In 2011, a large segment of Syrian society participated in demonstrations against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Despite the initial peaceful character of the uprising, the opposition armed itself (Majed, 2014) to respond to the terrible repression led by Damascus. A year later, the country was engaged in a still ongoing, wide-ranging sectarian war, opposing foreign salafi-jihadist militias and Lebanese, Iraqi, and Iranian Shia militants. Today, while all attention is focused on the Islamic State/Dâ’ish (and therefore on northern Syria), on the Kurdish and Christian minorities, and on a global Shia-Sunni confrontation, the study of Israel and its Syrian policy seems to have been sidelined by the academic community. Alternatively presented as "neutral" (by itself) or as "directly supporting Salafist militias" (by the Syrian regime and its allies), Israel’s Syrian policy is actually far more complex. Thus, understanding its position, role, and objectives would provide another key for reading the dynamics of the Syrian conflict. This communication, based on a 6-month field research in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Amman, aims to analyze Israel’s Syria policy since the beginning of the civil war (2011) and to provide new historical perspective on the formation and evolution of this specific foreign policy. At the theoretical level, this project is based on the foreign policy analysis (FPA) theory, at the crossroads of international relations and the sociology of public action. Using a multiscale approach, we will (a) understand the complexity and diversity of actors competing in the decision-making process that led to defining the Syrian—and, by extension, Lebanese—policy of Israel; (b) identify the variables (including economic and cultural) that influence decision-making processes behind the definition of its policy; and (c) understand the restructuring of the state and the various actors involved in the process (Planning and Policy Directorate, Aman, the Military Intelligence Directorate (MID), MFA, intelligence services, etc.). Breaking with conventional wisdom, this paper will explain why and how Israel’s “no-policy” towards the Syrian conflict was actually ill defined but also strongly contested from the start.

How do the historical legacies of forced migration shape contemporary responses to refugee crises? This paper compares the response of Turkey and its governing AK Party to the Syrian refugee crisis to those of Jordan and Lebanon. Examining how the reception of refugees shaped state-building over the past century, it argues that previous episodes of forced migration have created repertoires of refuge, political scripts governing appropriate state responses to forced migration. Drawing on printed texts in Turkish and Arabic from 1940s-today as well as interviews with NGOs and civil society groups in Turkey and Jordan, this paper demonstrates how previous refugee influxes created political discourses of nationhood, inclusion, and exclusion that have been redeployed in response to the current crisis today. Turkey, at first sight, seems to be an unlikely country to attempt a financially and politically costly program to host refugees. Although one of the initial signatories of the 1951 Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, it has only legally committed itself to admitting refugees from Europe. There is little in its domestic or international legal commitments that suggest it would respond generously to an influx of refugees. And yet, Turkey has responded to the Syrian refugee crisis with both costly state service provision as well as a generally permissive approach to informal settlement and work. This contrasts with the highly securitized approach to refugees displayed by Jordan and Lebanon, where states have made great efforts to segregate the refugees from the population and minimize chances of integration or the development of sustainable livelihoods. At the root of these divergent responses are two very different experiences of immigration and forced migration. While Jordanian and Lebanese history has been marked by violent conflicts that followed Palestinian refugee inflows after the wars of 1948 and 1967, Turkey/Ottoman Anatolia has been the site of immigration and assimilation of Muslim refugees, from the Circassian immigrations of the 19th century up to the influx of Turks from Bulgaria in 1989. Taking a longue durée approach to refugee policy, this paper explores how political identities are forged at critical junctures in forced migration, and seeks to explain why a country characterized by a recurrent history of strident ethnonationalism attempted to welcome a large influx of non-Turks, even while resorting to violence to deal with Kurdish nationalism.

The growing migrant crisis in Europe has spurred a debate about the proper naming of the newly arrived: Are they refugees or migrants? While the question may sound discursive, it carries practical implications, as the definition determines the legal and humanitarian treatment of the migrating subject. In reference to UNHCR’s definition of the refugee as a person in need of protection, European media and politicians alike have suggested that only those who have escaped war and can demonstrate signs of suffering or trauma deserve refugee status, while those who flee from structural inequality in search of ‘better lives’ remain migrants. In Lebanon, where the state has refused to grant refugee status to the close to 1.200.000 Syrians who have arrived since 2011, this phenomenon has been turned upside down. Rather than seek humanitarian help by registering with the UNHCR, many Syrians have relied on local migrant networks to navigate through the housing and labor market, often living in poor urban areas and working in construction and service economies. During fieldwork among Syrian refugees in Beirut in winter 2015, I found that this apparent rejection of the humanitarian system reflects a larger ambivalence with the refugee category; a figure many of my informants affiliate with a lack of agency. By referring to themselves as migrants instead, stressing their position as emerging participants of the socioeconomic life of their host community, Syrians in Lebanon simultaneously challenge the humanitarian privileging of the refugee and tap into a global economic discourse of the agentic, self-determining ’economic migrant’. In its legal and political exclusion of the migrant worker, who relies on existing social networks in order to circumvent institutional constraints on both the state and supranational level, the humanitarian system risks reinforcing regimes of labor exploitation that places this figure at the bottom of the hierarchy. As the case of Syrians in Lebanon suggests, people are often simultaneously in need of protection and looking for labor. As such, Syrians’ lived challenge to the humanitarian vocabulary of migration calls for an operational and epistemological rethinking that encompasses, rather than cuts through, the many people who straddle the definitional binary between refuge and migration.

The year 2015 was marked by a nervous temporality for Tunisians, as the stagnant, slack time of intensified economic downturn was punctuated by a series of high-profile terrorist attacks. This uneasy sense of a nation under siege at the fragile moment of its democratic transition was compounded by the worrisome statistic that Tunisia contributes the greatest number of foreign recruits to Islamist militias waging “jihad” in Syria and Iraq. What accounts for the allure of militancy among Tunisian youth at precisely the moment when dictatorship has been overcome? In televised public service spots, billboards, and other forms of public address, the Tunisian state disavows terrorism as a foreign ideological threat encroaching from the outside. Drawing on the language of “us” and “them,” these ads foreground the role of Islamist proselytism in luring youth to violent extremism. Against such sensationalized media images of the brainwashed Tunisian jihadist, this paper will examine the lives of Tunisian youth who have left for the conflict in Syria through the lens of everyday political economy. While eschewing any easy reference to a single causal factor driving Tunisian participation in the Syrian civil war, I foreground the practical dilemmas facing youth mired in conditions of deepening socio-economic precariousness, which often leads to the endless deferral of ordinary aspirations. Reconstructed through interviews with family members left behind in Tunisia, these young men’s life histories reveal reoccurring patterns of unemployment, under-payment, dead-end jobs, informal labor, and wage theft by employers, locating them squarely within the global class of insecure workers Guy Standing (2011) identifies as “the Precariat.” Through these narratives, travel to Syria emerges as merely one episode in a larger, often inter-generational story of crossing borders in search of work opportunities, informal labor, and improved life chances. This material allows me to draw connections between the contemporary phenomenon of “jihad” and the transnational itineraries traced by poor and downwardly mobile Tunisians in their daily struggle to make ends meet (Meddeb 2011). I ask whether, for some, the lure of engagement in a militia abroad lies not in any millennial utopian fantasy, but rather as a form of work.