How is it possible to gain a sense that you have a voice and that your life matters when you have lost everything and live your life as a ‘displaced person’ in extreme precarity? We explore this question by examining the mundane everyday organizing practices of Syrian refugees living in tented settlements in Lebanon. Contrasting traditional empirical settings within organization studies where an already placed and mattering subject can be assumed, our context provides an opportunity to reveal how relations of recognition and mattering become constituted, and how subjects in precarious settings become enacted as such. Specifically, drawing on theories on the relational enactment of self and other, we show how material-discursive boundary-making and invitational practices—organizing a home, cooking and eating, and organizing a digital ‘home’—function to enact relational host/guest subject positions. We also disclose how these guest/host relationalities create the conditions of possibility for the enactment of a subject that matters, and for the despair enacted in everyday precarious life to transform into ‘undefeated despair’.

This study explores the role of mobile phones in livelihood creation among Syrian refugees in informal tented settlements in Akkar Governorate and the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Drawing on fortyfive interviews with Syrian refugees and ten interviews with aid workers, the study highlights the importance of mobile phones in reviving, maintaining and leveraging social capital for the purpose of securing livelihoods in a context of precarity and restricted movement. We find that mobile phones offer important means for reviving social networks in exile, managing supportive relationships that have been established in Lebanon and liaising with employers. As such, they constitute important tools for coping with a context shaped by legal exclusion, restricted movement, police harassment, decentralised aid provision and a geographical dispersal of support networks, even as they remain a costly investment with uncertain returns.

In the 1970s, communities of the Kalinga sub-ethnic group in the Cordillera Mountains in northern Philippines successfully halted the construction of a series of hydroelectric dams along their main waterway, the Chico River, which would have caused their displacement. Based on interviews and archival research, the article examines the role played by a Kalinga political institution known as the bodong or peace pact in the Kalingas’ mobilisation against the dam project, using an analytical framework drawn from Charles Tilly's and Sidney Tarrow's work on contentious politics.

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