Diasporic groups negotiate the transition from a physically (spatially) rooted national identity to an imagined national affiliation differently, contingent on the circumstances of their exile. Having been torn lose from their nation, refugees can nevertheless remain connected to their homelands, to their national identity, through certain practices: constant recollections of the past, passing down stories, and, increasingly through media. Such determination on the part of refugees allows for the challenging of Agamben’s (1998) notion of bare life, of lives not worth living. By arguing for the expansion of Agamben’s notion of “bare life” beyond bureaucratic and legal exclusions, my research demonstrates that young adult Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, although bureaucratically and officially excluded, avoid cultural and ideated “bare life” through a determination to stay connected and active remembrance of their pasts, of what unites them, of their history, homeland and national identity. The growth and widespread availability of global media has significantly facilitated the imaginative act critical to the sustenance of nationalism (and maintenance of national identity) among diasporic groups. Based on ethnographic research carried out among young adult refugees inside and outside the camps in Lebanon, I demonstrate how refugees’ recollections of Palestine, their determination to maintain connections to their country of origin, and their use of media to access news, stories and information about the homeland have served to reinforce a strong sense of who they are and where they came from. Such actions also serve to reinforce the temporality of their refugee status, to remind them that they belong to some place, and imagine that they are part of a national community. As concerns refugee camps specifically, Agamben’s bleak description of the camps as states of exception and his sweeping and unequivocal reduction of lives that exist in these spaces to “bare life” deny any room for change or accommodation on the part of those living in the camps. But, refugees have demonstrated that, in the face of such bureaucratic/legal abandonment or exclusion, a search for identity and construction of home in connection to a nationalist identity is even more essential. By remaining active in maintaining their sense of community and in reinforcing their nationalist identities, refugees do not necessarily succumb to “bare life.” Thus, the constraints of displacement are not entirely limiting; refugees continue to mediate their existence and their histories in connection to what they imagine as ‘home’.

Kurdish Refugees in Kurdistan: A case study on Turkish Kurds in Northern Iraq Regarding the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), who rules Kurdish Autonomous Region in Northern Iraq, we can say that for the first time in the history Kurds are the subject of the solution of their own problems. Currently, KRG seems to be the neoliberal success story of post- Saddam Iraq. A poor, underdeveloped and conflict-ridden part of the country has emerged by far the most stable, secure and prosperous region of the country. From 1991 a de facto independent area under international protection emerged in the north of Iraq, which, despite external interference and internal infighting, has blossomed economically. Consequently Iraqi Kurdistan has become the first example in history which Kurds have succeeded on a territorial scale. As regards the developments in Northern Iraq, how will this wave trigger some changes on Kurdish question in the Middle East? And, what will be the role of KRG in this process? This paper will try to answer these questions by focusing on Turkish Kurdish Refugees in Northern Iraq. Today, approximately 12000 Turkish Kurdish refugees live in Kurdish-held North. Most of them have immigrated in 1994 because of Turkey’s brutal policies against Kurds. They have been living in different camps for about 17 years. And, it is still unclear that whether or not Turkey will implement a repatriation plan for the arrival of Turkish Kurds to Turkey; neither KRG implementations give a clear idea whether or not there is an integration plan for residence of Turkish Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan. In first sight, we can say that the Turkish-KRG relations, which have significantly improved in last decade, will modify the future of Turkish Kurdish Refugees. Today, common economical interests fuel the relations between KRG and Turkey. However, Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) bases in KRG remains as a crucial issue and influences the relation between KRG and Turkey. Consequently, KRG has difficulties to maintain a balance between the interests of Kurds as a whole and KRG as a sovereign actor. The main argument of this paper is that KRG’s policies, rather than creating an alliance with other Kurds living in the region, favoring the interests of KRG as new sovereign actor regarding governance.

In order to provide emergency relief and assistance to Palestinian refugees after the 1948 war, the United Nations established the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)in late 1949. As months of dispossession and displacement turned to years, UNRWA, in partnership with Unesco, quickly established basic schooling for refugee youth by late 1950. This educational system, growing quickly, was not autonomous, and was bound by the political priorities set forth by donors and powers dictating their parameters at the UN General Assembly, as well as the host state of Jordan (and its British overseers)—which had just annexed the West Bank in 1950, and hosted the majority of the Palestinian refugees. This paper explores the first decade of schooling in the camps, and majority Palestinian government schools, and in particular the technologies for socialization de-nationalization, and surveillance set in place to curtail the political mobilization of the refugees. As the region’s first extensive experiment in “knowledge economy,” this paper asks, what were these technologies, how did they facilitate this experiment, and how did they support UNRWA's broader early aim for re-settlement? Fearful of the increasing politicization of the refugees, and in particular their challenge to Jordanian political legitimacy and claims of refugee representation, the Jordanian regime, in the interest of state stability and fortification, compounded UNRWA’s own priorities with curricular and inspection mechanisms of their own. What tools did the Jordanians use, and how did they attempt to achieve the aim of upending nationalist refugee youth mobilization? With UNRWA/Unesco archival material, documents and reports, memoirs of teachers, inspectors, and students, interviews and press articles by UNRWA and Jordanian Ministry of Education curriculum developers, and textbooks from 1949 to 1958, I draw out the logic(s) and ramifications of UNRWA and Jordan’s educational regime for refugees. I attempt to make sense of the ways in which schools have and continue to act as spaces of contention and experimentation, and draw out the complex interplay between the needs of UN agencies and host states, and the demands of refugee agency, within the structural imperatives of refugee containment and de-mobilization.