On Refugee Agency, Bio-Politics, and a New World

This short intervention starts by discussing Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical formulation of ‘bare life,’ popular in refugee studies. Thinking with the case study of Palestinian refugee camps, particularly in the West Bank, it argues that there are clear limitations to the discourse of and bare life. I argue that ‘bare life’ neither accounts for the multilayered relations of power, particularly colonialism, slavery, and indigenous genocide, that systemically make certain populations more susceptible to its power than others. Nor does it account for the modes of of those who are systemically relegated to its sphere. I conclude by working through some of the theoretical formulations around body politics from the field of Black studies, particularly Alexander Weheliye's 2014 concept of the flesh, in order to explore new directions they may point us towards in refugee studies.

Solidarity with Soufra: Dividuality and joint action with Palestinian women refugees

Based on an exploratory study of Soufra, a women’s catering social enterprise in the Bourj al Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, we analyze how solidarity across difference can be organized. We conceptualize “difference” not in terms of “whole” individuals, but in terms of dividuals, the multiple roles and social positions that individuals occupy; this enables similarities between individuals of different ethnicities, nationalities, and statuses to become apparent. We find that, despite their extreme and protracted marginalization, Soufra does not seek to organize solidarity relationships with co-resisters joining their struggle against oppressors. Rather, they initiate exchange relationships with different others via carefully managed impressions of similar dividualities (e.g. professional cooks and businesswomen) and different dividualities (e.g. having refugee status and lacking any citizenship). These encounters provide opportunities for solidarity relationships to be created and underlying cultural predispositions to be transformed. Whether these opportunities are taken up or rejected is dependent, at least to some extent, on the willingness of participants to allow such transformations to occur.

Consolidating the Rule of Experts: A Model Village for Refugees in the Jordan Valley, 1945–55

This article examines the history of the establishment and work of the Arab Development Society (ADS) in Palestine from 1945–55. While this study contextualizes the project within the broader history of global rural development projects in the post-Second-World-War era, it mainly frames the ADS’s activities within the regional context of Palestine, Jordan, and Israel and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The discussion traces the alteration of the ADS’s mission after 1948 from a rural development project into a project that utilized its village modernization ethos to deal with the pressing problem of Palestinian refugee housing in the Jordan Valley. Drawing on archival research, the article scrutinizes ADS’s encounters with states, international bodies, and the refugee population. It shows that though the ADS was able to challenge the rule of experts on the specific case of the possibility of resettlement in the Jordan Valley, it generally consolidated the patronizing logic of expertise and failed to engage with the political visions of the refugee population. In shedding light on the widely-forgotten ADS experimental scheme, the article contributes to enriching the understanding of the overlapping nature of rural development and to the questions of resettlement and repatriation in Palestine in the aftermath of 1948.

Palestinian Refugee Identity: Marginalization And Resistance In Refugee Camps In Lebanon

Through a review of theoretical literature on the topics of space, power, and identity as well as literature on the Palestinian refugee situation in Lebanon, this research paper uses a critical approach to space in order to examine how Palestinian identity is formed within the specific context of refugee camps in Lebanon. The refugee camp has been used by the Lebanese state as a disciplinary tool to contain identities, but it has also served as a site for the displaced Palestinians to construct meaningful lives and create new places and identities. This paper will specifically examine the way in which a marginalized collective identity as well as an identity of resistance has been formed and renegotiated using culture, memory, and militancy by displaced Palestinian refugees living within the boundaries of camps in Lebanon.