This panel brings together an interdisciplinary set of papers that seek to understand the governance and consequences of forced migration from Syria into Lebanon and Jordan. The Syrian displacement crisis has catapulted both these countries into the global limelight as some of the largest hosts of refugees worldwide, and the countries share a long history with protracted refugee populations. Research is more pressing than ever, both to study refugee populations in the Middle East generally, and the Syria crisis specifically. Despite making up 5% of the world's population, the Middle East makes up one-third of the world's refugees. Looking to Syria's war, we find what is arguably the largest relative population displacement in recorded history. Half of Syria's pre-war population is still displaced, the volume and tensions around discussions of refugee return are growing, and the policies and dynamics in host states bear grave consequences on refugees' choices and life circumstances. This panel brings together four projects speaking to these important dynamics. The first paper looks at the importance of state governance on the lives of refugees through an analysis of how Lebanese state institutions create sites of enormous discretionary power over Syrians. The second paper studies Syrians' long-term migration and return choices through the use of a novel survey experiment, exploring the effects of living conditions in host countries and conditions in Syria on decisions to return. The third paper explores one of the most important factors shaping the living conditions of refugees, their integration in the local labor market. The paper studies the topic through a study of how the Syrian crisis has affected Jordanian firms and the informal labor market. Finally, the fourth paper takes a historical approach to the question of refugee integration through an archival and ethnographic study of the Quarantina neighbourhood of Beirut, which has received multiple waves of Palestinian, Armenian, and Kurdish refugees. The discussant's expertise on migration and refugee crises will stimulate the conversation and highlight the substantive and theoretical importance of this important yet understudied topic. The panel will contribute to understanding the dynamics of refugee crises, speaking to lines of research in political science, geography, and refugee studies. As the long-term research agenda around the protracted refugee crises continues to develop, it is critical that insights from the region be brought to the fore.
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Daniel Masterson
How do refugee crises end? A naïve theory of return would suggest that refugee crises end when conflicts end. It is clear, however, that this theory is insufficient. Past refugee crises show that many refugees return before conflict termination, by any reasonable definition of the term, and that many refugees choose not to return even after conflict ends. Conflicts often do not end definitively on a national level; war ends in different ways across different areas and for different groups of people. To better understand how refugee crises end, this paper asks: How do refugees make choices about whether to return home or continue living abroad? We argue that it is essential to examine how individual refugees choose between returning home or not, as these choices profoundly impact the dynamics of hosting communities and the post-war political environment. Therefore, we explore the drivers of refugees’ decision-making, and how policy and programming might influence return dynamics. Using observational data on migration, and results from a conjoint experiment embedded in the survey, funded and scheduled for data collection in 2019, the authors how refugees’ return intentions and choices are shaped by four key dimensions: 1) their living situation in their host community in Lebanon; 2) the conditions in their place of origin inside Syria; 3) their access to information about the situation in Syria; and 4) the costs of mobility.
Based on results from the survey that will field in March 2019, we will explore how conditions on the ground affect both the scale and composition of returns. A representative survey of Syrian refugees in Lebanon allows us to compare how conditions in Syria and in Lebanon interact with people’s characteristics to shape their intentions to return. This serves to explore the interaction of security and service access in Syria, with people’s personal experiences with the revolution and civil war, and the low quality of life in exile, to study which factors correlate with return intentions.
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Dr. Diala Lteif
Beirut’s history with displacement is long and complex. The latest Syrian influx of refugees only comes as a continuation of many waves of displacement Lebanon has witnessed in the 20th century. Starting with the Armenians after World War I, Beirut has also hosted Kurds, Palestinians and many internally displaced communities. This research explores the everyday and political life of Quarantina, a Beirut neighborhood that has hosted successive waves of refugees to Lebanon. Using Henri Lefebvre’s work on the production of space and the right to the city, I frame the role of refugees as an active participant in the making of the city. The specific case study of the Quarantina neighborhood—also known as Al Khodr part of the district of Medawar—in Beirut, Lebanon presents a particularly interesting context for these inquiries. Known as one of the first refugee camps, built under the French Mandate to host the Armenian refugees, the neighborhoods presents a unique layering of experiences of refuge when studied over time. Mixing archival research with interviews, the project aims to gather spatialized narratives of the everyday life of refugees as they claim their right to the city through appropriations of space.
This specific proposal focuses on the period from the early 1960s and until the start of the Lebanese civil war, when Quarantina evolved into a space of collaboration and cohesion between the native population, the migrant laborers and the Palestinian, Armenian, and Kurdish refugees who had settled in the area. Within the same time frame, the neighborhood also fell victim to a series of disastrous events, which started with multiple fires in the 1960s (believed to have been purposely instigated) and culminated with a massacre of the Muslim population of the area in January of 1976 led by the Christian Lebanese militias. The overall goal of this project is to counter some of the dominant narratives about refugee populations, by emphasizing their role as producers and contributors to the urban fabric. I pursue this while addressing the lack of research about the neighborhood of Quarantina, a forgotten and marginalized district of Beirut’s history and present, which however offers an invaluable window into the life of refugees as real if not legal citizens—subjects of what Lefebvre called ‘the right to the city’.
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Lama Mourad
Over the course of less than three years, the Syrian refugee influx into Lebanon transformed the country into the largest host of refugees per capita in the world. In response to this influx, a manifold set of authorities emerged as critical players in the governance of this migrant population. Alongside international agencies, government agencies, and municipalities, arguably no institution has been more significant in determining the lives of Syrians than General Directorate of General Security (al-Amn al-'Aam). A notably centralized and effective component of the state’s security apparatus, General Security is the security branch tasked with all matters related to resident aliens and tourists on Lebanese territory. For Syrians, these offices are the sites where they seek to regularize their status, claim residency, and at times even receive deportation orders. Actors involved in this dynamic extend beyond the agents of the state security apparatus itself, and include employers, sponsors (kafeels), and family members, whose roles as intermediaries are critical in refugees’ engagement with General Security.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in and around the regional offices of the Directorate General of General Security from 2015-2016 in the South, Mount Lebanon, North, and Beqaa, I analyze the ways in which these spaces are constituted as sites of enormous discretionary state power. I shed light on how ambiguity of policy, lack of information, and ultimate discretion serve to strengthen the authority of these offices, and the Lebanese state more broadly, on Syrian migrants and refugees, and, critically, on their mobility within the boundaries of the Lebanese territory and ultimately may serve to push them beyond its borders. This paper advances important debates in political science and geography on boundaries and border-making, the limits of state power and broader issues of migration and refugee governance.
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Dr. Allison Spencer Hartnett
The Syrian case is an important example of a global phenomenon: most refugee movements take place between neighboring states in the Global South. Despite this fact, most academic work on refugee integration focuses on Western host states, leaving a gap in our knowledge of how most host states absorb refugee labor into the labor market. Jordan and Syria’s other neighbors have received the largest share of refugees during seven years of civil war. With 89 refugees per 1,000 inhabitants, Jordan has the second-highest per capita share of refugees in the world. This paper examines the integration of Syrian refugees in the formal and informal labor markets in Jordan.
Using new data from the 2015 and 2018 LENS surveys of Jordanian firms, I show Jordanian firms have responded to the crisis by hiring more workers informally. The expansion of a refugee-based informal workforce in formal businesses has huge ramifications for government revenue, particularly in light of the new tax law that came into effect in January 2019. The Jordanian economy was characterized by slow growth and high unemployment even before the Syrian conflict, and recent protests over IMF-designed tax reforms signal the country's economic fatigue. The government of Jordan (GOJ) and international donors have introduced several policy initiatives to address Syrians refugees’ long-term residence in Jordan. The cornerstone of these is the integration of refugees into the Jordanian labor force. The February 2016 Jordan Compact marked a turning point in the international and domestic policy response to Syrian refugees in Jordan. The compact was the first collective document that addressed host community concerns and donor priorities to employ Syrians. As part of the negotiations, the GOJ committed to issuing 200,000 free work permits to Syrians. Given the importance of supporting host communities during refugee crises, this analysis sheds light on how mass forced migration become co-opted into the labor politics of host countries.
