As publicized by media outlets, the ongoing Syrian civil war has exacted a tremendous toll on the country’s civilian population. Among those civilians are Palestinian refugees who numbered about 500, 000 prior to the war. All of Syria’s 12 Palestinian refugee camps have been affected by the war, some more than others. More than half of Syria’s Palestinian population has been displaced due to hostilities, most of them internally. Among the displaced, approximately 100, 000 have fled across Syrian borders to neighboring countries in the region. A few have gone farther afield, to Europe or East Asia. In this paper, I reflect on the conditions of Palestinians from Syria who have once again become refugees and are now scattered across the Middle East. The paper is based on interviews conducted in Spring 2015 with Palestinians from Syria who are now living Lebanon, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates as well as interviews conducted with UNRWA employees at the agency's Amman headquarters. First, I give an overview of the different governmental responses to Palestinian refugees who have been able to reach Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Then, I examine the existing as well as emerging regional social networks that are being mobilized by Palestinian refugees themselves in order to assist other Palestinians who have fled the war in Syria. Finally, I compare and contrast these governmental responses to the existing and emerging social networks that are being used by Palestinians to assist fellow Palestinians who have been displaced from the war in Syria. I reflect on the ethical concepts and ideologies that inform the responses of governmental bodies as well as those of Palestinian refugees themselves and on the ways in which such concepts inform and/or complicate dominant understandings of humanitarianism.

This paper explores the ways in which humanitarian practice changes social space through case studies of Beirut’s southern suburbs (Dahiye) in response to 2006 July war, and the Syrian refugee influx in Lebanon from war in Syria during 2011-2014. Through the investigation of humanitarian practices, it identifies a Lebanese refugee regime in which short-term displacement of the Lebanese population exists alongside long-term refugehood of Iraq, Palestinian and Sudanese refugees in Lebanon. Official states of emergency in Lebanon cyclically stimulate the flow of greater amounts of resources to local citizens through the increasing internationalisation of local welfare. Consequently, the paper also investigates how humanitarian practice becomes articulated with forms of welfare and development. Rather than getting deeper into the technical analysis of humanitarian policies and programs that have gradually turned into development projects, in-depth interviews and participant observation have rather aimed to unearth the everyday human experience of beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries. Through the adhocratic emergency management of the war-stricken subjects’ lives, the paper shows how transnational humanitarian interventions have produced different social and political outcomes in Lebanon. In both case studies, international humanitarianism proves to function as an arm of ethical governance which aims to maintain state and regional order, and avoids confronting the human security of refugees, who are seen as a political problem. As a result, the chronic emergencisation of Lebanese society becomes leverage for preserving international security. The humanitarian strategy of continuously preventing further catastrophes and meeting immediate needs, in an environment of political nihilism, consigns the local as well as the refugee communities in Lebanon to an aprioristic abdication of radical social change.

During the Israel war on Lebanon in July 2006, multiple humanitarian organizations began a series of trauma-related interventions for affected communities to diagnose and treat trauma in Lebanon. Yet, despite the widespread violence, these therapies faced numerous difficulties in finding traumatic subjects in Lebanon. By the end of the 2006 war, humanitarian psychology in Lebanon had expanded and multiplied to treat other forms of violence against women, Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, Lebanese prisoners and youth in urban ghettos. Also, interventions were designed to integrated mental health assessment within primary health care units for postwar communities in South Lebanon. The escalating political violence in Lebanon however, expressed in car bombs, suicide bombers, occasional street fighting and abrupt rockets hitting villages on borders, remain out of humanitarian therapeutic governance. Therapeutics of violence in Lebanon, absent and emergent, re-located violence around new forms of injuries, bodies, sites of healing and subjects. It also produced a specific separation between violence occurring in war and peace in a place where violence is constantly anticipated. This paper follows the knowledge practices of violence as it becomes materially produced in the work of humanitarian therapeutics in Lebanon and embodied, contested and appropriated by different communities in Lebanon. What kinds of bodies, places, bombs, affects, speech etc. are considered violent and how are they transformed into non-violent ones? Which violence cannot be healed and intervened in by these therapies? How did communities in Lebanon themselves made sense of violence encountered and lived in? In this paper, I will first address the materiality of humanitarian psychology as it unfolded in Lebanon in war and its aftermath (its market, political economy; new forms of commodities; its technologies (trainings of policemen, humanitarian workers on psychological therapies etc.) new kinds of political action; ethics and the psychologization of violence) then I will address the different humanitarian therapies, starting with war trauma therapies in 2006 then “postwar” therapies for Iraqi and Palestinian refugees and feminist therapies against domestic violence. I will then end the presentation by addressing the forms of political violence escalating in Lebanon since 2011 that does not fall within any kind of humanitarian therapeutic governance (bombs, assassinations, street fights, etc.)

When Wounds Travel Recent work in anthropology has highlighted the intimate relationships between humanitarian regimes of trauma recognition and the production of conditions of modern-day victimhood. In the context of humanitarianism, diagnostics and therapeutics of trauma have become “signatures” of the “scarring” effects of past violence, and in turn a framework in the governing and management of populations and bodies in contexts of crisis. From immigration practices, to defining and selecting refugees for asylum and resettlement, to therapeutics offered to torture victims, trauma discourses has been operationalized as a regime of power where populations and individuals participate in making their own experiences and witnessing of violence both visible and available to a humanitarian ethic of victimhood. In this paper, I would like to think about trauma “beyond” the humanitarian discourses and practices of governance and medicalization. Rather than focusing on the nexus of humanitarian interventions, I want to account for trauma as a form of “social wound,” entrenched in the intersections of local histories and social experiences of violence. Building on ethnographic accounts of displacement of Iraqis in Lebanon, I ask: what happens when such wounds travel and how do they metabolize across different social worlds and histories of violence? In highlighting social tensions and imbrications of histories of such social worlds, I hope to show how an ethnography of “wounds” could account for the complex ways histories of violence and discourses of trauma unravel in everyday life.

This paper considers how environmentalism, specifically the biodiversity conservation of Iraq’s southern marshes, was instrumental to the counterinsurgency strategy in the recent Iraq war. It investigates the central question: is environmentalism a form of humanitarianism? In 2003, a group of Iraqi exiles in collaboration with the U.S. government set out to restore the marshes in southern Iraq as a revitalized Garden of Eden. In 1991, Saddam Hussein drained the marshes in retaliation for an uprising that began there and threatened to depose him. In 2003, marsh advocates would restore the marshes as a national symbol for a new, post-Ba‘ath Iraq. The project was quickly celebrated as the success story of the war. The triumphant narrative of marsh revival worked in other ways too: it concealed the motivated aims of its donors who sought to capitalize on the jackpot wealth potential of giant and supergiant oil fields encapsulated beneath the marshland reservoir. Under the cover of altruism, environmentalism enabled foreign donors to gain political power in wartime Iraq. In the “post-conflict” era, environmentalism bloomed in Iraq: the U.N. prompted the creation of the Iraqi Ministry of Environment, raising environmental infrastructure in Baghdad as more than 30 million U.S. dollars poured into the marshes. Unlike humanitarian projects, which manage human populations, environmentalism’s stated goal is to do work on land for the benefit of nature. Yet environmentalists in Iraq enacted a program of international development that restructured relations of people to the state, reshaped understandings of national identity, and framed an ethics of citizenship. This paper brings together literature on humanitarianism with literature on biodiversity conservation to demonstrate that environmentalist goals often reach beyond the natural world.