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

Regional Approaches to Displacement in the Middle East

The Middle East is home to a significant number of displaced people including refugees who are under the mandate of the bifurcated International Refugee Regime, that is to say, across the mandates of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). According to UNHCR’s planning figures for the Middle East and North Africa for 2022, of a total of 16 million forcibly displaced and stateless people in the region, 12.5 million were internally displaced (78% of the total), while 2.5 million (15% of the total) were refugees (UNHCR, 2022a). All refugees in the region, except for Palestinians, fall under the mandate of UNHCR; in turn, 5.8 million Palestinian refugees are under UNRWA’s mandate, and are consistently excluded from the so-called “global” refugee agency’s statistics

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

Invisible Refugees and/or Overlapping Refugeedom? Protecting Sahrawis and Palestinians Displaced by the 2011 Libyan Uprising

This article examines the experiences of two North African and Middle Eastern refugee populations (Sahrawis and Palestinians) affected by the 2011 conflict in Libya who have remained largely invisible to the international community. The challenges that they have faced since the outbreak of violence in February 2011, and the nature of international responses to these challenges, highlight a range of interconnected issues on both conceptual and practical dimensions. After outlining the scale and nature of the internal and international displacement arising from the 2011 conflict, and the history of these refugees' presence in Libya, the article explores whether Sahrawis and Palestinians can be categorised and conceptualised as ‘refugees' in Libya, given their ‘voluntary' migration to the country for educational and/or employment purposes. Drawing on a number of historical examples of protection activities by UNHCR for Sahrawi and Palestinian ‘refugee-migrants', the article explores the potential applicability of a framework that highlights ‘overlapping refugeedoms' without negating refugees' agency. Given that neither population has a ‘country of origin' or effective diplomatic protection, the article then explores which state and non-state actors could be considered to be responsible for their protection in this conflict situation. Finally, analysing the ‘solutions' promoted for Sahrawi and Palestinian refugees in this context leads to an assessment of whether such responses can be considered to offer effective protection to these populations. Ultimately, the article examines a range of protection gaps that emerge from these groups' experiences during the 2011 North African uprisings, arguing in favour of a critical assessment of the protection mechanisms in place to support refugees who ‘voluntarily' migrate for economic and educational purposes. Such an evaluation is particularly important given policy-makers' increasing interest in presenting mobility as a ‘fourth durable solution

Gender, religion and humanitarian responses to refugees

Major international agencies including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have moved towards partnering with faith-based actors to support displaced persons. Despite this, concerns – and suspicions – remain about the nature and impact of faith-based responses to displacement, often stemming from negative assumptions about the relationship between religion and gender. Based on her policy brief launched at the UN Refugee Summit in September, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh outlines how we can overcome these often flawed assumptions