhD, she looked at the case of the disappeared of the civil war to understand the tactics used by the confessional political regime - currently in a total collapse since 2019 - to privilege the status quo and avoid dealing with its past. In 2010, she co-founded Act for the Disappeared, today the leading NGO raising awareness on the issue in the country. She has taught Transitional Justice at the American University of Beirut, and in 2016, she organized a simulation for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, imagining together with students that Lebanon had held one in 1991 after the end of the civil war. Earlier in 2012, with a group of young political activists from the Danish Youth Forum and the Democratic Renewal Movement, she took a key role in challenging the absence of policies on dealing with the memory of the civil war in Lebanon by organizing “Another Memory”, an interactive exhibition that showcased the contradictory memories related to key events of the war, in an effort to argue for the recognition of the memory of the “other” as a first step towards reconciliation.

Lyna believes in contributing to causes related to children. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with her husband to raise funds for Heartbeat. After the August 4th catastrophe, she opened her home for child-to-child discussions around what had happened, in an effort to help them deal with their anxieties by sharing their experience with other peers. She dreams of building a platform to speak to Lebanese children about politics one day.