Over 250,000 migrant domestic workers currently work in Lebanon. In 2015 alone, the Ministry of Labor granted 60,814 new work permits to foreign laborers, the majority of whom applied as female domestic workers (al-khidamy al-menzaliya) from Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, though this number is commonly identified as inaccurate, since many domestic workers do not register for work permits, or fail to renew work permits for a number of reasons. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), female MDWs in Lebanon suffer some of the highest rates of abuse worldwide, and are dying at a rate of more than one per week. These statistics have mobilized international watch groups and Lebanese non-governmental organizations (NGO) on two main points, first, the much-needed reform of the kafala system, the state-sanctioned sponsorship system for migrant workers that, "systematically produces [emphasis added] a new population of readily exploitable worker[s]." Second, the treatment of MDWs at the hands of their employers, with special attention paid to the gendered dimensions of such violence in the home. There is still a dearth of analysis, however, on the actual labor of MDWs in Lebanon, and the practices that sustain their positioning within the labor economy. Using ethnographic data gathered in collaboration with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 2017, and independently in early 2018, this paper will center MDW labor in Lebanon as the starting point of an analysis that investigates how certain tasks under the umbrella of "care work" are implicated through gendered and racialized logics. This research will examine some of the following questions, including: what types of labor are in highest demand? Is this labor demand made across all demographics of MDWs, or are tasks allocated according to a raced and/or gendered logic? How is labor reconfigured in homes with more than one MDW? Are certain tasks and/or job-types more desirable for MDWs?

Turkey currently hosts more refugees than any other country in the world, including over three million Syrians. By law, Turkey provides free access to healthcare for all registered Syrians with a temporary protection ID. Yet starting in 2015 dozens of informal Syrian-run health clinics emerged in the heart of Istanbul. These clinics operate as low-cost outpatient clinics staffed by Syrian doctors lacking Turkish certification. The Turkish state has neither legalized nor shuttered many of these clinics, allowing them to operate in legal limbo alongside established Turkish providers. I ask: why did Syrian-run clinics emerge in Istanbul despite the Turkish state’s extension of free healthcare to Syrians, and what is their role in the incorporation of Syrians into Turkish society? In describing this process, I consider the health clinic as a site of refugee incorporation. Using semi-structured interviews with Syrian patients, Syrian doctors, as well as Syrian clinic administrators across 10 Syrian-run clinics, I analyze the individual interactions between patients and healthcare providers to explain the mechanisms that perpetuate the operation of illegal Syrian-run healthcare clinics. I find that Syrians’ experiences of Turkish state healthcare services embody a tension between “deserving refugee” and “burden on the state” created by the state’s effort to accept Syrian refugees without delineating a clear long-term refugee integration policy. While the state allows Syrians to utilize formal healthcare services, negative experiences engendered by the language barrier, discrimination, and state healthcare bureaucracy makes Syrian incorporation into services a serious challenge. Syrian-run health care clinics provide a venue where refugees gain access to care without incorporating into Turkey’s bureaucratic state healthcare system. A paradox emerges: refugees who incorporate into formal services as “deserving” refugees often have off-putting experiences that detract from a sense of belonging. Refugees who avoid state care and utilize refugee-run clinics have more positive healthcare experiences but remain marginal to the state apparatus. At the organizational-level, I find that Syrian-run clinics negotiate their illegality by framing themselves as medical humanitarian organizations, thereby gaining patient trust and minimizing state interference. Yet the constant anxiety of closure in which these clinics operate reinforces their status as temporary and constrains their ability to cooperate with state health services. This liminal legality of the clinic underscores Syrians’ “temporary protected status” in Turkey, where deservingness and belonging come into conflict with formal incorporation into state services.

In an era marked by protracted humanitarian conflicts, and in a climate where aid funding is stated to be in decline globally, international organizations—and donors—are calling for more "localization" in their programs and projects. This is particularly true in the Middle East, which is the largest regional producer and host of displaced populations globally. Places like Jordan, for example, are increasingly identified as key locations for organizations to engage in more “localization” efforts to develop sustainable projects and solutions to replace their previous “relief” initiatives and efforts. In response, international organizations claim they are hiring more “national” staff (i.e. “local” workers) and partnering with “more local” organizations to carry out their mandates. But who are these “local” workers and organizations, and what do they do? Who “speaks” for the local in these spaces? Based on interviews with over 90 aid workers in Jordan, I find that workers construct “the local” through their ideas, practices, and daily routines in ways that reflect and reinforce historical global hierarchies of privilege and power; as well as among and between various "local" communities in Jordan. Specifically, aid workers—Jordanians and non-Jordanians alike—construct “the local” and Jordanians as more susceptible to corruption; and certain “local” locations and groups as more “risky” than others in this regard as well. This as a result shapes not only how aid workers think about their work, beneficiaries and the communities they engage with, but also the practices and processes informing how aid is distributed, reported, and conceptualized as projects and programs. My findings suggest that critical attention is needed to the ways in which relationships and interactions between and among aid workers, as well as the “local” communities they represent and interact with, reproduce particular social hierarchies and inequalities at sub-national, national and global levels.

Currently there are over 20 million forcibly displaced persons (refugees and internally displaced persons/IDPs) throughout the Middle East and North Africa, particularly Iraq, Kurdistan, Libya, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen. This is just a part of over 65 million forcibly displaced persons worldwide representing the greatest global refugee crisis since World War II. The immediate causes of the current MENA crisis are well known and include the United States’ Global War on Terror and invasions/occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq; the on-going Palestinian-Israeli Conflict; Turkey’s war against its Kurdish populations; Arab Uprisings and subsequent civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen; the entrenchment of Al-Qaeda; the rise of ISIS; and the continued interference of regional and global powers in the various ongoing conflicts in the MENA. This paper, however, focuses on the root and long-term causes of the current MENA refugee and IDP crisis. It argues that the current crisis is the net result of an ongoing combination of Western Interventionism/Imperialism, Geo-Political and Regional Rivalries, Nationalism, Nation-state Construction, the Integration and Peripheralization of MENA into the Global Capitalist Economy, and the Wedding of Ethno-Religious Identity with Political Representation and Access to Power. This toxic cocktail was entrenched in the Middle East and North Africa as a result of World War One, its immediate aftermath, and the creation of the current state system in the MENA region that resulted in the most devastating demographic transformation the region since the plague and Mongol invasions ravaged the region in the 13th and 14th centuries. The entrenchment of this toxic cocktail as a result of WWI has led to a perpetual process of displacement and dispossession in the MENA that has culminated with the current crisis. This paper will provide an overview of this process citing specific examples to illustrate its development and consequences over the course of the 20th century and in so doing provide a template of how to integrate the current crisis into the broader historical narrative regarding the development of the modern Middle East and North Africa over the last century.