How do encounters with healthcare providers shape refugees’ experiences of belonging in a polity? States typically extend social rights such as access to education and healthcare to refugees, which provide key mechanisms for incorporation into the host state society. In the case of Turkey, Syrian refugees are provided “temporary protection” as opposed to official refugee status. Unlike the conferral refugee status, which denotes a state’s legal commitment to providing social rights to protected individuals, temporary protection is an ad hoc status. Temporary protection for Syrians in Turkey has precipitated generous social rights including education and healthcare access but remains unspecified in its temporal scope. This temporal ambiguity affects the organizational terrain in which refugees interact with the state as they access services and incorporate into Turkish society. This paper analyzes the ways in which Syrians’ experiences with healthcare services shape their sense of belonging and identity in Turkey, while assessing in tandem the development of a patchwork healthcare landscape for refugees that extends beyond state providers. Using semi-structured interviews with Syrian patients, Syrian doctors, Turkish doctors, and Syrian clinic administrators, I examine the experiences of individuals with both Turkish state providers and alternative providers that have emerged in the interstices of state services. I find that despite the fact that Syrians have legal access to Turkish healthcare, they may opt out of state services due to feelings of marginalization. Exclusion from and avoidance of Turkish healthcare due to a confluence of language barriers, bureaucratic challenges, and discrimination creates demand for alternative healthcare options. Syrian doctors and professional have created new combinations of healthcare to meet this demand. I argue that individuals are able to exert autonomy by seeking care in Syrian-run clinics, outside the Turkish bureaucratic healthcare apparatus. These clinics are able to mediate incorporation into society by filling everyday healthcare needs such that individuals do not need to enter the Turkish healthcare setting where their refugeehood and otherness comes into sharper relief in waiting rooms and through interactions with healthcare personnel. On the other hand, the persistence of parallel services outside the margins of the state perpetuates identity-based service provision, which undermines broader attempts at social integration. Most recently, the Turkish state has begun opening separate Migrant Health Centers employing Arabic-speaking doctors, thereby institutionalizing the separation of migrants and refugees as a group while easing access to official services.

The Lebanese state has been characterized as weak, shattered, or even absent. Research on state institutions is rare in studies on Lebanese politics, even when political disputes revolve around the role of the state. As with much scholarship on the Middle East, scholarship on Lebanon mainly traces the emergence, and politicization of different ethnosectarian groups. Even when scholars do take the state seriously, they often assume it is only an instrument of pre-existing ethnosectarian groups. However, the state is not only a stronghold of privilege and resource extraction, but also an arena of political contestation and group formation. In the formative decades of state building in 1950’s and 1960’s Lebanon, there were competing understandings of belonging. How did different national ideological currents tie into the state formation processes of that period, and why did they fail? To answer this question, I take the case of the only higher public education institution in Lebanon, the Lebanese University (LU), as an arena of state-institution building. Using archival materials at the Lebanese National Archives, I look at the state's education policies and parliamentary debates, as well as the key ideological and political struggles of the formative years of the LU. I conclude with an analysis and contextualization of print publications of an untouched source: the magazine publications of a centrist nationalist student movement that grew out of the School of Pedagogy in 1969, known as Harakat Al Wa’I (The Consciousness Movement); along with extended interviews with key intellectuals of the movement. Historians see the expansion of public education in the 1960s, and especially the creation of the LU, as one of the most favorable state reforms of that era. Before that, privileges in the state’s bureaucracy and the education system were domains of sectarian inequality and sectarian apportionment. The expansion of educational provision across sects, and the inflation of the state’s bureaucracy prompted student unions and teachers’ associations to question the validity of the sectarian system, and allowed the question of education to be central to political conflicts. By the late 1960’s, the LU had become an intellectual hub for political contestation both between and across sectarian groups. Analytically, universities are more than sites of education. They shift class structures, and reflect the local, regional, and global ideological movements of their time. Universities are strategic research sites for processes of identity formation and understandings of belonging in developing countries.

In recent years, scholars have become attuned to the presence of religion in the military. As a public institution thought to embody national ideals, the military is a particularly advantageous site for understanding state priorities with respect to religion. The extent to which the military accommodates minority soldiers, for example, is one indicator of state tolerance for religious diversity. But despite the prevalence of states with established religions in the Middle East, there have been few—if any—concerted studies of religion in regional militaries. At the same time, scholars continue to explore political interventions by the military in the Middle East. But the range of phenomena under consideration is limited to coups d’état, support for protesters, and defections. Overlooked are historical episodes of religious contestation in which the military played a role. A number of scholars have closely documented the participation of state actors in promoting and institutionalizing specific interpretations of religion, but without much consideration of the military. This paper brings together these two literatures by engaging the complex, complicating, and understudied case of Egypt. I specifically ask, when do militaries engage in religious claims-making? How do they establish and communicate religious identity? Informed by the premise that practices, discourse, and symbolism can provide insight into organizational culture, I draw on a novel source of data—the religious-affairs magazines of the Egyptian military—as well as interviews with retired generals to illustrate instances and plausible causes of religious mobilization by the military. I also shed new light on the military's religious infrastructure, including its corps of Muslim clerics. In the end, I contend that when a domestic competitor emerges in the Egyptian religious field and challenges state dominance, the military is deployed to engage in an altogether different form of combat: over the ideological power of the state.