As humanitarian actors and practice have become central to the governance of Syrians in Lebanon, the line between state action and non-state governing efforts has become increasingly indistinct. While recent scholarship has addressed the state-like nature of protracted humanitarianism, this paper utilizes a non-realist understanding of the state to address a more pointed question: where does humanitarianism begin and so-called state action end? Rather than attempt to analyze humanitarian politics in Lebanon from either state absence or state presence, this paper regards the reified state as a fiction that deserves more careful examination. Drawing from critical scholarship on the state and humanitarian governance, this paper attempts to disentangle power from realist, reified notions of the state, and instead place so-called “state power” within an assemblage of governance that includes humanitarian groups, NGOs, and various “informal” actors. In this effort, this paper argues that humanitarianism and so-called state power overlap in two clear ways: accusations of corruption and concerns of security. Drawing from ethnographic research in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, I argue that humanitarian groups are better positioned within an assemblage of governance in Lebanon—a framework that attempts to breakdown the elusive divide between formal and informal systems of power, and instead frames seemingly disparate or hierarchized actors as mutually constituting, contingent, emergent, and at times contested. Such a paradigm helps to uncover and legitimize otherwise overlooked networks, and advocates for a more capacious framework for conceptualizing humanitarianism and the state.

The attacks carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Sinjar (Shingal) region in the Northern Iraq and the violence inflicted upon the Yezidi community (Ezidi) forced more than 300,000 Yezidis to seek refuge in the autonomous Kurdish region in Northern Iraq in 2014. After resettling in the Kurdistan region, Yezidis found themselves trapped in a web of non-governmental and governmental humanitarian organizations that mushroomed after the emergence of ISIS and had to compete with a larger Muslim displaced community from Iraq and Syria for humanitarian assistance. At the outset of their displacement, Yezidis were settled in established refugee camps along with Muslim refugees. However, the contentious relationship between Yezidis and Muslim groups, which was rooted in the traumatic memories from the ISIS-inflicted violence and the Yezidis’ fear of persecution by other extremist groups, resulted in a rearrangement of the camps through resettling Yezidis in different camps or dividing the camps with physical barriers. Reifying religious differences across displaced populations has complicated humanitarian aid distribution, since the principle of “religious neutrality” is an explicit premise of modern humanitarianism. Based on ethnographic research among internally displaced Yezidis residing within and outside of a refugee camp in the Kurdish region of Iraq, this paper uses “humanitarianism” as a lens to unpack the implications of humanitarian governmentality on interethnic relations, belonging, and citizenship; namely how does contemporary humanitarian intervention, which presupposes a secular framework, interpret religious difference across displaced population? In what ways does humanitarian intervention manage the articulation of difference within the humanitarian space? And how do internally displaced Yezidis contest or concede to humanitarian sensibilities? Focusing on neoliberal management policies of the refugee camp, surveillance and policing of the camp population and humanitarian space, I further address examples of how humanitarian and state policies have created a suspended temporality and feeling of estrangement and alienation among internally displaced Yezidis, which have engendered new forms of polarization and self-understanding among Yezidis vis a vis other displaced groups.