Refugee Hosts announces the publication of a major report, ‘Development Approaches to Forced Displacement from Syria in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq’ (by Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Greatrick, Carpi, and Shaiah Istanbouli).

Written by Refugee Hosts

On the 3 November 2022 the UCL-Migration Research Unit at the Department of Geography published a major report on ‘Development Approaches to Forced Displacement from Syria in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.’ The report, led by Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, presents the findings of a state-of-the-art literature review of over 260 sources published between 2016–2021, synthesising existing knowledge on 3 factors that are important for refugees from Syria based in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

Access the Summary Report below:

A set of 3 Policy Briefs has also been published to disseminate policy-relevant findings and recommendations arising in the full report (available here), including two thematically focused Briefs on Onward Migration (available here) and on Social Cohesion (available here).

The report was commissioned by the Policy and Operations Evaluation department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands (IOB) and is organized into 3 parts:

Part I of the report sets out the evidence relating to onwards migration. Literature relating to the difference between aspirations and capabilities to facilitate onward migration is examined and policy implications are outlined. The literature stresses that aspirations and the capability to act varies according to the characteristics of specific individuals and groups (e.g. gender, age, class, family composition, religion, ethnicity). In turn, literature on drivers of onward migration indicates context-specific factors and highlights why particular groups of people may seek onward migration from a given host country, while the majority of refugees remain in their country of first asylum. The influence of foreign assistance on migration decisions is also assessed. This evidence suggests that coordinated foreign assistance that addresses livelihoods, rights and protections have the potential to enable refugees to build sustainable lives in host countries. However, further research is necessary to fully understand the impact of foreign assistance on onward migration.

Part II synthesises the literature on approaches adopted to enhance social cohesion between refugees and members of host communities in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. Promoting social cohesion is of increasing interest to diverse stakeholders, including policy-makers, donors, and humanitarian and development agencies. However, in spite of its popularity amongst policy-makers and practitioners, social cohesion is a contested concept which remains largely undefined and is difficult to measure. Social cohesion literature, policies and programmes have overwhelmingly focused on documenting host perceptions of refugees and host assumptions relating to the ‘impact’ of refugees on hosts. However, the assumption that the presence of refugees leads to negative impacts on members of host communities is not consistent with the evidence. Evidence is synthesized relating to key legal, policy and social factors which support or prevent refugees’ local participation. Part II also summarizes multiscalar factors which variously undermine or potentially enhance the nature and quality of refugee-host interactions and different forms of local participation, noting that these are influenced by ongoing and new forms of discrimination, violence and exclusion.

Part III assesses the evidence relating to refugees’ participation in local economies, and how refugees’ presence is related to changes in national, municipal, and local level economies. While it is often assumed – by donors, policy-makers, practitioners and host community members alike – that the arrival of refugees has a negative impact on local and national economies, the evidence highlights that these assumptions are often empirically unfounded, and that greater attention must be paid to long-standing structural dynamics and the broader impacts of conflicts and humanitarian responses to displacement. This part of the report examines the evidence relating to refugees’ access to formal and informal modes of employment (as entrepreneurs and employees alike), and the diverse factors which may promote or impede safe and dignified modes of economic participation. Noting the challenge of causally linking ‘the arrival and presence of refugees’ to changes in national-, municipal- and city/town-level economies, growth and employment, the final part of the report synthesises evidence on the nature and impacts of policies and programmes developed and implemented since 2016 in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, including a discussion of how changes in labour laws, processes to obtain and renew residency and work permits, the establishment of special economic zones, financial crises and the impact of COVID-19, relate to refugees’ economic participation in local communities.

Featured image: (c) E. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

Review forum: War and the City: Urban Geopolitics in Lebanon, Sara Fregonese, I.B.Tauris (2019)

I really enjoyed taking part in Sara Fregonese’s book forum!

It was an intriguing discussion I had with the author, Sara Fregonese, and with Aya Nassar, Mona Fawaz, and Alan Ingram – all focusing on war, urbanism, and/or Lebanon – during the Royal Geographic Society Conference in August 2021.

The review has been edited by Olivia Mason, and it is now accessible in the Journal of Political Geography:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629822001913?dgcid=coauthor.

I republish my contribution here below, to make it open access 🙂

4. Epistemological reflections on space, violence, and relational identities

4.1. Estella Carpi

War and the City by Sara Fregonese is a powerful piece of work which demonstrates that the built environment can act as a powerful geopolitical agent and that understanding urban space is key to understanding people during conflict. Fregonese frames War and the City as a historical account, but it is more than just a history. Urban warfare is examined through a geographic and an urban lens without reducing the narrative approach to geography or urban studies. Together, the chapters contribute to the creation of an all-around interdisciplinary work. This book effectively illustrates the urban nature of the civil war and inspires reflections on other conflicts and crises characterising Beirut’s history, which may also be considered ‘urbicides’. War and the City shows that making war per se can dangerously come to represent a ‘normal’ dimension of that urbanity.

Fregonese not only effectively describes people’s complex relationships with the geographies of war and everyday violence in Beirut: through this book, we also learn how those become translated into spatialities of enmity, and, therefore, potentially constructive coexistence. In this vein, the book equips its readers with concepts and terminologies which can be employed to understand other war-marked urbanities in Lebanon’s history. One example is the northern city of Tripoli, where in the neighborhoods of Jabal Mohsen and Bab at-Tabbeneh antithetical polities vis-a-vis the Asad regime’s politics and Syrian politics in Lebanon are emblematically divided by Syria Street.

In the broader body of literature on Lebanon, war, and urbanity, Fregonese’s work proposes sovereignty and power in Lebanon as a hybrid assemblage which shapes the urban battleground; while, in the academic arena, the state has always been the privileged lens through which to understand welfare, crisis, and human choice. This conceptual framework, which Fregonese has developed over time since 2012, has provided more nuanced interpretations of power in action in the Lebanese context.

The book develops themes which lie at the intersection of the macro and micro aspects of urban warfare, going beyond the current theoretical deadlocks. Fregonese demonstrates how sectarian power and identity are the products of grounded mechanisms that happen through space. Thus, echoing important previous views on sectarianism in Lebanon (e.g. Makdisi, 2000), the warring parties are neither fixed categories of people nor predefined ways of thinking and behaving. If sectarian power can shape space and practices of war, the politics of urban warfare is not merely about facts and relations that shape space: those relations are also enabled or prevented by space. In other words, sectarian power shapes the territory, but it is not innately inscribed into it. However, sectarianism as an inherent characteristic of the region is a longstanding belief of many Middle East commentators who have thus actively created a Lebanese exceptionalism in identity-dictated conflict.

Methodologically, Fregonese openly shares the way in which she re-orients the interview process, an important stage which is often silenced, even in ethnographies. For example, she states that she often scaled down her interlocutors from the regional to urban level (p. 10). This politics of writing ensures greater empirical honesty. Epistemologically, by proposing the tragedy, chaos, and fate scripts, War and the City offers a systematic analysis of two key representational tropes, which I identify as ‘impossibility’ and ‘determinism’. In this section of the book, we are reminded of the fundamental role of representations: not only media representations, but also the representations produced by official diplomatic discourse, which is often underestimated in the accounts focused on the Lebanese civil war. Against the misleading role of representations, Fregonese demonstrates that urban spatiality was reorganised to serve war, rather than being captured by expressions such as ‘incomprehensible chaos’. Indeed, more than once Fregonese talks of ‘militia knowledge and practices,’ which do not develop independently from geopolitical dynamics. Scholars rarely employ such terminology when referring to militias in Lebanon or in general. Thus, Fregonese invites us to the feasibility of understanding war by detailing space. The book challenges several accounts which portray Lebanon as an impossible-to-map place, and which propose that the civil war is a conflict that we simply cannot comprehend. Indeed, she challenges the ‘descent into barbarism’ talk (p. 69). The city in wartime is configured as a set of identity-defined enclaves since the spatial basis for heterogeneity was exactly the target of sectarian violence. The latter, at the same time, is also discussed as both causing and being caused by class inequality. In War and the City, in fact, sectarianism is the most discussed form of violence, yet only one among many. For example, looting, targeting the built environment for reasons beyond military necessity, economic inequality, and street symbols such as posters, which embody the “social and material fabric of wartime Beirut” (p. 111), all interact with intersectional forms of sectarian power.

The book marks two epistemological turning points in the study of Beirut and urban warfare. The first point is that while focusing on war, Fregonese puts forward the possibility of urban space as a factor in pacification. Indeed, few are the studies which focus on the so-called capacities for peace while too many focus on tensions in human relations and the need for social cohesion. The urban space contributes considerably to reshaping such relations. Indeed, Fregonese points out that hardly any attention has been paid to the relations between space and peace (Macaspac & Moore, 2022; Megoran & Dalby, 2018). However, I wonder whether it would be even more generative to see war and urban research progressing beyond the categorisation of ordinary atmospheres and political orders. This epistemological move would encourage scholars to think beyond the war/peace repertories. In my view, inhabitation, coexistence, and even wellbeing may offer emancipatory conceptual tools to finally move beyond the interpretative grids and the inner workings of official politics.

War and the City is a powerful reminder to those who focus on human relations that we cannot only speak of ‘war-affected spaces’, which is common in narratives of crisis forgetful of the agency of space itself, but also of ‘spaces making war’. In fact, human relations alone cannot make either peace or war: such conditions can only be achieved through the built environment. As a social anthropologist and a recurrent Beirut dweller, I would love to read more about the intimacies produced by the geopolitical frames discussed in the book. However, that would probably have fallen beyond its scope, which instead focusses on the balance between, on the one hand, grand narratives of representation and power and, on the other, the intimate. A connection is built between the grand narratives around the Lebanese civil war, which are called ‘regional conjunctures’ (p. 10), and the relational and ideological lifeworlds of the people. In summary, War and the City reminds those who are interested in social relations that to really understand the latter, we first need to understand the city. Thus, we must take a step back and register the spatiality of such relations and note the effects of spatial transformation. The second turning point is the suggestion that sectarian order, and more broadly societal divides, do not exist regardless of social processes. This invites us to question demographic homogeneity as a way to territorial peace.

By way of conclusion, I believe War and the City should be judged not only by how dexterously Fregonese organises and answers her own questions, but also by the questions she leaves on the table. For instance, how do cities in Lebanon (and elsewhere) manage to challenge, transform, and interrogate such geographies of war? Where did the spatiality of urban warfare challenge war dynamics? Many of the questions generated by Fregonese’s research do not have a once-and-for-all answer precisely because they are subject to enquiry within continuous debates on the layered nature of urban warfare and the Lebanese civil war.

Lessons from the Middle East for Ukraine’s Refugee Crisis (April, 2022)

https://english.alaraby.co.uk/analysis/lessons-ukraines-refugee-crisis-middle-east

In-depth

6 min read

Estella Carpi

28 April, 2022

In-depth: As millions of Ukrainian refugees flee to host cities in neighbouring Poland, reassessing the experience of Syrian refugees in the Middle East can provide vital lessons for sustainable resettlement.

In the two months since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, more than two million refugees – mostly women and children – have crossed over the border from Ukraine into Poland.

These people have sought out shelter in border towns, including Przemysl and Medyka, as well as in the main Polish cities, namely Warsaw and Krakow.

When large-scale military attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure occur, they inevitably result in a rapid exodus of people fleeing into cities and towns in neighbouring countries. In response, the general public promptly praises these refuge destinations for their unconditional hospitality.  

But after absorbing millions of Ukrainian refugees, Polish mayors are now warning that their cities are over capacity as municipal infrastructures are under strain and any sort of shelters, such as gyms, theatres, and local houses, have become overcrowded.

As a result, the media narrative turns to one of ‘saturation’ and of host cities “reaching capacity”.  

Here, lessons can be learned by drawing on the case of Middle Eastern cities that received large numbers of Syrian refugees in the wake of Syria’s civil war. There are two important lessons to embrace: firstly, how the ‘hospitality’ and ‘reaching capacity’ discourse may prevent us from understanding the capacity of cities from a historical perspective.

“Lessons can be learned by drawing on the case of Middle Eastern cities that received large numbers of Syrian refugees in the wake of Syria’s civil war”

Second, the tensions in collaboration between urban and humanitarian actors in crisis-affected contexts often cause resource wastage and political power deadlocks, and cooperation between the two still needs to be strengthened.

The infrastructural pressure that cities experience when receiving new residents cannot be denied. However, there is a problem with the idea of cities reaching capacity: it assumes that cities were doing just fine before refugees arrived.

In the Middle Eastern context, which has a long history of people fleeing conflict – from Palestine, Iraq and Syria, among others – the arrival of refugees is blamed for weakening local infrastructures and depleting resources while, in reality, the pressure from an influx of refugees simply exposes the current status of a city’s capacities and the type of governance in place. 

In reality, especially given the dynamism of the job market, cities are constantly evolving to accommodate people, among whom some are refugees.

If we consider that there are an estimated  84 million displaced people across the world, the fact that refugees tend to permanently relocate to cities is a part of normality; yet, the discourse of hospitality and capacity implicitly keeps refugees as permanent ‘guests‘. 

For example, Turkey has received nearly 3.8 million Syrian refugees since the conflict started in 2011. Due to such large numbers, the country’s refugee hospitality was largely praised, like in today’s Poland.

However, academic studies have shown how the hospitality of the recent past can give way to today’s legitimation of refugee return programmes, which are borderline deportations.

Such ‘invitations’ to return to Syria are justified by the discourse that perpetually keeps Syrians in Turkey as ‘old guests’ after more than a 10-year long displacement.

In this vein, the ‘reaching capacity’ mantra makes such host cities look like they were all functioning perfectly before refugees arrived, and that the return of refugees to their country of origin is the only requirement to rescue urban infrastructure, local labour, and resources.  

Ukrainian refugees rest in a temporary shelter at a gym of a primary school in Przemysl, near the Polish-Ukrainian border on 12 March 2022. [Getty]

With many media outlets depicting war refugees from Ukraine as hordes of people who literally ”overwhelm” cities, crisis functions as a litmus test for the city’s normal capacities as well as its malfunctions.

The hospitality rhetoric presently used to comment on Polish cities echoes the wider public’s praise of local hospitality in reference to Syrian refugees, but the responsibility of refugee reception, sufficient welfare provision, and infrastructural support in the countries receiving refugees from Syria was not equally shared by European countries. 

Today we are provided with an image of well-received Ukrainians, while tomorrow they will be said to endanger local labour and resources in their host countries. By doing so, such accounts overshadow the (sometimes longstanding) presence of Ukrainian labourers and their past contribution to national welfare in such countries.

Future social relationships between new and old refugees and migrants and locals never come out of the blue, but rather they are built on long-standing dynamics and socioeconomic factors. The media representation of a massive exodus of Ukrainians into other countries in Europe can thus engender the misconception that there is no social and economic continuity to learn from. 

“Academic studies have shown how the hospitality of the recent past can give way to today’s legitimation of refugee return programmes, which are borderline deportations”

Over the last two decades, with the increasing number of refugees in urban areas, international humanitarian actors, who generally come to provide assistance in the spaces where most refugees reside, have largely been working in cities. This means they have to learn how to work in closer cooperation with urban actors (e.g. mayors, schools, and hospitals) and other local aid providers in host cities.

Moreover, foreign interventions typically bringing in resources and support can alter the urban fabric as well as local relationships. Therefore, international humanitarian actors also need to learn about the social relationships at play in the host city, including its infrastructure or pre-existing services and systems, urban governance, and welfare, as well as informal and community-based networks.

As transient actors, they also need to build their own relationships with the population at large and gain local trust. 

Despite the increasing importance of the urban-humanitarian nexus, research on Syrian displacement suggests that humanitarian agencies often arrive too late to recognise local authorities and integrate urban infrastructure into humanitarian programming when intervening in host cities.

In other words, rather than burdening responsibilities on ‘local knowledge’, it is fundamental that international humanitarian actors enlarge their own knowledge of local urban life. This enables them to understand what form of support may be more viable in the long run. 

In the countries that received large numbers of refugees from Syria, the humanitarian system initially acted with a traditional, short-term, and urgent action-oriented focus. Indeed, foreign assistance providers who came to assist Syrian refugees in Lebanon tended to neglect municipal and regional governors, as well as informal providers, who were all able to face emergency crises to different extents.

In the Lebanese context, aid agencies resorted to urban authorities to guarantee their own local legitimacy and to build quicker access to people in need, rather than developing a fine-grained knowledge of the local context.

“The management of Syrian displacement in Middle Eastern cities is a key example of the missed opportunities between urban actors, local service providers, and foreign humanitarian actors”

A deeper mutual understanding between urban and humanitarian actors and their respective approaches to crises have often proved to be lacking, thus losing the opportunity to complement each other.

In countries like Jordan and Lebanon, top-down humanitarian efforts, such as training urban actors and merely asking for their formal approval to operate, have been mistaken for substantive engagement.

As a result, there has been a delay in the meaningful and consistent collaboration between urban and humanitarian systems. More meaningful and grassroots knowledge exchanges could eventually engender more synergy in aid provision. 

In this respect, the management of Syrian displacement in Middle Eastern cities is a key example of the missed opportunities between urban actors, local service providers, and foreign humanitarian actors.

What has happened in the countries neighbouring Syria over the last decade therefore provides many lessons for Polish cities today.

Learning from the survival and reception mechanisms in place at a local and national level is key to the sustainability of host cities in the future.

Estella Carpi is a lecturer of Humanitarian Studies in the Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London. 

Follow her on Twitter: @estycrp

Slavery, lived realities, and the decolonisation of forced migration histories: An interview with Dr Portia Owusu

My conversation with Dr Portia Owusu can now be accessed in Migration Studies.

In the framework of the ‘Southern Responses to Displacement’ project (based at UCL), I’ve interviewed Dr Portia Owusu from Texas A&M to discuss slavery in Black-American literature, the (abused) decolonial discourse in the academic Anglosphere, and “non-normative” forms of forced migration. Today our conversation is available in open access in the Migration Studies journal.

To access the full article:

https://academic.oup.com/migration/advance-article/doi/10.1093/migration/mnac009/6543576?guestAccessKey=43c9c221-76d6-4603-b983-69687d35d67d

Abstract

Academic institutions in the global North have historically claimed leadership in the production of high-quality scholarship. As such, it is their work that often informs pedagogical materials in secondary and tertiary education worldwide. This dominance has serious cultural impacts. At the very least, it positions Western academics as ‘custodians’ of knowledge with the ability to influence what is taught and how it is taught. Within this framework, learning is politicised, and the teaching of subjects such as history, becomes a space of contention. These issues touch on the aim of the Southern Responses to Displacement from Syria (SRD) project, financed by the European Research Council (grant agreement no. 715582) and led by Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh in the Migration Research Unit at University College London. In particular, it aligns with the project’s goal to explore a multi-directional approach to knowledge production and to centralise the experience of displaced peoples and actors from the global South in scholarship. The Research Associate Dr Estella Carpi discussed slavery as an ignored form of forced migration with Dr Portia Owusu, Assistant Professor of English Literature at Texas A&M. The SRD team’s conversation with Dr Owusu, indeed, endeavours to rethink mainstream forced migration studies and rather engages with neglected—and, at times, silenced—epistemologies of forced migration.

The epistemic politics of ‘northern-Led’ humanitarianism: The case of Lebanon

My new article in Area discusses “professional authority” in the humanitarian field, and proposes a peculiar politics of knowledge in the case of Lebanon.

Abstract

This article examines the epistemic politics of hegemonic humanitarianism by building on agnotology theories. I unpack the idea of ‘professional authority’ with the purpose of showing how the Global North’s humanitarian agencies thrive on both a technocratic and an unpredictability approach. This epistemic politics is used to absolve humanitarianism of its failures and blame ‘Southern’ politics and technical deficiencies in the Global South.

For the full article (Open Access):

https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/area.12770

ANIMAL DISPLACEMENT FROM SYRIA: A STORY YET TO BE WRITTEN

Image by Bernard Gagnon (via Wikimedia Commons)

Animal Displacement from Syria: A Story Yet to be Written

During the Syrian war, which has now raged for a decade, the attention of scholars, media commentators and activists has primarily focused on human displacement. More than 60% of the world’s refugee population – over 30% of which are victims of internal displacement – reside in the Middle East, mainly due to large-scale armed conflicts. The Syrian war, which began following a popular uprising in spring 2011, has led to half a million deaths (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), nearly seven million displaced people – 70% of whom still live in the Middle East – and 14 million in need of assistance.

Due to the tragically large scale of human loss, the destiny of fauna during the war in Syria has been under-explored, and any emphasis on it has often been frowned upon in informal conversations I had throughout the years with international researchers and opinion-makers working on this geographic area. With this post, I encourage readers to reason beyond inter-species hierarchies, which instil unproductive ways of thinking, such as that a species per se is more or less important than another. The haste to set up such existential hierarchies between animals and human beings derives from a human-focused understanding of animals that share our natural habitat as well as our built environment. In this sense, animal care becomes either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in response to our personal habits, our everyday culture and, importantly, our social and economic capacity of care. Indeed, in Western societies, the care for animals – especially pets – has widely been associated with the lifestyle of global middle and upper classes, who are able and keen to feed, care and cater for animals. So to speak, the “bourgeoisization” of animal care – where the latter is frequently viewed as the care provided by wealthy people equipped with time and resources that enable them to think beyond human survival – and the critical reactions to it have ended up influencing our external gaze on human conflict and migration and have dangerously legitimated the exclusivity of human care. To look at the entirety of this multi-species ecosystem of war and forced migration reveals a complexity that goes unheeded as a result of an anthropocentric gaze.

I encourage readers to reason beyond inter-species hierarchies, which instil unproductive ways of thinking.

Animals affected by war have mainly been discussed in terms of human survival and sustainability, but with pointed exceptions. For example, in 2012, Reuters news agency dedicated a photo galleryto animals, such as turtles and cats, that were trying to survive bombings, seeking food in almost depopulated areas and, sometimes, receiving it from armed groups who lived, occupied or briefly stopped in these neighbourhoods destroyed by war. To expand on such snippet views, I focus on the animals’ fate during the Syrian conflict and the discursive and logistic use of animal-fare in war narratives.

The omission of animals’ fate in today’s journalism and academic scholarship on armed conflict has led to ignoring a fundamental element in the lives of refugees who had to leave Syria: the incurable existential harm caused by the need to abandon their pets or, for those who had a rural lifestyle, their livestock, as it has been noted in forced migration history. In many cases that I have witnessed throughout years of research on Syrian displacement in the Levantine region, the abandonment of their animals – even a cow kept for milk or poultry kept for eggs – has generated pain and emotional disorientation in the lives of the displaced. Such abandonments are experienced as an inevitable sacrifice when leaving the war-torn country and building a life elsewhere. Indeed, most of the Syrian refugees I have met in northern Lebanon’s villages – and who often work in Lebanese farms – have a rural background. They often remember the cattle they owned and how they looked after them when they lived in Syria. Many of them say they regularly ask their neighbours about the fate of these abandoned animals; most of those who were not resold died of dehydration, starvation and disease.

The abandonment of their animals has generated pain and emotional disorientation in the lives of the displaced.

Despite this, animal displacement has been approached from the angle of the survival and proliferation of humans and the importance of exhuming Syrian agricultural production, which used to rely on the export of livestock before the conflict, making up 15% of the internal agricultural workforce. But what was the fate of these animals? Domestic, pack and farm animals alike were often killed as spoils of war, smuggled into the neighbouring countries, or were stolen, displaced, bombed or sold. As a consequence, the rate of private ownership of livestock within the country has dropped to 60% since the beginning of the conflict. Many breeders have had to abandon their profession and lifestyle and leave the country or migrate to other locations in Syria in search of new livelihoods.

Animals and animal violence have been widely discussed as a soft power strategy for shaping relations between political actors, and as a tool for gaining credibility in local and international communities while morally discrediting political enemies. For example, there is some Arabic media material illustrating this trend, with videos showing the leaders of the shabbiha – thugs loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – throw a ‘thoroughbred’ Arab horse to their lions for food, as written in the Tweet of a Syrian political opponent included in an al-Quds article. Many of these videos, accessible on YouTube, show the killing of livestock by armed groups or the theft of livestock in some Syrian regions. Some accusations are not expressly aimed at either government militias or opposition groups, but they are used as such for political propaganda. Beyond the authenticity of this type of media material, which is continually the subject of journalistic debate, the treatment of animals plays a fundamental role in shaping the political rhetoric of each of the parties in conflict. The same happens with the recent government decree, No. 221, through which Bashar al-Assad assigns the Ministry of Education to the directorship of the ‘Animal Protection in Syria’ project.

Animals and animal violence have been widely discussed as a soft power strategy for shaping relations between political actors, and as a tool for gaining credibility while morally discrediting political enemies.

As I wrote with Samira Usman in the past, the humanitarian mantra of ‘human dignity’, according to which every human life must be respected and protected, has indeed shed light on the importance of ensuring legal and social protection for refugees. However slow this has been to materialise on a global level, it has emphasized the importance for refugees to have their dignity recognized. In this vein, the rhetoric of human dignity, over-used by the international community as well as by activist groups, ended up ignoring the historical fact that war causes dramatic consequences to other species too. It is emblematic that only a small number of humanitarian projects (for example, Animals Lebanon) approach human beings as part of an entire ecosystem that is being destroyed by conflict, therefore actively subverting anthropocentrism.

Animals have also long been an object of debates among Muslim communities worldwide. There is a longstanding belief that Muslim-majority societies have little respect for animals, which has led scholars to speak of Islamic environmentalism only in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, namely, in the so-called ‘Global North’. In this regard, some fatawa (plural of fatwa) in the Sunni Muslim world have warned Syrian internally displaced people and refugees not to kill or eat cats, donkeys and dogs, even in situations of famine and hardship. Such fatawa generate extensive internet discussions focussing on the precepts of Islam and serve as a spiritual, legal and social consultation space for believers. Some religious authorities have denounced the act of killing and eating animals without a valid reason, while others have allowed the act of eating them provided that these animals have already been killed by bombing. Yet, this has at times become a practice in today’s Syria, owing to the famines and hardships that the conflict itself has caused. At the same time, the care and provision of food to animals, such as cats, is indeed praised and appreciated by God. The topic remains an element of animated discussion within the Muslim world.

Only a small number of humanitarian projects approach human beings as part of an entire ecosystem that is being destroyed by conflict.

The animals that have accompanied human beings during their flight and that have shared their conditions of forced migration are often unspoken; for instance, many refugees crossing the Syrian–Lebanese border brought along sheep, goats and cows, which had not been vaccinated due to their sudden departure to flee war, violence and the resulting poverty. Since 2011, some Syrian refugees in Wadi Khaled (north-east Lebanon) have told me that they crossed the al-Kabeer river connecting the two borders on the back of a donkey. They later had to abandon the animal because it fell ill and they did not have the means to maintain it, having paid a large amount of money to smugglers.

However, the ethical discourse underlying human displacement has sometimes been at odds with environmental and animal ethics. The areas where refugees are resettling are taken from the local fauna; human settlement and methods of mass-producing food often lead to deforestation and erosion of the surrounding habitat. As in such paradoxical situations, only either of the two vulnerable conditions can be protected within the ecosystem, the defenders of environmental and animal rights find themselves in tension with those who advocate for human rights. This was the case of one million Rwandan Hutu refugees, who, in 1994, relocated to the Virunga National Park of neighbouring Congo, where ten gorillas were killed after the territory was plundered. Similar to what is happening in Syria, in the case of Virunga National Park, the refugees who went to live in the protected area, considered a heritage site of humanity, were accused of committing violence against the territory. It is instead the refugees’ presence that becomes a favourable source of chaos, and some people take advantage of such chaos to carry out raids, using the refugees’ presence for dissimulation.*

The defenders of environmental and animal rights find themselves in tension with those who advocate for human rights.

In the context of the Syrian conflict, animal displacement is still a history yet to be written. I consider it important to highlight not only the anthropocentric and violent use of animals in conditions of forced migration but also the emotional bond that some refugees had with the animals they had to abandon, due to protracted political, economic, social and political instability. Remembering animals is often part of the stories told by refugees themselves; in some cases, animals explain refugee and internally displaced people’s attachment to their home back in Syria. In order to fully understand the effects of conflict, violence and deprivation on mobile ecosystems, it is indeed inevitable to unravel these important inter-species relationships.

Crisis discourse traditionally omits the relational history with animals in forced migration narratives, while human beings – both refugees and political actors, as mentioned above – often remember, thrive on, or instrumentalize animals in the real world. As long as the biodiversity of crisis goes unheeded, our knowledge of the ‘politics of living’ in displacement also remains maimed. In this sense, disrupting anthropocentric understandings of human-made crisis is not only an ethical issue, as animal-rights activists remind us through campaigns, but also an intellectual and epistemological one.

Remembering animals is often part of the stories told by refugees themselves.

Notes

This research has been conducted in the framework of the project “Analysing South-South Humanitarian Responses to Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey,” funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation agreement no. 715582.

*Others use the presence of refugees in these territories as an instrument for political negotiation. This is also the case for some Syrian archaeological sites; the ruins of Idlib, a cultural heritage site, have become temporary shelters for local displaced people, who could not find alternative places for protection and survival. The Antiquities Center of Idlib is in charge of this issue.

Featured image by Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The damage aid workers can do – with just their words (by Tammam Aloudat)

The damage aid workers can do – with just their words

Through its language and psychology, the aid sector has divided the world into saviours and ‘beneficiaries’

Tammam Aloudat

March 26, 2021

Try getting through this paragraph without becoming bored or confused:

“Our humanitarian field operations have focused on high-impact, cost-effective implementation of activities through local partners. We have provided the target population with platforms to empower our beneficiaries – particularly women, children, and other vulnerable groups – and provide them with sustainable and scalable solutions to build resilience and preserve dignity. Through the deployment of teams of expatriate staff to the front lines, our humanitarian operation allowed us to effectively address the needs and raise awareness, giving voice to the voiceless victims while building the capacity of local actors.”

If you work in the humanitarian sector, you could read through it without batting an eyelid. At first glance, it might sound like something (not particularly well-written) one finds in a report posted on a humanitarian or development organisation’s website. In this case, I invented it to illustrate a point.

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The problem is not just the displeasure you experience trying to wade through the syntax. It’s what lies beyond the words – what they tell us both about humanitarians and, ultimately, the current state of humanitarian aid.

The obvious disclaimer here is that this view is neither a judgement on the character of any given humanitarian worker – I am one of them – nor a cliched “call to action” about humanitarian language (though by all means, feel free to act). It is, rather, an interrogation of the way humanitarianism teaches us to think, and what lurks beneath its surface.

The mid-20th century Martinique political philosopher Frantz Fanon once wrote about the effect of language: “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation.”

Like every discipline, humanitarianism has developed its own language and imagery that reflects not only the means to communicate among its practitioners, but also its conception of the world and how it understands, and hence behaves, in it.

This language of humanitarianism is hardly static. It evolves with the changing contexts in which humanitarian action takes place, the pressures of donors and benefactors and the social and cultural norms of the societies – usually in the West – where those organisations are based and where western narratives are most important.

Despite the evolution, however, the abstractions, jargon, and acronyms so common to humanitarian-speak still aim for, and manage to achieve, several things.

First, it defines the field of action, humanitarianism, and draws its parameters, principles, and tactics; second, it justifies and moralises the act itself and asserts the legitimacy of its existence and consequences; and third, it sustains the power, worldview, and future of those who control the narrative.

Those goals are not explicit, that is to say they are not written in formal documents or articulated in strategic plans. They, however, can be discerned from the use of the language itself.

In my own attempt to resolve my long-standing discomfort with the language I was using every day, I posted a Tweet last month asking for words or expressions that we humanitarians use regularly but are inappropriate.

To my surprise, many answers came, and the objectionable words and phrases spanned beyond the obvious. The full list is too long to include here. However, some of them remain, and are difficult to excise from our daily professional lives. Others are widely agreed to be unacceptable now or because they are emerging as such influenced with a renewed debate about the asymmetries of power in the humanitarian sector.https://d-10335907221585136272.ampproject.net/2103240330001/frame.html

Those include “beneficiaries” to describe people who receive aid in emergencies, “capacity building” as a main NGO activity, “target population”, “speaking out on behalf of…”, “vulnerability” (especially in formulations like “women, children, and other vulnerable groups”), “resilience” as something that can be built in communities by external actors. It even includes some of what are considered fundamental principles, such as “neutrality” or the word “humanitarian” itself.

And yet, all of these words linger.

While it is optimistic to see the changes that are gradually happening to humanitarian language and the way this has been raised into collective awareness, the road to moving humanitarian action away from its still-dominant Eurocentric view of the world is just beginning. Writing glossaries of more appropriate terms to use in communication is one step. But what language tells us about power hierarchies is far more interesting because it gives a window to the current state of humanitarian action, as well as its possible futures.

A Palestinian walks past a ceramic sign of a USAID project in Hebron in the West Bank in 2019. Reuters

For a humanitarian to exist and to be justified, his or her opposite – a beneficiary – is necessary. As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida once wrote, a concept is implicit in its opposite, and one cannot exist without the other.

For the humanitarian – a person defined by their highest moral impulse being to help others – the beneficiary has to exist as a helpless person with little agency, who is defined not by their communal or individual attributes, but rather their benefit from the moral action of the humanitarian.

There are plenty of other problematic oppositions: developing/developed, resilient/vulnerable, donor/recipient, and international/local. None of those is neutral or free from value judgement. They are based on generalisations and stereotypes, and all of them, as they are used today, assert the existing powers and their resistance to change.

Glossaries and style guides are unlikely in themselves to ever change the culture and power hierarchies that hide behind the language. But they are still a necessary step in going forward.

Edward Said once argued that the orientalist invents an oriental that only exists in their mind

As we have seen in growing social justice and solidarity movements concerned with racial and gender-based discrimination, the change of terms by those they dehumanise or oppress is being accepted as a necessary step in allowing people to assert their own self-perception. It also sets a threshold for response, by daring everyone else to recognise the imbalance and correct it.

Moreover, just like the Palestinian scholar Edward Said once argued that the orientalist invents an oriental that only exists in their mind rather than in reality, the humanitarian who accepts the narrative of a beneficiary without a say or agency, without knowledge or will, is prone to go to the “field” and act as if they are the only one with knowledge, will, or benevolence. In doing so, they further disempowering the very people they are meant to aid.

Forty years ago, the African-American writer and civil rights activist Audre Lorde, in talking about the lack of representation of people like her in society’s wider conversations reminded us that “the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house”. We need to find a new language, a world view and the tools to create the words that talk about the poor, the sick and crisis survivors as the owners of their fate, rather than an inconvenience that has to be overcome in the grand humanitarian narrative. It will not be simple to achieve, but then, no one should expect humanitarianism to be a simple matter.

Dr Tammam Aloudat is a Syrian physician and a senior strategic adviser to MSF in Geneva

A Sociology of Knowledge on Displacement and Humanitarianism

In this post, Dr Estella Carpi identifies the main points she and Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh raise in their contribution to the recently published Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East, where they focus on the commonalities and dissimilarities across the academic literature relating to war-induced displacement and humanitarianism in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt.

If you find this post of interest, please visit our Thinking through the Global South series and the recommended reading and listening at the end of this post. 

A Sociology of Knowledge on Displacement and Humanitarianism

by Dr Estella Carpi, Research Associate, Southern Responses to Displacement Project, UCL

The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East, edited by Armando Salvatore, Kieko Obuse, and Sari Hanafi, contains my and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s contribution, a chapter on the sociology of knowledge of studies on war-induced displacement and humanitarianism in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt. Our comparative analysis of academic literature on this topic suggests that similarities and differences across the academic literature are not always motivated by specific forms of state governmentality. Importantly, in the framework of how academic knowledge production relates to political order, we show how postcolonial his­tory seems to only provide partial explanations.

Our chapter, ‘A Sociology of Knowledge on Displacement and Humanitarianism’  primarily emerges from the need to decentralize mainstream knowledge by shedding light on responses to dis­placement led by organizations, governments, informal groups, and individuals from across the Global South, including refugees themselves. It also emerges from our experience with teaching displacement and humani­tarianism in several international institutions and the responses received from different cohorts of students.

In our chapter, we depart from the Syrian “refugee crisis”, started by a popular uprising in March 2011, as it has now become a crucial watershed in international scholarly literature concerned with the Middle East. Indeed, the Syrian crisis has paved the way for a large number of studies focused on humanitarian governance, forced migrations, security and borders, migrant labour, and social integration in receiving coun­tries. In countries where the central state tends to emerge as authoritarian in the organization of society (e.g., Turkey and Egypt), such themes have been addressed differently from po­litical environments where the state has been considered absent and fragile and where political power is fragmented (e.g., Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories). For instance, some forced migrants living in states where the “catastrophization” discourse is unlikely, have not always appeared in academic texts under the label of “refugees” but have instead been categorized as “migrants” since economic and climate-related migrations are both unlikely to be classified as “forced” in the global political arena. Indeed, in Egypt and Turkey, humanitarianism is not a usual analytical framework for the explana­tion of refugee governance and refugee experience.

Our chapter shows that postcoloniality does not explain such peculiar sociologies of knowledge. States like Lebanon have proved that, al­though domestic sovereignty is seemingly fragmented and delegated to more than one ac­tor, they can still curb or hold sway on assistance provision and its layered politics, for ex­ample, forbidding marches in support of refugee employment and living conditions. However, postcoloniality is a key variable in carving out a transnational sociology of knowl­edge of these localities. Identifying this sociology means meditating on the ways in which crisis is defined and understood in different political histories. In this respect, Lebanon is over-characterized by the catastrophe discourse, having a wavering political past and present during which governmental mandates have never lasted long, unlike many other states in the region. Nonetheless, we conclude that it would be incorrect to argue that Lebanon has historical­ly been more exposed to crisis than countries like Jordan, Egypt, or Turkey (also charac­terized by outbreaks of nonstate political violence and coups d’état), because “crisis” per se should have contextual and relativistic meanings and, at times, resides in the ordinary details of everyday life.

Against this backdrop, we define the “sociology of knowledge” as the relationship between the production of knowl­edge and the social context in which it develops and examine how knowledge is con­structed socially and what factors mainly influence such a construction. Since knowledge is contextual, it is shaped as much by the social and political positioning of knowledge producers as by their local, regional, and international environments. Academic cultures —not always overlapping with official “national cultures,” which are defined by the boundaries of the nation-state—frame such topics in a peculiar manner. In the effort to build a sociology of knowledge, we seek to identify the political and social factors that have been moulding international scholarship in the field of displacement and crisis man­agement. The need for a common language and to somehow embrace functional monolingualism has subtly justified the implicit demand to think and present ideas monoculturally. Such an Anglocentric mono­-culture risks emerging as the only valuable and acceptable one in defining “global knowledge” and concepts such as “humanitarianism”. As Fiddian-Qasmiyeh has argued, “exploring the principles and modalities of South–South cooperation, rather than promoting the incorporation of Southern actors into the ‘international humanitarian system’ via the localization agenda, presents a critical opportunity for studies of displace­ment and humanitarianism in the Middle East region”. As a result, the displacement and humanitari­anism literature need to transcend the state paradigm and focus on a larger variety of so­cial and political factors.

Here comes the endeavour of the Southern Responses to Displacement project: while most scholars have examined the work of the United Na­tions and of international institutions in the region, in our chapter for the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East, we instead highlight the need to learn from multilingual literature, especially that produced in the Global South, and from a deeper investigation of the principles and modalities of crisis management as developed by actors from the Global South. From our perspective, such con­siderations, while overcoming the nation-state paradigm, could also drive us toward an actual global sociology of knowledge.

If you find this post of interest, please visit our Thinking through the Global South series and the recommended reading below:

Carpi, E. (2021) Slavery, Lived Realities and Decolonising Forced Migration Histories: A transcript of an interview with Prof. Portia Owusu – Interview with Dr Estella Carpi and Dr Portia Owusu

Carpi, E. (2021) Slavery, Lived Realities and Decolonising Forced Migration Histories: An interview with Prof Portia Owusu (Podcast)

Carpi, E. (2019) Thinking Power Relations across Humanitarian Geographies: Southism as a Mode of Analysis

Carpi, E. (2018) Humanitarianism and Postcoloniality:  A Look at Academic Texts

Carpi, E. (2018) Teaching Humanitarianism:  The Need for a More Responsive Framework:

Carpi, E. (2018) Empires of Inclusion?[FE1] 

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2020) Migration, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Knowledge – An Interview with Juliano Fiori

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2020) Introduction: Recentering the South in Studies of Migration

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2019) Exploring refugees’ conceptualisations of Southern-led humanitarianism

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2019) Histories and spaces of Southern-led responses to displacement

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2018) Thinking through ‘the global South’ and ‘Southern-responses to displacement’: An introduction.

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2018) The Localisation of Aid and Southern-led Responses to Displacement: Beyond instrumentalising local actors

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2018) Southern Responses to Displacement: Background and introduction to our mini blog series. 

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. and Daley, P. (2018) Conceptualising the global South and South–South encounters[FE2] 

Nimer, M. (2019) Reflections on the Political Economy in Forced Migration Research from a ‘Global South’ Perspective

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Featured image: (c) El Maks, Boustashy Art photograph, Autumn 2004

CALL FOR ACADEMIC LEADS ON ESTABLISHING A RESEARCH PARTNERSHIP WITH OPERAZIONE COLOMBA

Operazione Colomba

Nonviolent Peace Corps of the Comunità Papa Giovanni XXIII

http://www.operazionecolomba.it/en

CALL FOR ACADEMIC LEADS ON ESTABLISHING A RESEARCH PARTNERSHIP WITH OPERAZIONE COLOMBA (APG23)

Research Proposal
The Prospect of Humanitarian Zones in Syria

Who are we

Operazione Colomba is the Nonviolent Peace Corps of the Association Comunità Papa Giovanni XXIII. Since 1992 our volunteers have been operating in: protecting civilians, promoting dialogue and reconciliation between the parts, supporting local nonviolent realities, doing advocacy activities.

Since 2013, Operazione Colomba volunteers have been living in a Syrian refugee camp in Northern Lebanon, sustaining a need for international protection expressed by refugee communities. These same communities drafted a Peace Proposal to answer to the growing hardships faced in Lebanon. Their request is simple and fair: to go back to their country in a safe area where they do not risk being arrested, killed or be forcibly drafted in the army.

To support their Peace Proposal, Operazione Colomba and a group of Syrian activists have created a team of experienced volunteers, to make sure this proposal is taken to the major political platforms dealing with solutions to the Syrian conflict, reaching policy-makers at both national government level as well as within international diplomacy channels.

The research group

In order to identify a humanitarian zone in Syria where Syrian refugees abroad could safely return, the Peace Proposal team needs to be supported by an organized research group, which could scientifically and systematically monitor the ongoing dynamics of the war in Syria, the demographic changes of the country and the safe areas where a normalization could be feasible, so as to provide concrete feasibility to the realization of the Peace Proposal in practice.

The Research Group will be made of international academic staff and researchers collaborating with Operazione Colomba Peace Proposal Team. Academic staff based at international Universities is welcome to join the research group on a voluntary basis, and is expected to critically engage with the Peace Proposal Team in the outline of specific areas of research. Academic staff will work as main point of contact between Operazione Colomba and MA students interested in conducting specific sections of the research.

HQ: Operazione Colomba – Via Mameli 5 – 47921 Rimini (RN) Tel./Fax (+39) 0541 29005 E-mail: opcol@apg23.org

Operazione Colomba

Nonviolent Peace Corps of the Comunità Papa Giovanni XXIII

http://www.operazionecolomba.it/en

Focus of the research group

The Research Group’s fundamental aim is to study the Syrian conflict, investigating where and how the safe humanitarian zone could be created in order to promote a safe and just repatriation of Syrian refugees.

The research group’s strategy will be based on the analysis of modern socio-economic and political trends in Syria’s recent history, so as to contextualize the transformations undergone through the last nine years of war. Adding to the situation in Syria, research will also focus on the evolving situation in different regions of the country and in Syrian refugees’ camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

Moreover, past cases of humanitarian zones in other world regions will provide yet another key focus to this research, in understanding the processes and specific geo-historical causalities that brought to their formation and local/regional/international recognition. The successful case of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó in Colombia, will be used a comparative study.

Organization of the research group

To operationalize this research proposal, three distinct groups are identified for collaboration: (I) Operazione Colomba Peace Proposal Team; (II) Academic leads at major international universities, and (III) Master-level students interested in carrying out their research projects on topics relevant to this research proposal.

Tasks and duties of Operazione Colomba Peace Proposal Team:

•   To provide overall guidance and support to academic leads about the specific areas ofresearch focus;
•   To coordinate the different areas of research involved in this research project so as to avoidcross-overs and guarantee that all interest areas are covered;
•   To provide information and access to specific data held by Operazione Colomba on thetopics of research interest.Tasks and duties of the academic leads:

•   To identify pertinent sub-areas of research interest to propose as assignments to MA studentsinterested to carry out research on those specific topics;
•   To supervise the work of MA students in line with the research requirements, ethics, andfinal purpose of Operazione Colomba’s research proposal;
•   To liaise with the Peace Proposal Team with regards to changing research focus, access todata, fieldwork required. HQ: Operazione Colomba – Via Mameli 5 – 47921 Rimini (RN) Tel./Fax (+39) 0541 29005 E-mail: opcol@apg23.org

Operazione Colomba

Nonviolent Peace Corps of the Comunità Papa Giovanni XXIII

http://www.operazionecolomba.it/en

Tasks and duties of MA students involved:

•   To identify a specific research area of interest within the remits of this research proposal;
•   To liaise with the specific academic lead about the research and delivery of the research;
•   To produce a final report on the research conducted specifically for the use of the PeaceProposal Team, summarizing main methodologies and findings.Sub-areas of research focus

This research will be based on four macro-themes:
1) A comparative study between the Peace Proposal and the Community of San José de Apartadó;

2) Examples of humanitarian zones in international law (previous cases of both “informal” and “formally recognized” humanitarian zones;

3) Examples of restorative justice (humanitarian commissions ruling on demilitarization and peace- building between warring communities);

4) Update study and monitoring of specific geographical areas of Syria (demographic engineering during the Syrian conflict, areas of return, return flows from neighbouring countries).

Contacs: opcol.ls@apg23.org http://www.operazionecolomba.it/en/wethesyrians/ HQ: Operazione Colomba – Via Mameli 5 – 47921 Rimini (RN) Tel./Fax (+39) 0541 29005 E-mail: opcol@apg23.org

Webinar with the AAA Interest Group on NGOs and Non-Profits (March 1, 2021)

Last March 1, 2021, I and Dr Chiara Diana (Universite’ Libre de Bruxelles) have presented our chapter The Right to Play versus the Right to War? Vulnerable Childhoods in Lebanon’s NGOization for the volume edited by Kristen Cheney and Aviva Sinervo (More information about the book Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification and Objectification can be found here: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030016227).

For those who would like to review the webinar or who registered and were unable to attend, here is a link to the video of the event: https://youtu.be/IM17PpE2aFE

One of the questions that came up during the webinar was regarding the ethics of doing research with children. Here is the website (as well as an attached PDF) recommended by María Claudia Duque-Páramo in response to questions about the ethics of doing research with children: ERIC Ethical Research Involving Children: https://childethics.com/
To learn more about the AAA Interest Group on N​GOs and Non-Profits you can visit our website http://ngo.americananthro.org, like the IGNN on Facebook and follow @ngoanthro on Twitter.