Managing through ad hoc measures: Syrian refugees and the politics of waiting in Lebanon

Abstract

Managing through Ad Hoc Measures : Syrian Refugees and Legal Geographies in Lebanon This paper explores how the ad hoc and uneven implementation and enforcement of policies in the context of the Global South particularly in situations of large-scale refugee crises creates forms of waiting and precarity amongst refugees. This exploration is initiated by questions about how states in the Global South manage mass displacements of people whilst adhering to the principles of non-refoulement , a customary international law forbidding countries from forcibly returning refugees to conditions that may endanger their lives. How is this complicated in situations where states are not party to the Refugee convention and where refugee crises become protracted? How does this then lead to immobilizing refugees and compelling them to wait? I focus on the practices of the Lebanese state in response to the Syrian refugee crisis that has continued on from 2011. Lebanon has changed its regulations and decisions towards the large number of Syrians living in the country over the course of the crisis whilst adhering to the principle of nonrefoulement. However, the policies enacted by the government are arbitrarily implemented and enforced at different scales of governance creating legal anxieties and immobilities for Syrians in the country. I draw on the work of critical legal and political geographers to argue that the ad hoc nature of the law, creates a fragmented landscape of mobility for Syrians, exacerbating conditions of precarity and poverty and, importantly, colonizing their futures.

Refugee urbanism: seeing asylum “like a city”

“…Just as Magnusson (2011) argues that seeing like a city better reflects the realities of urbanism as a way of life, so Valverde (2011, p. 291) argues that seeing like a city better captures the pragmatic compromises associated with urban development. The compromised nature of authority in this mobilization of seeing like a city resonates with critical discussions of the improvised nature of governance in contexts of bordering Dunn & Cons, 2014;Sanyal, 2018). For instance, Dunn (2012) highlights how an "adhocracy" of improvised solutions and guesswork shape humanitarian governance in practice, drawing attention to the limits of authority claims, and presenting a model of sovereignty that is "aleatory" in nature (Dunn & Cons, 2014).…”

Changing geographies of the state: themes, challenges and futures

“…We should also be attuned to situations in which non-state actors attempt to ape state mechanisms for reproducing its territory and enforce a politics of exclusion. Vigilante territorial policing is one form of this, found in settings such as the United States (Williams and Boyce 2013), Bulgaria (Krasteva 2017) or Lebanon (Sanyal 2018). Such acts depend on existing mechanisms and technologies of state territory, but take their exclusionary potential to a logical extreme.…”

Landscapes of refugee protection

“…Throughout this paper, I have used the case of non‐signatory Thailand to explore some of the grey areas between official refugee protection as understood under the Convention and the dangers that face refugees in their countries of origin. Many refugees around the globe are seeking protection in countries that lack legal protection frameworks (e.g., Sanyal, forthcoming) and informal policy frameworks such as occur in Thailand structure their lives and possibilities. Increasingly, however, signatory status is no barrier to poor treatment of refugees, and the arbitrary and graduated landscapes of protection occur in the UK context as well.…”

“…Thailand's ability to host refugees since the 1970s, and the elaborate framework of informal practices governing refugee treatment such as border camps, detention and bail, and cooperation with international NGOs are all examples of how refugees are legally incorporated as “illegal migrants” in Thailand. Such tacit legal frameworks that govern refugees’ status, mobility and livelihood possibilities are important parts of the landscapes of protection they navigate, and increasingly add to the personal costs of claiming refugee status and limit refugees’ access to protection within the Convention and “beyond” (Sanyal, forthcoming). This analysis engages in comparison not to insist on exact empirical similarities between the cases, but rather to suggest that a common analytical framework reveals very similar trends in how countries approach refugee governance.…”

“…Despite the ongoing attention to the questions of similarity between protection regimes, geographical literature on borders and refugee flows has tended to focus on particular – and different – aspects of refugees in signatories from non‐signatories (Sanyal, forthcoming). Discussions of camps, for example, often break down along lines of signatory status: Agamben's () paradigmatic spaces of the camp are used to debate detention spaces in signatory countries such as the USA's Guantanamo Bay (Gregory, ) or Australian island detention facilities (Perera, ), whereas the refugee camps of non‐signatory countries (e.g., Ramadan, ) are often framed through perspectives on protracted displacement and resettlement.…”