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The book focuses on the largest refugee crisis of our time: the Syrian refugee crisis. It exploits a wealth of survey and registry data on Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon to assess their poverty and vulnerability status, understand the predictors of these statuses, evaluate the performance of existing policies toward refugees, and determine the potential for alternative policies. Findings point to a complex situation. In the absence of humanitarian assistance, poverty is extremely high among refugees. Current policies including cash transfers and food vouchers are effective in reducing poverty but they remain short of providing economic inclusion and self-reliance of refugees. A shift toward economic inclusion and self-reliance would require a different humanitarian and development paradigm, one that focuses on growth policies for areas affected by refugees where the target population is constituted by refugees and hosting populations alike. This joint study by the World Bank Group and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees helps bridge the historical divide between humanitarian and development work by providing practical solutions for assisting refugees in the short, medium and long-term and to prevent the irreversible loss of social and human capital typically associated with prolonged refugee crises.

Nearly half of the world's eight million Palestinians are registered refugees, having faced partition and exile. Landscape of Hope and Despair examines this refugee experience in Lebanon through the medium of spatial practices and identity, set against the backdrop of prolonged violence. Julie Peteet explores how Palestinians have dealt with their experience as refugees by focusing attention on how a distinctive Palestinian identity has emerged from and been informed by fifty years of refugee history. Concentrating ethnographic scrutiny on a site-specific experience allows the author to shed light on the mutually constitutive character of place and cultural identification.Palestinian refugee camps are contradictory places: sites of grim despair but also of hope and creativity. Within these cramped spaces, refugees have crafted new worlds of meaning and visions of the possible in politics. In the process, their historical predicament was a point of departure for social action and thus became radically transformed. Beginning with the calamity of 1948, Landscape of Hope and Despair traces the dialectic of place and cultural identification through the initial despair of the 1950s and early 1960s to the tumultuous days of the resistance and the violence of the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Most significantly, this study invokes space, place, and identity to construct an alternative to the received national narratives of Palestinian society and history.The moving stories told here form a larger picture of these refugees as a people struggling to recreate their sense of place and identity and add meaning to their surroundings through the use of culture and memory.

Some sixty-five years after 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, the popular conception of Palestinian refugees still emphasizes their fierce commitment to exercising their \"right of return.\" Exile has come to seem a kind of historical amber, preserving refugees in a way of life that ended abruptly with \"the catastrophe\" of 1948 and their camps—inhabited now for four generations—as mere zones of waiting. While reducing refugees to symbols of steadfast single-mindedness has been politically expedient to both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict it comes at a tremendous cost for refugees themselves, overlooking their individual memories and aspirations and obscuring their collective culture in exile. Refugees of the Revolution is an evocative and provocative examination of everyday life in Shatila, a refugee camp in Beirut. Challenging common assumptions about Palestinian identity and nationalist politics, Diana Allan provides an immersive account of camp experience, of communal and economic life as well as inner lives, tracking how residents relate across generations, cope with poverty and marginalization, and plan––pragmatically and speculatively—for the future. She gives unprecedented attention to credit associations, debt relations, electricity bartering, emigration networks, and NGO provisions, arguing that a distinct Palestinian identity is being forged in the crucible of local pressures. What would it mean for the generations born in exile to return to a place they never left? Allan addresses this question by rethinking the relationship between home and homeland. In so doing, she reveals how refugees are themselves pushing back against identities rooted in a purely nationalist discourse. This groundbreaking book offers a richly nuanced account of Palestinian exile, and presents new possibilities for the future of the community.

Refugee camps are cast as spaces of exception where the body of the refugee is reduced to bare life. Camps exist at the intersections of multiple layers of governance and legality and remain in a liminal state for generations. The focus on them as spaces of humanitarian intervention often renders them voiceless. Yet, refugees have agency—as is evident through a study of their built environments. The development of refugee camps shows the ways in which identity, politics and construction are intertwined.The process of squatting, largely seen as a technique of the urban poor to address their housing needs, can also be recast in the camps. Here, squatting not only produces shelter but is also an act of rebellion. This article will interrogate the Palestinian refugee camps of Beirut to show how squatting in camps is an attempt at constructing a nationalist identity through an act of insurgent nationalism.

The year 1948 marks the beginning of al-ghurba (exile or diaspora) and al-nakba (disaster or calamity), words intensely resonant in the Palestinian lexicon. After this decisive date, one can affix “pre-” or “post-” as markers of an apocalyptic moment. In this cultural and political orbit, a new spatial world took shape. Violently crafted and maintained borders that locked Palestinians in and kept them out became features of quotidian life. In 1948, through a combination of expulsion and flight, around 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in neighboring Arab countries. About 100,000 Palestinians remained in their homeland. The core issue, however, is not conditions of departure but denial of an internationally recognized right of return, as elaborated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.

The socially engrained notion that motherhood is essential to womanhood is strongly portrayed in how states view women's political participation through their reproductive capacities. In Lebanon, the state's political agenda influences laws and policies that restrict or encourage women's procreation, depending on their nationality, sect, marital, and legal status. Since 1943, Lebanon's system of proportionally allocating parliamentary seats to sectarian political parties, based on their population size, has spurred fears of demographic changes across sects. This fear is also referenced by politicians as the reason why Lebanese women are legally denied their rights of passing citizenship on to their children and non-Lebanese spouses. With Lebanon holding the highest refugee population per capita in the world, the fear of disturbing the \"sectarian balance\" directly collides with the reproductive autonomy of both Syrian and Palestinian refugee women. Migrant women living in Lebanon are also restricted to playing out their role as workers and therefore have their sexual and reproductive health and rights denied. Another fear of the state is that of changing moral values, whereby motherhood and parenthood in single women, queer, transgender, and intersex persons are perceived as deviant and a threat to traditional values. This review aims to display how, through fear - of changing moral values and demographic shifts - the Lebanese state practices reproductive oppression on part of the population, while neglecting them and exacerbating their difficult living conditions.

More than four million Palestinian refugees live in protracted exile across the Middle East. Taking a regional approach to Palestinian refugee exile and alienation across the Levant, this book proposes a new understanding of the spatial and political dimensions of refugee camps across the Middle East. Combining critical scholarship with ethnographic insight, the essays uncover host states’ marginalisation of stateless refugees and shed light on new terminology on refugees, migration and diaspora studies. The impact on the refugee community is detailed in novel studies of refugee identity, memory and practice and new legal approaches to compensation and \"right of return\". The book opens a critical debate on key concepts and proposes a new understanding of the spatial and political dimensions of refugee camps, better understood as laboratories of Palestinian society and \"state-in-making\". This strong collection of original essays is an essential resource for scholars and students in refugee studies, forced migration, disaster studies, legal anthropology, urban studies, international law and Middle East history. Are Knudsen is a Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen, Norway. He has published on Islamism among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, political Islam in Palestine and political violence in post-civil war Lebanon, and he is currently involved in research on conflict and co-existence in post-civil war Lebanon, Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and the democratic turn within Hamas. Sari Hanafi is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon. He has written extensively on economic sociology and network analysis of the Palestinian diaspora, relationships between diaspora and centre, political sociology and sociology of migration (mainly about the Palestinian refugees) and sociology of the new actors in international relations (non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international NGOs). Introduction Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi Part I: Space, Governance and Locality 1. Cartographic Violence, Displacement and Refugee Camps: Palestine and Iraq Julie Peteet 2. Governing the Palestinian Refugees Camps in Lebanon and Syria: The Cases of Nahr El-Bared and Yarmouk Camps Sari Hanafi 3. Palestinian Camp Refugee Identifications: A New Look at the “Local” and the “National” Rosemary Sayigh Part II: Urbanisation, Place and Politics 4. Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon: Migration, Mobility and the Urbanization Process Mohamed Kamel Dorei 5. Refugees Plan the Future of Al Fawwar: Piloting Strategic Camp Improvement in Palestine Refugee Camps Philipp Misselwitz 6. Nahr el-Bared: The Political Fall-out of a Refugee Disaster Are Knudsen and Jaber Suleiman Part III: Civic Rights, Legal Status and Reparations 7. Passport for what Price? Statelessness Among Palestinian Refugees Abbas Shiblak 8. Dynamics of Humanitarian Aid, Local and Regional Politics: The Palestine Refugees as a Case-Study Jalal Al Husseini and Riccardo Bocco 9. Reparations to Palestinian Refugees: The Politics of Saying ‘Sorry’ Shahira Samy Part IV: Memory, Agency and Incorporation 10. ‘The One Still Surviving and Viable Institution’ Sylvain Perdigon 11. ‘A World of Movement’: Memory and Reality for Palestinian Women in the Camps of Lebanon Maria Holt 12. Politics, Patronage and Popular Committees in the Shatila Refugee Camp, Lebanon Manal Kortam

Events in Lebanon are primarily interpreted through the lens of sectarianism and religious difference. Yet if we look at Lebanon through the lens of politics of space, significant similarities emerge among populations that are otherwise considered different. For instance, communities in Lebanon's geographical borderlands are home to disproportionate numbers of martyrs. As a result of a policy of neglect by elites at Lebanon's political centre, communities of Sunnis and Shiites in North and South Lebanon similarly identify as disenfranchised and oppressed (al-mahrumīn or al-mazlumīn). My research is supported by interviews with families of martyrs of recent violence, analysis of newspaper articles, as well as a reading of roadside martyr images in North and South Lebanon.