Among the original members of the Arab Nationalist Movement that emerged in Beirut after the nakba, Ahmad abu Maher al Yamani was the only Palestinian to come from a peasant background. Born to a poor family in the Galilee in 1924, he grew up through the events of the Peasant revolts of 1936-7 and organized workers against the partition of Palestine as a union leader for the Palestinian Arab Workers Society. Yamani drew on his expertise to organize refugees in Lebanon and became one of their unheralded civic leaders. He forged constituencies to negotiate with authorities from a position of strength, and his networks became the backbone of camp organization. This study of Yamani’s life uncovers civic leadership in a historiography dominated by the motif of armed struggle. Zachary Lockman’s scholarship on British Mandate Palestine traces how the growing muscularity of Zionism accelerated the social transformations that challenged existing power structures in Palestine. New civic leadership emerged from the peasant, laboring, and petit bourgeois classes to assert new identities, demand concessions, and negotiate new solidarities. Unfortunately, these transformations go largely unacknowledged in existing scholarship on Palestinians in exile. While the armed struggle motif accepts that the Nakba fractured social hierarchies and delegitimized the old elite, it fails to notice how the social transformation of the Mandate era produced the leaders, like Yamani, who would rebuild social institutions in exile. These institutions – which include teacher, student, and worker associations, scouting movements, organized rallies, commemorations, and strikes – defeated the Lebanese state’s efforts to isolate refugees. I argue that the unheralded civic leadership of the 1950s fashioned a national consciousness among peasant and poor refugees and enabled the armed struggle. My research examines Yamani’s memoirs and the correspondence of the Committee of UNRWA Teachers in Lebanon. I also draw on interviews I conducted with an older generation of Palestinian organizers, and on Al Tha’r, an underground newspaper that circulated in the early 1950s among Arab Nationalists in refugee camps.

Since March of 2011, almost half of Syria’s population has been displaced. Most of these people were internally displaced while over three million refugees sought safe haven in surrounding countries, primarily Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. Informed by their previous experiences with other refugee populations (primarily Palestinians and Iraqis) and other geo-political interests, these three countries developed divergent immigration policies to deal with the current Syrian refugee crisis. Jordan houses many Syrian refugees in Zaatari, the second largest camp in the world. While the camp is only 1.3 square miles in size, Zaatari became home to 203,000 people at its peak density. In stark juxtaposition, Lebanon's initial policy was not to rely on camps at all, creating Syrian squatters dispersed throughout the country. With approximately 1.3 Syrian refugees, the country’s population has increased by over 25%. Finally, Turkey runs more than 22 smaller refugee camps that have been characterized as “perfect refugee camps” by the New York Times. The Turkish government recently took over refugee management from the UNHCR and has implemented initiatives to monitor refugee movement. Why did each of these states respond differently to the influx of Syrian refugees? What role does the camp play in managing refugee populations? The relationship between the refugee camp and the state broaches classical sociological questions about sovereignty and control of immigrant populations.

This project introduces a new framework for thinking about ethnic cleansing and tests this theory on the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990 using an original quantitative dataset and about 60 interviews gathered during 14 months of fieldwork. Ethnic cleansing, or instances where one ethnic or sectarian group displaces members of another from a particular territory through violent means, can be either a political goal or a strategy in service of another end and this crucial aspect means that the practice of this strategy will vary widely across conflicts. Ethnic cleansing is often used as a strategy for dominating contested territory in nationalist conflicts which implies that some group is trying to maximize displacement using all available military forces. Yet my argument is that in civil wars fought at least in part across an ethnic divide, but where neither side has separatist ambitions, armed groups have strong incentives to minimize the amount of displacement. Ethnic identity is an easy and cheap heuristic device that can be used to identify potential enemies which enables armed groups to use collective violence such as ethnic cleansing. But with a lack of separatist ambition comes an understanding that the country will need to be governed after armed hostilities end. In addition, during the conflict process, armed groups have an incentive to retain non-coethnic resident civilians since all manners of in-conflict funding of armed groups are strictly increasing in the size of civilian population: taxation, predation, seizing and operating firms, and donations. For these reasons armed groups have an incentive to acquire more fine-grained information about resident non-coethnics to allow them to displace only those who are actively disloyal. This is easiest in areas where loyal and disloyal civilians are mixed, such as mixed residential neighbourhoods, which are therefore more likely to witness selective violence but less likely to experience full collective ethnic cleansing. To test this theory I rely on an original countrywide village-level data set on demographics, migration, and violence collected during 14 months of fieldwork based in Beirut and supplemented by about 60 interviews with political leaders and former militia fighters. The data stems from voter registration materials, government documents, NGO reports and other sources and allows for a rich set of quantitative tests and illustrative GIS mapping. The main finding is that ethnic cleansing was less extensive and more narrowly and competently targeted than is commonly imagined or appreciated.

In this paper, I argue that the juxtaposition of sectarianism with nationalism gives an incomplete picture of the Lebanese situation, especially at the popular level. Many scholars believe that the creation and buttressing of a Lebanese national identity would unite people and lead them away from sectarian divisions but I argue against a standard view that understands Lebanon’s past, present, and future through a sectarian/national and sectarian/secular binaries. I propose an alternative theory, what I call sectarian habitus. Drawing from Bourdieu’s (1980) conceptualization of habitus, I use the term sectarian habitus—the set of sectarian dispositions that people experience through daily social relations that structure both the conscious and non-conscious behavior of different sectarian groups in Lebanon—to illuminate the likely failure of a national Lebanese identity and the enduring power of Lebanese sectarianism but also the possibility of a non-divisive and non-conflictual popular sectarianism that might allow for a different Lebanese future. This formulation of habitus allows for the consideration of popular practices in reproducing sectarian structures in times of war, peace and coexistence. I analyze Lebanese sectarianism by focusing on its conscious, non-conscious, and imaginary attributes that account for the social reproduction of the sectarian social structures and sectarianism’s resiliency. I look at the importance of the popular level, day-to-day life practices and the sectarian imaginations of Lebanese citizens in shaping and reproducing these structures while also thinking about the role of the political/sectarian leadership and the sectarian structures of government institutions. I closely examine the events that followed PM Hariri’s assassination, mainly the four weeks in February and March 2005, preceding the so-called “Cedar Revolution.” I show that the period leading to the Cedar revolution on March 14th was as important as that day, if not more, in contrast to most analyses of the period which just regard it as a build-up to March 14th. The four weeks prior exhibited intense changes in the sectarian habitus at the popular level. This theory – sectarian habitus – gives people’s actions throughout the four-week period importance and understands them in the context of larger structures at play. This four-week period, however short it was, needs to be reconsidered as one of the most important periods in Lebanese sectarian history because it showed a glimpse of different sectarian imaginations.