A novel model of forced displacement management that has emerged in the post-2011 Middle East concerns the introduction of “refugee compacts”. Aiming to transform a broken refugee system by supporting displaced persons’ integration into the host-state job market, refugee compacts involve multi-billion-dollar investments in Jordan and Lebanon, with similar schemes currently being developed and introduced across the broader Middle East. While these interstate agreements have been habitually portrayed as success stories or “win-win” strategies that transform forced displacement crises into developmental opportunities, little has been written on their consequences for host states of first asylum. In order to amend this gap, this paper takes an interdisciplinary approach that builds on political science, migration studies, as well as Middle East studies in order to identify the socio-political effects of the Jordan and Lebanon refugee compacts. The paper adopts a postcolonial lens in order to argue that these arrangements have encouraged the commodification of forced displacement in states’ policy-making processes along three dimensions. Firstly, they create novel ties of dependency to Western donor states that are augmented by complex conditionality mechanisms attached to this economic aid. Secondly, they encourage host-state elites to skew their policies with a view to attracting external funding, particularly via the production of alarmist narratives of collapse. Finally, they provide a moral justification for an economistic management of forced displacement that enables local actors to seek material profit from local refugee populations. The paper builds on expert and elite interviews in Amman and Beirut, including government officials as well as NGO and civil society representatives. It offers a critical analysis to increasingly-popular attempts at solving the refugee burden-sharing problem both in the Levant as well as the broader Middle East and provides important implications around the perils of refugee commodification.

The United Nations offers three durable solutions to long-standing refugee crises—repatriation, resettlement, and local integration—though local integration is often dismissed by host countries in the Global South as undesired or infeasible (Jacobsen 1996). Recently migration scholars have begun to acknowledge just how widespread local integration has become for both refugees and irregular migrants, despite host government opposition, finding that many migrants and refugees in a variety of contexts have reached a point of economic and social integration (“de facto integration”) despite national and international policy climates (Hovil 2014). While de facto integration provides benefits such as flexibility and the opportunity to exist in relative anonymity, it also leaves migrants and refugees in a precarious and informal position, subject to rapidly changing security environments and absent important legal protections. Simultaneously, political science has developed a renewed focus on practices of informality (Helmke and Levitsky 2004), which insert themselves into the space of tension between the coercive authority of the state and the state’s legitimacy (Davis 2018). Further, recent scholarship has argued that informality does not necessarily result from low state capacity; instead, states may choose to practice forbearance and refrain from interference and engagement when they perceive benefits from restraint (Moss 2014; Gallien 2018). In the case of de facto integration for migrants and refugees, host states may actually permit and even encourage economic and social integration, even as they publicly decry such practices. This paper asks: how do migrants and refugees contextualize these practices of informality—in terms of what is permissible, and what is forbidden—in rapidly changing and securitized host state environments? Drawing on three years of fieldwork and more than 150 semi-structured interviews, this paper demonstrates that migrants and refugees residing in countries like Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, and Turkey find access to livelihoods, healthcare, ways of sending their children to school, and engage in social and sometimes political activities, all through state-sanctioned practices of informality. The findings have important implications for the way in which scholars consider host state engagement and informal institutions in countries of the Global South.

Under what conditions do native citizens vocalize opposition to displaced persons (including both refugees and economic migrants? Why, moreover, does native citizens’ opposition intensify against non co-ethnic displaced persons while it attenuates against co-ethnic displaced persons? Examining these questions, this paper draws upon a new, original, and nationally representative survey of 2700 respondents from the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). Conducted in Morocco in 2018, the survey tracks variation in citizens’ opposition to displaced persons and, further, explains why significantly stronger opposition exists toward non co-ethnic ones (specifically sub-Saharan Africans). Cohering with findings from studies on ant-migrant attitudes from Western Europe, this study confirms that both economic and cultural theories help to explain variation in citizen opposition. Native citizens who perceive displaced persons—especially sub-Saharan African migrants—as depressing their wages, utilizing public services, and threatening their culture are more likely to voice opposition. These factors also seem to predict citizens’ stronger opposition toward sub-Saharan Africans when compared with Arab displaced persons, like Syrians and Iraqis. Yet, this study takes a new tack by introducing a previously unexplored variable: Fear of AIDS. In addition to both economic and cultural factors, our survey demonstrates that fear of AIDS transmission also likely plays a role in driving native citizens’ oppositional attitudes in the MENA region. The paper concludes by offering policy recommendations, specifically greater AIDS health education, to help depress such sentiment.

Foreign and Refugee Policies: A comparative Study of Iran and Pakistan For the past four decades Iran and Pakistan have been hosts to the largest Afghan refugee populations. During the first decade, both countries adopted a relatively open-door refugee approach, treating Afghans as their guests. The sign of a change, however, most evident in both countries’ emphasis on mass repatriation, appeared in the early 1990s (see UNHCR statistics, different years). As of now the open-door approach seems to have become a relic of the past. What explain such a shift in policy? Even though domestic political, social, and economic factors play important roles in determining any country’s (Iran and Pakistan, included) approach to refugees, one cannot ignore the impact of foreign policy goals and orientation of a state in setting such policies. The purpose of this comparative study is to investigate the nexus of refugee and foreign policy of Iran and Pakistan. Despite their different international standing/posturing (Iran is a strategically lonely country, shunned by the United States and many powerful regional actors, while Pakistan, a nuclear power, has good working relations with most powerful countries including the US) these two neighbors have certain similar security and foreign policy concerns that have spilled over into their refugee policy. The argument of this paper is that in each case the shift from open to close door refugee policy has a close connection to the foreign policy goals of each country. To make its argument the paper analyses both the foreign policy (particularly security) and refugee discourses of decision makers, and the actual policies of the two countries. Very little scholarly work has been done to analyze the nexus of foreign and refugee policy for either Pakistan or Iran. The purpose of this study is thus twofold. One is to contribute to filling up the above-mentioned gap in our knowledge about the connection between foreign policy and refugee approach in the two countries. The other is to contribute to the process of theory building in refugee studies.