Theorizing refugeedom: becoming young political subjects in Beirut

Abstract

Refugees can be formed as "subjects" as they navigate forced displacement in countries that are not their own. In particular, everyday life as the politicized Other, and as humanitarianism's depoliticized beneficiary, can constitute them as political subjects. Understanding these produced subjects and subjectivities leads us to conceive of forced displacementor "refugeedom"as a human condition or experience of political (sub)alterity, within which inhere distinctive subjectivations and subjectivities. Drawing on fieldwork in Beirut, Lebanon, we use young Syrian and Iraqi refugees' experiences with everyday racism, violent bullying and racialized discrimination as heuristic lenses with which to see displacement's political subjects and subjectivities. We argue that the young refugees emerge as both political and moral subjects through core and defining struggles withinand againstthese politicizing constraints. We interpret their struggles as ambivalently and dynamically situated within humanitarianism's and racism's subjections and subjectivities. Yet we also found that occasionally the young refugees could eclipse these produced subjectivities to claim repoliticized subjecthoods distinct from those of humanitarianism and outside displacement's normal politics. We interpret these in Rancièrian terms as "political subjectivation." Abstracting our findings, we offer a simple theoretical architecture of refugeedom's subjectivations, subjects, and subjectivities as comprising humanitarianism's rights-bearing or juridical subject; the vulnerable and resilient, innocent and suffering subject; and the Othered or racialized subject, formed through the exclusions of displacement's politicized spaces. But we also conceive refugeedom as a space of values, and so the ground on which moral meaning and significance attach to agency and subjectivity.

“If I fall down, he will pick me up”: refugee hosts and everyday care in protracted displacement

“…That's why" As Hilal emphasized, hosting is a domestic practice created within and against external practices of exclusion. In providing a means for the men to remain in Amman and to claim their rights as refugees and urban residents, it can further be read as a form of political engagement (See also Riga et al, 2020 on the political of forced displacement; Jordan, 2022a).…”

Identity Politics and Syrian Refugees in Lebanon: Implications for Higher Education

“…At the same time, "the social origins of [their] suffering and distress, including poverty and discrimination, even if fleetingly recognized, are set aside " Fassin (2012: 21). In this way, refugees' lives become depoliticized as they are stripped of historical and political context (Riga et al 2020).…”

Syrians in Beirut post-2011. (c2020)

“…The majority of Syrians in Lebanon remain to be working class and the urban and rural poor according to Chit and Nayel (2013); nevertheless, the middle class and upper classes are also part of the newcomer social fabric. Studying young migrants in Beirut as political subjects, Riga et al (2020) state that young Syrians are able to avoid racialization by adopting the Lebanese dialect by "becoming Lebanese". One of their participants reported their ability to speak Lebanese Arabic without using the Syrian accent, in addition to using their fluency in French to allows them "to move between worlds".…”