Refugees' Pandemic Responses in a Palestinian Camp in Lebanon

Palestinian refugee camps, long established in Lebanon, have become havens for people from other nationalities as well, most recently Syrians who fled the civil war. Accustomed to neglect or outright hostility from Lebanese officials, camp residents have come to rely on each other for support. The COVID-19 pandemic has stretched these networks of mutual aid to the limit. This article offers an intimate view of everyday life during the crisis in a camp in northern Lebanon

Embracing Transculturalism and Footnoting Islam in Accounts of Arab Migration to Cuba

This essay traces the development of Cuban analyses of Arab migration to the island from the 1500s to the present. It examines whether there is a specifically ‘Cuban’ school of ‘migration studies’, analysing the nature and implications of Ortiz's concept of transculturation underpinning the postcolonial development of ‘Cuban national identity’. It further argues that, despite official Cuban claims regarding post-revolutionary racial equality, Arab migration has not only been historically and politically marginalized in accounts of the development of ‘Cuban identity’, including in Ortiz's own work, but diverse ‘waves’ of Arab migration to the island have been characterized by what I refer to, following Derrida, as the accumulative ‘footnoting of Islam’. In conclusion, I argue that Muslim Arab immigration prior to the Cuban Revolution has been entirely overshadowed by a systematic focus on Christian Arabs, in effect leading to the category ‘Arab’ being practically synonymous with ‘Christian’ or ‘Maronite’, with wide-ranging implications for our understanding of Cuba's academic and political discourses regarding national identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Representations of Displacement: Introducing the Series

A year after the AHRC-ESRC funded Refugee Hosts research project was officially launched, we are introducing this new blog series which aims to offer critical and creative insights into the politics, ethics, poetics and aesthetics of representations of displacement

The right and role of critiquing the contemporary patchwork of protection

The 70th anniversary of the 1951 Geneva Convention has been marked by a flurry of powerful academic critiques of the Convention’s colonial and Eurocentric roots, and its ‘intentional’ exclusion (Mayblin 2014) of certain refugees and regions (ie. see Krause 2021; White 2021; longer-standing critiques include Chimni 1998). Equally, the Convention’s anniversary has been characterised by the ongoing flagrant violation of its fundamental legal principles by states across the global North and global South alike. At a time when refugees’ rights to protection continue to be undermined, it becomes urgent to ask: what is the role of critique? Does critique risk undermining the existing framework, thereby potentially leaving people with fewer rights? Or, to the contrary, does it provide an avenue to bring into fruition more equitable and meaningful practices, and a more hopeful vision of protection in the 21st Century

Repressentations of Displacement from the Middle East and North Africa

This article draws on research with and about refugees from across the Middle East and North Africa and examines the current Syrian refugee crisis through the tropes of visibility and invisibility. Adopting a deconstructive framework, it purposefully centralizes what has previously been assigned a peripheral position throughout the ever-expanding “archive of knowledge” (following Foucault) vis-à-vis particular refugee situations and critically interrogates how, why, and with what effect only certain bodies, identity markers, and models of humanitarian response become hypervisible in the European public sphere. The article starts by tracing the roles of visibility and invisibility in constituting the “ideal refugee” (and the concomitant figure of the “a-refugee”), before turning to refugee-refugee humanitarianism as an invisible form of Southern-led (rather than Northern-led or Northern-dominated) responses to displacement from Syria

Recentering the South in Studies of Migration

It has become increasingly mainstream to argue that redressing the Eurocentrism of migration studies requires a commitment to de-centering global North knowledge. However, it is less clear whether this necessarily means ‘re-centering the South.’ Against this backdrop, this Introduction and the broader Special Issue on this topic poses Re-centering the South in Studies of Migration as a set of intersecting questions: What do de-centering and re-centering mean and what might these processes entail? What or who does the South refer to in contested academic, political and policy domains? And whose knowledge is and should be involved in re-viewing the nature, and plural futures, of migration studies? The Introduction starts by highlighting diverse ways that scholars, including the contributors to this Special Issue, have sought to redress Eurocentrism in migration studies: 1) examining the applicability of classical concepts and frameworks in the South; 2) filling blind spots by studying migration in the South and South-South migration; and 3) engaging critically with the geopolitics of knowledge production. The remainder of the Introduction examines the preceding questions on decentering and re-centering, different ways of conceptualising the South, and – as a pressing concern with regards to knowledge production – the politics of citation. In so doing, the Introduction critically delineates the contours of these debates, provides the frame for the Special issue and sets out a number of key thematic and editorial priorities for Migration and Society moving forward

On the threshold of statelessness: Palestinian narratives of loss and erasure

This article examines how Palestinians in France, Sweden and the UK negotiate, mobilise and/or resist, and ultimately problematise, notions of statelessness as a concept and as a marker of identity. Centralising Palestinians’ conceptualisations in this manner – including accounts which directly challenge academics’ and policy-makers’ definitions of the problem of, and solution to, statelessness - is particularly important given that statelessness emerges as both a condition and a label which erase the ability to speak, and be heard. The article draws on the narratives of 46 Palestinians to examine perceptions of statelessness as a marker of rightlessess, home(land)lessness and voicelessness. It then explores statelessness through the paradigm of the ‘threshold’, reflecting both on interviewees’ ambiguity towards this label, status and condition, and the extent to which even Palestinians who hold citizenship remain ‘on the threshold of statelessness’. It concludes by reflecting on interviewees’ rejection of a label which is imposed upon them ‘from a distance’ via bureaucratic processes which reproduce, rather than redress, processes of erasure and dispossession

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