This article discusses how the Lebanese state has responded to displacement from Syria (2011–17), and how the resulting policy formulation processes and discourses have constructed the relationship between the hosting state and the refugee. It focuses especially on how this small state has negotiated its politics of reception and choice of policy tools amid dysfunctional institutions and political disputes. To this end, it uses the lens of Lebanon's model of sectarian power sharing to understand the polity's response to mass displacement. This process has been structured by the defining dynamics of the country's politics of sectarianism: slack governance, an elite fractured model, and a politics of dependence on external and domestic nonstate actors. The Lebanese model offers broader insights into types of coping mechanisms that emerge in the context of forced migration, notably when a formal refugee regime is absent. The article contends that states lacking a legal asylum framework and grappling with various governance hurdles are likely to draw on the repertoire of their political regime to deal with displacement.
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AbstractWith the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the Sunni-Shiite divide came back to the fore in regional politics. In this context, sectarian identities have now acquired a security dimension, as actors have started framing each other as existential threats. This article aims to examine the process by which sectarian identities become security issues and sources of conflict. We claim that primordial and instrumentalist/rationalist approaches to identity cannot capture the complexities of sectarianism in Middle East international relations. Instead, we draw on securitisation theory to examine the speech acts and narratives leading to the construction of sectarianism as a security issue in the Middle East. We examine Hezbollah's and Saudi Arabia's speech acts towards the Syria crisis as revelatory cases in the securitisation of the Sunni-Shiite divide in the post-2011 order.
How do host states with a refugee regime relying on a patchwork of competing and informal responses negotiate refugee return? Amid a stalemate, Lebanon has taken in more than one million Syrian refugees. As soon as conflict dynamics shifted in favour of the Syrian regime, politicians started calling for their repatriation. In this context, although conditions are not propitious for return, various state and non-state actors have rushed to devise return initiatives. The article discusses shifts in governing returns from the Lebanese state as the sole decision-maker to the dispersion of authority within competing structures. It shows how various actors have drawn on return as bargaining leverage. Their divergent agendas have enshrined disputed preferences over repatriation, obscuring accountability over refugee rights. Competing logics are to be contextualised in a historically informed analysis of the state and its refugee regime. They are further to be embedded in a geopolitical reading of the ways Syria's war has cut across Lebanese borders. The Lebanese case conveys broader insights. Host states may draw on fragmentation and informality to blur responsibility over safe and dignified return. Additionally, fragmentation and informality within a state make it harder for international actors to rally support for principles governing repatriation. 'It's dangerous to go back, but it's dangerous to stay here also' .
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