Do social forces in Iran have any meaningful influence over the state or does the state use a top-down power approach in its interaction with the society (Harris, 2017). Taking refugee policy as a case this paper engages this debate. Since the early 1980s Iran has been host to one of the largest Afghan refugee population (UNHCR statistics, several years). Over this long period the approach of the Islamic Republic has shifted from an open door policy of integration to a focus on restriction and repatriation. What explains this shift? Multiple domestic and regional/international factors have influenced Iran’s refugee policy. The purpose of this paper is to see whether societal forces have been able to influence the state’s refugee policy, and if yes, how and to what degree? Is the Iranian state a unified entity, or is it plagued by institutional rivalries and inter-elite competition? If the latter, does such fragmentations, for example the rivalry between the Revolutionary Guards and Rouhani’s government over refugee policies, expand or contract the space of influence of societal forces? But what are the relevant societal forces when it comes to the problematic of refugees. How fragmented is the society in its approach to Afghan refugees, and what are the consequences of such fragmentation for state-society relations? Has the existence of multiple and contradictory societal positions/voices helped the state to be more autonomous in choosing its path, or have such multiple voices, in conjunction with intra-elite and institutional competition, made the state more dependent on societal forces? By focusing on refugee policy as a case in studying state-society relations this paper makes several contributions. Firstly, it redresses, partially, the inadequacy of the literature on Iran’s refugee policies and their determinants, domestic as well as regional/global. Studies of domestic factors (with a few exceptions such as descriptive accounts by Rajaee 2002 and Adelkhak 2007) are scant, while those about regional/international elements are almost non-existent. Secondly, it contributes to the literature on state-society relations in hybrid or authoritarian political systems. And lastly, by looking at the specific case of refugee policy of Iran this paper engages the general literature of refugee policies.

Since the 2011 Syrian uprisings and the outbreak of the civil war, more than a million Syrians have fled their homes to the neighboring country, Lebanon. They arrived on foot and in family cars amidst bombings and through overwhelmingly securitized checkpoints. Mostly from cities active during the uprisings, such as Dera’a, Homs, Aleppo, Raqqa, and Hama, they all have stories of demonstrations, armed participation, surviving sieges, and experience with the death of loved ones. These are stories of a cause told in an uneasy amalgamation of pride, regret, hope, frustration, and doubt. Stories of everyday lives spent as refugees in a country where the majority have now lived in makeshift camps for years. “Collecting rain water that comes from the holes in your tent every winter makes you forget about isqat en-nizam (bringing down the state),” Rateb (pseudonym) told me once, when I asked him about where the revolution is headed. Like many of the young Syrians I’ve met, Rateb both refers to himself in the present tense as a revolutionary and decisively asserts that the Syrian revolution is over. In this paper, I explore Rateb’s life history, to ask: Where does revolution stand when the revolutionaries are displaced? And what aspects of political participation are lost during war and displacement and what forms of individual or collective forms of engagement replace what is lost? I look at multiple stages of what Rateb describes as his political formation: from being born to a Bedouin family, to serving in the Syrian military intelligence service, to joining the Free Syrian Army, to becoming an illegal refugee-activist in Lebanon. Rateb’s story weaves together the diverse and, at times, contradictory understandings held by my Syrian interlocutors about what political activism had meant to them before and during the uprisings and what it represents in their future. It sheds light on how Syrians are struggling to replace their active political engagement on the streets with social activism, a process marked by the experience of refugeehood in Lebanon. Through this story, I investigate the new understandings of homeland, belonging, and future, which make alternative forms of community-building and transnational political activism possible in the lives of displaced Syrians. As part of my dissertation project, this paper is based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork (July 2018-October 2019) in north and east of Lebanon. I conducted participant observation, life histories, and semi-structured interviews with Syrians in Lebanon.

More than eight years after the beginning of the devastating civil war in Syria, there are currently more than 12 million displaced Syrians. Displaced Syrians are often portrayed in both policy-oriented and academic discourses as victims in need of help, especially from the “humanitarian” West. Rarely are they recognized as humanitarian actors even though thousands of these displaced Syrians have made concerted efforts to support other Syrians living in conditions even more dire than their own. My ethnographic research (2019-2020) looks at Syrian-led organizations based in Turkey that are set up by displaced Syrians to help Syrian refugees in Turkey and regionally. As of 2019, more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees were registered in Turkey, the largest number of Syrian refugees in any one country worldwide. Turkey has recently become a flourishing center of humanitarian aid work in the MENA region. Syrians have founded more than 300 registered humanitarian organizations that operate transnationally, closely collaborating with the Turkish bureaucracy, Syrians, non-Syrian Arabs, and Western actors inside and outside of Turkey. Turkish laws regarding organizations allow Syrians to organize freely, and Syrian humanitarian workers have often vocally celebrated this freedom in contrast to the restrictions found in other countries in the Middle East. However, those laws also render Syrian efforts invisible because the organizations are registered as “Turkish NGOs.” Nevertheless, Syrians who are based in Turkey and work in support of displaced Syrians through institutional means have a strong presence in both shaping the humanitarian field and policy-making towards Syrians. My discussion will explore this presence by attending to how Syrian humanitarian actors blend global, nationalist, and Islamic discourses to articulate a different vision of humanitarianism. Diverse groups of refugee and non-refugee Muslim Syrian actors have built complex transnational care networks that articulate a tapestry of secular, religious, and nationalist discourses. Speaking from the viewpoints of “marginalized actor” and “expert” at the same time, Syrian humanitarian refugees’ articulations of humanitarianism will contribute to growing scholarly discussions regarding both effective policy toward refugees and agency on the part of refugees.

Amid what appears to constitute a global intensification of nativism and racism, scholars have grown increasingly attuned to transnational solidarities and belongings. In this paper, I explore how Arab refugees living in Turkey navigate a socio-political landscape that is increasingly characterized by hostility toward their presence. Taking as my case-study primarily young, devout Syrian men who have settled in Istanbul, I consider how a shared religious register allows these men to negotiate their relationship to Turkish citizenry on the basis of a shared identity, sometimes framed in terms of fictive kinship (e.g. "brothers"). Moving beyond reductive tropes that treat refugees as a people 'on the move' or 'out of place,' I look at the sorts of contingent belongings that form through these transnational interactions, as well as the practical forms of support that Islamic communities and sociality provides. This research draws on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Istanbul district of Fatih, where I conducted dozens of interviews and extensive participant observation among an Islamic renewal movement. I suggest that my interlocutors adopt and adapt what they perceive as underlying Turkish classificatory systems (such as a religious/secular binary) and thereby situate themselves along these fault-lines, so as to effectively forge affiliations with a particular segment of the 'host' population. The subjectivities of belonging that emerge are conditional and limited, dependent as much on constructing and maintaining distance and distinction from the populations whom they deem hostile toward their presence as on upholding relationships and camaraderie with those whom they affiliate.

This paper is based on my extensive field research during 2015-2016 among Iranian asylum seekers in various cities in Turkey. These transit migrants, whose estimated number is about twenty thousand, pursue permanent resettlement mainly in North America. They counter the privileged Iranian hegemonic public that consists of the Persian speaking Shi?a who subscribe to the principles of heteronormativity. These Iranian counterpublics are consequently composed of precluded sociocultural categories, namely LGBTQ, political dissidents, as well as religious and ethnic minorities including Christians, Baha’is, Kurdish Ahl-e Haqq, Zoroastrians and Cosmic Mystics. Exploring issues that range from Islamic Shi?i jurisprudence and citizenship rights, border crossing and right of asylum to transit migration, international politics and resettlement, I explicate the entwinement of structural and mental processes underpinning diaspora and diasporic identity formations across national, geographical, political, religious and gender boundaries. I argue that while every phase of this diasporization process is governed by particular geopolitical and legal regimes, it is nevertheless the complex interactions of the national, international and transnational forces that forge the path for such a globalized movement of human bodies, practices, and ideas. These forces include the totalizing and monopolizing politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, economic and political motivations of Turkey, transnational organizations and their practices as well as the international political and economic post-colonial structures enshrined in international laws, United Nations regulations and legal systems of migrant countries. These factors determine the direction and speed of migration, and their confluence generates preconditions for diasporization of marginal Iranian counterpublics to expand into visible diasporic ones. Furthermore, penetration of religious ideas, ideals, and practices other than the dominant Shi?i Islam, dissemination of scientific findings that recognize the fluidity of gender identities and sexual practices, spread of universalized legal concepts defining and defending basic human rights as well as global indigenous rights’ movements, have all become sources for and of social organizations and meanings that challenge the normative Iranian public. As I demonstrate, before, during and after the transitory period in Turkey, these alternative religious beliefs, gender identities, and political convictions sustain congregations of believers and communities of political and gender activists.