ESTELLA CARPI

In the wake of the massive influx of refugees from Syria to Lebanon (2011-2014), some international NGOs have intervened in specific regions of Lebanon to prevent Lebanese and Syrian youth from “radicalizing” themselves and joining armed groups. In the presence of security and political risks, these NGOs play a sizable role in territories that often become destinations for refugees and migrants. We recognize their work as an effort to “neutralize” social spaces by stifling any factor causing local instability.
    In this framework, youth quickly come to be addressed as objects of concern but rarely as subjects of decision-making and aware action. Our study seeks to unpack international NGOs’ discourses about children’s vulnerability and protection, which are generally formulated according to universalized conceptions of childhood. This research is aimed at understanding the space between global security agendas, child protection, and humanitarian action. Finally, our study shows the controversial character of humanitarian agencies that alternate between depoliticizing younger generations and complying with the social order established by local power holders.

This report aims to analyze how formal and informal security providers implement their respective social order agendas through a security “assemblage”. It also aims to inform the debate on refugee protection and security provision in urban settings, in the context of Lebanon’s hybrid security system. The accounts collected illustrate how state security institutions tacitly accept – or even rely on – informal security actors, managing at times to achieve their political and strategic goals through decentralized and/or illegal forms of control. In this vein, local municipalities imposed curfews and street patrols, which, far from being an institutional measure, follow a flexible and unpredictable pattern. Three localities have been selected for the purpose of this research - namely Aley in Mount Lebanon, Ebrine in North Lebanon, and Shebaa in South Lebanon. The choice of these localities was driven by their different political and social history, their demo-graphic homogeneity or diversity, and their relationship with surrounding regions.The investigation of the Syrian refugees’ access to security systems constitutes an interpretative lens through which the analysis of securitization processes in Lebanon can be undertaken. The notion of security we will discuss here is polysemantic: it does not only encompass regional or domestic conflicts, but also suggests a particular social form of waiting; a climate of fear portending the worse that is yet to come. As a matter of fact, this climate of fear encourages preemptive security measures and serves as a deterrent against violent outbursts. Therefore, manifestations of insecurity or security threats are often routinized perceptions and, as such, integrated into accounts of ordinary everyday life. Security plays a multifaceted role in the three settings selected for thorough analysis. It builds the cohesiveness of the local communities, while fending off endemic societal fragmentation. This is mainly because local people tend to identify with a single homogenous entity that needs to protect itself against external threats, with these threats being represented nowadays by Syrian refugees, who may become “radicalized” and destabilize the “host” space. And since security goes beyond the exclusion of risk and jeopardy, the official discourse of local security providers entails the protection of refugees. While we draw on the classic normative distinction of security providers into formal and informal, our analysis moves beyond such a rigid differentiation. The formal/informal dichotomy fades away when security is discussed as a hybrid assemblage of unpredictable and situational forces enforced in particular circumstances. Our findings confirm that formal security is partially implemented through informal local actors, providing a terrain of common interest in the preservation of social order. In addition, security cannot be viewed as a given “social fact”: it is rather a contextual process embedded in multiple power relations that preserve social order in a given space and reinforce social status and community identification.

Over the last two decades, leading humanitarian agencies in the Global North have increasingly promoted a policy of self-reliance, understood as making individual refugees financially independent from aid assistance through livelihood programmes. However, individual economic autonomy offers an incomplete picture of refugee well-being. Based on fieldwork conducted over 2017 in Halba (Lebanon), Delhi (India) and Thessaloniki (Greece), this multi-site study shows that non-camp refugees build on collective strategies at household, social network and community levels in efforts to develop mechanisms of survival and enfranchisement. These strategies include social and leisure activities as well as income-generating activities which are often organised compartmentally in humanitarian programming. We argue that while leisure and social mingling alone cannot ensure economic sustainability, they are fundamental dimensions of self-reliance as seen by refugees and should therefore be systematically included in livelihood programming.

Since the 2011 uprising, the Arab world turned into a theatre of political and social transformations. While some have been visible, others, less visible, have however been able to affect the intellectual, social and political infrastructure of international research. Being an important scenario for regional policy developments (Eg. the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran), Lebanon offers an interesting case in point. While this article does not address the October 2019 revolution and the most recent COVID-19 pandemic, we endeavor to unravel the ways in which research themes, methods, and security have changed in the Lebanese context.
Despite domestic instability, Lebanon not only is one of the few countries where conducting research is still possible in a crisis-affected region, but it also emerges as a “comfort zone” for international researchers: a place where to observe regional conflicts while enjoying a consumeristic lifestyle and a privileged position within Lebanese society. We provide a critical inquiry of how, first, the confessional narrative has been abused and reproduced in international research. Second, we focus on how scholars have changed the way of thinking Lebanon’s statehood and political order. Finally, we discuss how the forced migration scholarship has built on the widespread securitization and ethnicization of migration.

This article examines the child protection strategies of two international and one local NGO in the Tripoli governorate. It explores psychosocial care programmes and play activities that are meant to heal and integrate the refugee child. It shows how programmes for crisis-affected childhood and the sport-for-development formula predominantly remain universalised models, failing to incorporate local specificities despite increasing campaigns promoting contextualisation approaches.

This paper examines the hospitality provided to Syrian refugees during the refugee crisis spanning from 2011 to 2016 in the border areas of Gaziantep (southeastern Turkey) and the Akkar region (northern Lebanon). Hospitality, apart from a cultural value and societal response to the protracted refugee influx, is a discursive strategy of socio-spatial control used by humanitarian agencies, local and national authorities. This paper, first, argues against hospitality as an assessment to ethically compare host countries (i.e. more welcoming versus less welcoming states). Second, drawing on Walters' notion of " humanitarian border " , it shows how the governmental , humanitarian, and everyday workings of hospitality exercise an assertive politics of sovereignty over the social encounter between locals and refugees. We examine the state-centered hospitality in the Turkish case and a humanitarian-promoted hospitality in the Lebanese case. We also show how the hospitality discourse shapes the spaces that refugees, citizens, and earlier migrants partake in.

This working paper seeks to document and analyse collaboration mechanisms between local authorities and humanitarian actors in addressing the Syrian refugee
crisis in urban and peri-urban settings in Lebanon. It outlines existing mechanisms of collaboration, analyses their potential strengths and weaknesses, and derives lessons and recommendations for improving refugee responses in Lebanon, and potentially in other national settings. The report focuses on two case studies: the largely hybrid urban district of Bourj Hammoud, one of the main commercial hubs of Greater Beirut, and the peri-urban coastal region of Sahel El Zahrani, located between Saida and Tyre in South Lebanon. The response to the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon, which broke out in 2011, faced many challenges initially; namely the lack of a solid national response strategy and weak local governance capacities, which were needed to respond to a large-scale crisis. International non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and United Nations (UN) agencies took the initial lead in responding to the crisis. Local authorities, who were at the forefront of the response, lacked the adequate capacities to respond and thus were involved in a less organised manner. The humanitarian response suffered overall from weak coordination between international actors, the central government, and (in)formal local authorities, resulting in unequal and scattered aid distribution. As the crisis prolonged, the government of Lebanon (GoL) became increasingly involved and eventually, in 2015, led the development of the Lebanon Crisis
Response Plan (LCRP) jointly with UN agencies. Various ministries took a more proactive role in the response, in particular the Ministry of Social Affairs (MoSA), which was designated by the Council of Ministers to take on an official role in the response. At the local level, municipalities and unions of municipalities, despite lacking an official responsibility, made serious efforts to respond to the refugees due to increasing pressures in their localities and based on moral imperatives. International and UN agencies initially targeted Syrian refugees on the basis of the humanitarian principle of immediate alleviation of suffering following displacement. Local host communities, who were impacted by the crisis due to the increase in the local population and a higher demand on limited basic services, were initially less involved and addressed in the response. This working paper explores the various formal and informal levels of collaboration, or lack thereof, between international and local organisations, UN agencies and local authorities. In Lebanon, establishing successful coordination mechanisms between national and local authorities and aid agencies is politically and logistically challenging. Due to funding constraints and limited programme timeframes, humanitarian organisations find it difficult to maintain a continuous long-term relationship with local municipalities and unions of municipalities. Moreover, aid agencies often opt to bypass local authorities in project implementation in order to avoid local bureaucracy. Internal politics also create another challenge for coordination with local authorities, as this can interfere with the orientation of aid.
UN agencies and INGOs are now mostly turning short-term relief programmes into longer- term projects for development, and have shown serious efforts to adapt their responses to address local contexts more adequately. However, clearly defining roles among international and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and UN agencies and establishing solid coordination mechanisms remains a challenge and is
important to enhancing overall public management in urban crisis contexts.
The research concludes that complementing sectoral approaches by adopting area-based approaches to respond to emergency crises allows humanitarian and development programmes to address the needs of different vulnerable groups, including refugees and local communities, in a more efficient and sustainable manner.
This allows the implementation of more inclusive needs-based responses, whilst also preventing unequal aid distribution and the ‘compartmentalisation’ of society.
Moreover, this working paper highlights the weakness in focusing and adapting responses to respond to urban settings which host the majority of refugees. As such, it is important to raise awareness and develop the necessary tools and coordination mechanisms to optimally address refugees in urban contexts, especially
with more refugees settling in urban areas worldwide. Finally, coordination efforts and mutual aid agreements for emergency service provision can provide a solid ground for local actors to know: first, how to turn international aid into an opportunity rather than financial and political dependency or reason for domestic marginalisation, and, second, to learn the advantages of domestic coordination, internal agreement, and develop the capacities to manage foreign aid. Overall, reinforcing the role of local authorities and actors has proven to be more efficient and manageable in the short-term; however, over time, it also faces political limitations thus challenging the ability to reach a broader consensus on the management of domestic issues. This paper proposes a multi-scalar coordination approach to respond to crises and address diverse social vulnerabilities.

This research project has addressed the subject of refugee self-reliance in cities by analysing humanitarian programming and refugees' own self-support practices in three cities: Halba (Lebanon), Delhi (India), and Thessaloniki (Greece). Economic self-reliance is typically framed as a means to, or a reflection of, integration, or at least assimilation. It is often framed as a duty of the refugee. However, self-reliance becomes an unachievable goal when access to the formal labour market is restricted by political and legal barriers that humanitarian actors can do little to break down. Therefore, humanitarian livelihoods interventions focused on self-reliance end up providing a form of distraction through leisure activities, or, at best, supporting refugees' own coping strategies. Meanwhile, the conception of self-reliance in primarily economic terms has often allowed for less attention to be given to important and interrelated social and political factors that determine refugee experiences. From saving lives to self-reliance Over the last 30 years, the language, focus and ambition of humanitarian organisations has shifted. In the early 1990s, in the context of an emboldened liberal interventionism, human security became the stated goal for a 'new humanitarianism' that forthrightly rejected the absolute sovereignty of states and imagined a role for itself, beyond saving lives, in the promotion of the sovereignty of individuals. In the new millennium, as a changing conception of crisis has privileged the management of vulnerabilities, resilience – celebrated as a means of connecting relief and development – has become a guiding objective for the humanitarian sector. On the one hand, this evolution in humanitarian discourse has allowed for an expansion of the sphere of humanitarian activity; on the other, it has reflected a steady reduction in the ambition of humanitarian organisations as to what they can practically do.

Lebanon’s refugee crisis has highlighted the need for much closer coordination among the various organisations and local authorities involved in the response. A new study has laid the groundwork for a series of recommendations, set out in this briefing, on how national, local and international humanitarian actors can work together more effectively to enhance urban refugee responses in Lebanon and perhaps in other countries. In the context of a protracted urban crisis, this briefing argues that humanitarians will only be able to ensure their responses are sustainable and meet needs on the ground if they work closely with local authorities.

Since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, Syrian diaspora organisations (Dos) in Lebanon have been providing diverse forms of support, relief and assistance to Syrian refugees. Whether in areas which are difficult for international providers to access, or in major towns and cities where international actors including the UN, INGOs and state actors have been providing assistance, Syrian Diaspora Organisations (DO)s have played a vital role in providing support and relief to their Syrian fellows. At times, these DO initiatives have been actively funded by international donors or developed in formal partnership with UN agencies and INGOs, while in other contexts they take place on the margins of (or at times in ways that directly challenge) formal humanitarian aid structures.
Against this backdrop, and based on long-standing research vis-à-vis local, national and international responses to displacement from Syria within Lebanon, this chapter examines the diverse roles that faith and secularism play in the initiatives developed by Syrian diaspora organisations based in Lebanon, exploring how and with what effect faith, religion, secularism (and secularist frameworks) relate to Syrian DOs’ relationships with different local, national and international actors, including Syrian refugees, members of host populations and diverse UN Agencies, NGOs and INGOs.
Syrian DOs in Lebanon include organisations established and led by activists, ex-protesters, established Syrian migrant workers, and religious leaders who have ‘become’ relief providers since the crisis broke out. On the one hand, by drawing on interviews with members of a range of Syrian DOs in Lebanon, this chapter explores the personal and collective reasons behind the act of establishing these organisations. On the other hand, it will investigate the social roles played by secular and faith-based DO members who engage in relief work, and their contextual relationship with their international and secular counterparts. This is particularly important in light of the strong financial and political support that a core group of popular secular(ist) Syrian DOs have received from international donors/agencies. In contrast, faith-based diaspora organisations have often been viewed by members of the international community (both in the context of Syria and more broadly) as exiled communities that do not fulfil key international humanitarian principles such as neutrality, impartiality or universality as they are assumed to prioritise political or sectarian dimensions through providing assistance (only or primarily) to their co-nationals/co-ethnics. This secular-centric interpretation of the partialist nature of faith-motivated assistance remains particularly biased towards diaspora groups that mobilise within the global South, where the source of crisis supposedly lies.
By providing examples from Beirut and from northern Lebanon, this chapter will show how DOs’ configuration and engagement with specific international and local communities have been changing since the outbreak of the crisis in Syria in 2011. By analysing the organisational configuration (including partnership models) and the forms of provision of these secular and faith-based DOs, we are particularly interested in examining how intra-community solidarity is (or is not) built within southern host societies through Syrian DOs’ initiatives – this is a dynamic that has received hardly any attention from scholars examining diaspora transnational endeavours.
With the purpose of investigating the human and social geographies of such secular and faith-based DOs, our chapter aims to draw on lessons from anthropological, sociological, and IR studies, in a bid to construct a deeper understanding of secular and faith-based DO-led aid provision and their social impacts in settings of the global South which geographically (and geopolitically) neighbour new and ongoing crises.

With the recent outbreak of the 2011 Syrian crisis and the massive flows of forced migrants across the Middle Eastern region, INGO interventions addressing childhood have been growing. In this chapter, we critically examine the intervention of the Canadian-founded NGO Right to Play on local and refugee children residents of the Tripoli governorate (northern Lebanon). Drawing on interviews conducted in Spring 2015, Summer 2016 and Autumn 2016 with three INGO workers and nine child players and their parents, we primarily focus on INGO play activities aimed at reshaping child subjectivity in contexts where political violence is widespread and longstanding. We analyze INGO discourses and practices in a bid to critically examine the humanitarian and developmental attempts to provide politically neutral spaces to refugee and local children. More specifically, our study intends to decontruct the INGO discourse about children's vulnerability and standardized international strategies for social cohesion and stability, given taht, while increasingly cooperating with local partners, they are formulated according to universalized conceptions of childhood.

In the wake of the latest migration flows from the Middle Eastern region, mostly the result of economic hardships and protracted political failures, humanitarian and development organisations have increasingly been relying on play and sports as a back-route to integration and social stability. The values that societies assign to play and sports activities for children and youth are well encapsulated by protection, discipline and education.
In this framework, play and sports, which do not necessarily complement each other, are deployed as vehicles to address broad societal issues, such as marginalisation, war recruitment and economic or political vulnerabilities.
Drawing on the experiences of (un)forced migrations and development or humanitarian practices, this panel seeks to contribute to those debates that maintain play activities and sport are an end per se or to frame them as catalysts for political, cultural or religious formation processes.
The panel is particularly interested in contributions tackling the intersection between development/humanitarian action, migration flows and play/sports activities in Middle Eastern and other societies that have become home to Arab background diasporas.
Lastly, it seeks to provide a terrain of discussion regarding what ludic and physical activities do to the agency of children and youth, particularly in light of the economic and existential uncertainties and opportunities that human mobility entails. In an attempt to move beyond the definition of development and humanitarian agendas, how do children and youth on the move make sense of ludic and sports activities?
Individuals who wish to contribute can send a 200-word abstract to estella.carpi@gmail.com and dianachiara3@gmail.com.
Panel convenors: Dr Estella Carpi, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University College London; and Dr Chiara Diana, Research Associate at IREMAM-CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université.
Abstracts will be accepted until 20 November 2017. The selected contributors will participate in the WOCMES 2018 conference which will take place in Sevilla (Spain) from July 16 to July 20.
The convenors are planning to edit an anthology of articles focusing on play and sports that are meant as development and humanitarian tools in migration, to be published in 2019.