Issue 15: Economic Precarity among Syrian Refugee Families Living in Lebanon: Policy Recommendations to Restore Hope in the Context of Displacement

The conflict in Syria has been described as the largest humanitarian crisis to date. Ongoing for over eight years, the conflict has resulted in over five million refugees and 6.6 million people internally displaced within the borders of Syria. Most refugees from Syria have been displaced to neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, and Lebanon. Lebanon is host to over one million Syrian refugees. Prior to the Syrian crisis, Lebanon was struggling economically, which has since exacerbated anti-refugee sentiment and government policies that aim to discourage Syrians from seeking refuge in Lebanon. Within Lebanon, Syrian families are challenged with high rates of poverty, restrictive governmental policies and regulations, a lack of affordable housing and health care, food insecurity, and family violence. These challenges have a destabilizing effect on Syrian families, impacting the mental health of parents as well as their ability to meet their families’ basic needs. This policy brief draws on research conducted with Syrian families in Lebanon to highlight policy points to address the impacts of economic precarity on the health and well-being of Syrian families. The lessons drawn from this research can be applied both within areas of displacement and in post-resettlement settings where issues of economic precarity can often persist

Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances

This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide

Issue 15: Economic Precarity among Syrian Refugee Families Living in Lebanon: Policy Recommendations to Restore Hope in the Context of Displacement

The conflict in Syria has been described as the largest humanitarian crisis to date. Ongoing for over eight years, the conflict has resulted in over five million refugees and 6.6 million people internally displaced within the borders of Syria. Most refugees from Syria have been displaced to neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, and Lebanon. Lebanon is host to over one million Syrian refugees. Prior to the Syrian crisis, Lebanon was struggling economically, which has since exacerbated anti-refugee sentiment and government policies that aim to discourage Syrians from seeking refuge in Lebanon. Within Lebanon, Syrian families are challenged with high rates of poverty, restrictive governmental policies and regulations, a lack of affordable housing and health care, food insecurity, and family violence. These challenges have a destabilizing effect on Syrian families, impacting the mental health of parents as well as their ability to meet their families’ basic needs. This policy brief draws on research conducted with Syrian families in Lebanon to highlight policy points to address the impacts of economic precarity on the health and well-being of Syrian families. The lessons drawn from this research can be applied both within areas of displacement and in post-resettlement settings where issues of economic precarity can often persist

Responding to Precarity: Beddawi Camp in the Era of Covid-19

How are refugees responding to protect themselves and others in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic? How do these responses relate to diverse local, national, and international structures of inequality and marginalization? Drawing on the case of Beddawi camp in North Lebanon, I argue that local responses—such as sharing information via print and social media, raising funds for and preparing iftar baskets during Ramadan, and distributing food and sanitation products to help people practice social distancing—demonstrate how camp residents have worked individually and collectively to find ways to care for Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi, Kurdish, and Lebanese residents alike, thereby transcending a focus on nationality-based identity markers. However, state, municipal, international, and media reports pointing to Syrian refugees as having imported the virus into Beddawi camp place such local modes of solidarity and mutuality at risk. This article thus highlights the importance of considering how refugee-refugee assistance initiatives relate simultaneously to: the politics of the self and the other, politically produced precarity, and multi-scalar systems that undermine the potential for solidarity in times of overlapping precarities

"I Saw It on the Internet!" COVID-19 Narratives across Online Milieux of Uzbek Labour Migrants in Russia

Although important incidents of misleading information related to the global COVID-19 pandemic have been examined by both journalists and academics, the various sources of such information and the magnitude of its impact have yet to be fully comprehended. Additionally, there are cases and contexts that are underrepresented in current studies. To address this gap, this article examines the online social milieux of labour migrants from Uzbekistan to Russia as potential source of misleading information related to COVID-19. Specifically, this article looks at discussions and posts shared on thematic groups across social media platforms such as Odnoklassniki, VKontakte, Facebook, and Telegram through a netnographic lens, identifying five COVID-19-related narrative clusters: 'the remedy,' 'practical information,' 'the news,' 'asking for help,' and 'conspiracies and religion.' As all these narrative clusters have been found to contain misleading information, the article initiates a discussion on the role that thematic social media groups can play in (dis)informing labour migrants