Ecologies of Conflict and Coexistence in the Mediterranean: Seeking Refuge in post-war Lebanon

Abstract

This chapter draws on the example of refugee displacement in Lebanon to derive broader conceptions on how notions of national identity and otherness materialize, interlace, and collide in the Mediterranean. We argue that Lebanon’s political system has constructed the figure of the refugee as a disrupter to Lebanon’s national identity, framed in the political rhetoric as a static bond structuring relationships between already existing sectarian communities. This bond revolves around a century-old sectarian power-sharing formula in which eighteen confessions are supposed to divide political offices and resources. At the same time, refugee-centric spaces have contested such ossified conceptions of identity. Civic and humanitarian actors have curated alternative spaces of hospitality. Moreover, contentious episodes including Lebanon’s 2019 iconic protest movement as well as smaller-scale refugee-led protests have called for debunking the conception of a closed, exclusionary, and sectarian-tied citizenship. In broader perspective, we draw attention to how the politics of refuge unlocks a heterotopic space where conflict and coexistence as well as exclusion and inclusion co-constitute each other, and where static and dynamic conceptions of citizenship interlace.