For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontier, Hiba Bou Akar (2018)

Review of: For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontier, Hiba Bou Akar (2018) Stanford: Stanford University Press, 264 pp., 31 b&w illus., ISBN: 9781503605602 (paperback), $28

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.

‘Islam is a Place Inside Myself’: Material and Immaterial Re-Positioning of Religion in the Living Experience of Unaccompanied Muslim Minors in Italy

European sociological studies on refugees who are hosted by national protection systems primarily focus on intervention practice and are particularly attentive to the regulatory and social conditions that produce refugees’ precariousness. Studies that consider refugee subjectivity through migratory experiences are rare. In the case of unaccompanied minors, a protection/control dynamic is widespread, as the vulnerability of young refugees is often used as a pretext for setting up institutions to contain their aspirations and their life plans. This article argues that analysis of the role of religion, i.e., the place of the religious in the experiences of unaccompanied minors, is a way to focus on the subjectivities of young refugees, thereby building an understanding of the essential issues surrounding the migration experience. The article is based on research conducted in Calabria, in southern Italy, involving unaccompanied Muslim minors hosted in reception centres. With the aim to understand the religiosity of individuals, this empirical investigation presents the migratory experience of each minor, taking into account trajectories, family ties, and ways of transitioning into adulthood. Considering how these three areas are interconnected by the young refugees’ ‘musulmanity’ (their sense of being Muslim) has made it possible to be attentive to their agency, to the meaning these minors give to their actions, and to their migratory experiences.

Constructing a Refugee Through Producing a Refugee Space: Russian Migrants in Occupied Istanbul (1919–22)

Migration is a natural tendency of human society. Solidification of the modern nation-state led to the regularized protection of states’ borders and territory and reduced the ability of migrants to negotiate their integration into a host society. The political and economic turmoil of the era following the First World War exacerbated the problematic relationships between the nation-state and migrants. Many migrants were excluded from the normal territorial and legal space of post-war global society and were categorized under a new political label as refugees. With the example of Russian Civil War (1918-21) refugees in Istanbul, the article investigates the process of constructing a refugee identity among these people. This included producing a refugee space, which was accomplished through imagining space as a resource, reimagining the meaning of Istanbul, constructing refugee camps, and engagement with the experience of the spatial hierarchy of Istanbul city life. I argue that the experience of Russian refugees in Istanbul after the First World War heavily contributed to the formation of today’s modern refugee regime.

Earthen Architecture in Muslim Cultures: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Stéphane Pradines (2018)

Review of: Earthen Architecture in Muslim Cultures: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Stéphane Pradines (2018) Leiden: Brill, 283 pp., 185 illus., ISBN: 9789004355316 (hardcover), $160

Dis-Placed: Space, Settlement, and Agency

This article introduces the special issue ‘Dis-placed’. Questioning the term ‘refugee’ as an identity marker and pointing at the problematic connotations it embodies, the article explores the spatial forms of refugee experience. The knowledge of space, as produced within disciplines such as geography, urban planning, and architecture, is deployed by states to limit the movements of forced migrants across and within national borders. In response, the article calls for social/spatial justice, arguing that this can only be achieved through the blurring of the boundaries between host and refugee identities. The contributions in this special issue present investigations on different facets of the spatiality of forced migration through various disciplinary approaches and methodologies. Taken together, they underline the importance of the link between space and refugee agency in tackling forced migration.

Syrian Children’s Imagination and Play Areas beyond the Physical Reality of Urban Spaces in Beirut

This study examines the play areas of displaced Syrian children in Beirut. It depicts informal play areas and patterns in the centre of the city and those that emerge in the informal settlements of the Burj Al-Barajneh Palestinian camp. The study depicts the children’s ability to understand the environment around them while transforming it into a stage for loosely structured forms of play. It is important to note that the article does not aim to portray the dense and overcrowded urban setting of Beirut and its informal settlements as favourable environments for children at play. Instead, the discussion focuses on the children’s ability to re-semanticize and colonize anonymous places. Our aim is to demonstrate that Syrian displaced children develop a cognitive relationship to the spaces around them that goes beyond the physical boundaries of their play areas. Additionally, we argue that the formal urban fabric and the local population of the city alienate these children by maintaining their status as strangers or ‘others’. Despite the dire conditions and the seemingly chaotic setting of the informal camp settlement, Syrian children residing there are able to free themselves from the perception of estrangement and integrate as part of their new context.

Hosting Syrian Refugees in Saida (Lebanon) Under Protracted Displacement: Unfolding Spatial and Social Exclusion

Lebanon has witnessed multiple waves of displaced peoples throughout its recent history, including the displacement of Palestinians to Lebanon after the occupation of Palestine in 1948, the internal displacement of families from occupied Southern Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1978, and the influx of Syrian refugees after the outbreak of the Syrian crisis in 2011. Many Syrian families had to reconstitute their lives in Lebanon because of the crisis in their country, often in tented and informal settlements or in overpopulated or even abandoned buildings. This article focuses on the process of hosting Syrian refugees in Saida in Southern Lebanon after 2011. It explores service provisions and the two dominant types of housing for Syrian refugees: collective shelters and single apartments within local neighbourhoods. The article argues that mechanisms of exclusion emerge with intensity in cities like Saida that have received and accommodated multiple waves of displacement. Such mechanisms of exclusion in Saida are politically attuned to the historical depth of the hosting experience and emerge at multiple levels, both social and spatial. This is despite Saida’s mobilization to provide aid, and its departure from housing refugees in camps, which is based on a model of containment, and its move toward housing refugees across the urban landscape, which is based on a model of disbursement.