Destabilizing
Borders
Possibilities of solidarity
in the encounter between volunteers and forced migrants
Maria Chiara
Coppola
ABSTRACT
With the recent closure of borders, which
prevents asylum seekers’ arrival to safer countries and their right to free
mobility, international solidarity with refugees resonates as a call for
action. In the name of solidarity, many forms of intervention and volunteerism
have been mobilized. However, the question of solidarity between “forced
migrants” and “international volunteers”, – a widely debated object of study –
within the context of the right to mobility, is hinged on an asymmetry and
ambiguous duality that deserves closer attention. While one form of mobility is
hindered and criminalized, the other is not only
possible but also encouraged. In this paper, a group of Italian volunteers and
displaced Syrians are analyzed together while they
are traveling within a van on the streets of Lebanon, in a common attempt to exercise
their right to mobility (which Syrians are not entitled to). I analyze what happened inside the van, where volunteers
intentionally make use of their privilege in order to
extend it to the refugee traveling with them. I look at both refugees and volunteers,
in order to investigate how these two categories might
actually co-constitute and re-produce each other. The van, as our “space of
mobility”, appears as painfully synonymous with whiteness, since the
volunteers’ presence went completely unquestioned, in contrast to that of the
refugee. The incident allows us to think of borders, bodies, spaces, and
whiteness together: borders cease to be mere national boundaries, becoming a
constant radical distinction in visibility and privilege instead. Acknowledging
and displaying this disparity and contradiction means calling into question
volunteers’ positionality. This reflection raises the question of how we can
explain the feasibility, the very possibility of practices of solidarity across
inequalities, and aims to orient us toward possible answers.
KEY WORDS
international solidarity, global mobility,
privileges, positionality, whiteness
INTRODUCTION
From January to April 2017, I
volunteered with an Italian organization in the north of Lebanon, inside a settlement
of wood and nylon huts, where Syrians who fled from the war have been living
for the last seven years. I was part of an Italian non-violent peace corps.
This is a small organization of Italian volunteers living inside the camp. They
aim to be side by side with the victims of conflicts and violence in order to defend and support them every day.
In this case, they live
together with Syrian people displaced by war, and now stuck in unsafe informal
settlements and considered illegal migrants. Being on their side, most of the time,
means accompanying them during otherwise unsafe movements and travels within
the country.
The context considered in
this study, Lebanon, reflects the contemporary hegemonic national discourse on
migration and security, where national borders are “sacralized”
and any acts outside its regulation are hence criminalized (Simon 2007, Welch
2002, Sharham 2010). Within Lebanon, Syrians cannot
apply for asylum since the country did not sign the Geneva International
Convention, which means that its legislation does not provide asylum
protection, and the State is relieved from all the duties it would otherwise
have towards Syrian asylum seekers. Certainly, the mass arrival of Syrians has
been a cause of social and economic pressures that tested the already poor and
insufficient Lebanese resources and infrastructures (PAX & Alef 2016). However, this influx of Syrians has been
associated by media with the threat of terrorism, increasing Lebanese fear and
intolerance toward the neighboring population.
Moreover, in 2015, Lebanon changed its policies on border regulation, shifting
from a position of indifference, almost blindness (Mourad,
2017), to one of closure and oppression toward Syrians. While before 2015 it
was possible for them to enter the country visa-free and then apply for a
residence permit, this law introduced category-based restrictions on border
access, valid only for Syrians, and set new rigid conditions (and fees) on
residence registration and renewal (PAX & Alef
2016, 18-20). After 2015, despite the enduring Syrian conflict, it has become
almost impossible for Syrians to find any legal route to enter Lebanon. This
law created the conditions to systematically generate illegal ingresses and
criminalize Syrians who have no other choice but to cross the border via
smuggling. Volunteers, conversely, get in and out of the country with a tourist
visa that they can easily obtain at the airport.
Within this context, I report
on a specific episode related to practices of solidarity between displaced
Syrians and the European (Italian) volunteers that took place within a precise
regime of border control and regulation.2 In this paper, I aim to contribute to
the debate on borders in two ways: on the one hand, I analyze
how borders affect human encounters; on the other hand, I point at how certain
encounters and solidarities across inequalities can destabilize such “b/orders”
(Van Houtum & Kramsch
2005).
Firstly, I will present the
case: Italian volunteers and displaced Syrians are captured together while they
are traveling within a van through the streets of Lebanon, in a common attempt
to exercise their right to mobility (which Syrians are not entitled to).
Secondly, the incident will be unpacked as many borders will come to the
surface. I consider how national borders intervene on the bodies of Syrians who
cross them outside their regulation. Then, I follow the traveling of borders
themselves, their continuous slippage and reproduction in public space. This
movement raises questions about where and how borders are reproduced and become
embedded in everyday life. Moreover, it shifts our attention from national
borders to other divides that, over time, have informed an understanding of the
world as hierarchically nationally ordered. In the second section, drawing on
theories of the racialization of mobility, I look at the convergence of
borders, bodies, and space in the case of the two differently legitimized but
co-present bodies of volunteers and of refugees within the van. What does the
co-presence of European volunteers and Syrian refugees tell us about the
different possibilities for visibility while traveling and about the politics
of mobility which define such possibilities?3 Finally, and most importantly, I
ask how the volunteer’s and the refugee’s bodies implicate each other in their
visibility.
In this paper, I assert the
necessity to consider volunteers and refugees together in borders and migration
studies. As these subjects are already hierarchically ordered in their
encounter, I propose that their position needs to be dialectically understood.
As Gaztambide-Fernández writes: “the subject
positions are largely enforced – yet sometimes contested – through the manifold
human encounters that are the definitive marker of the complex social world at
the turn of the 21st century” (R. Gaztambide-Fernández,
2012, 45). This investigation engages with the ambivalence that arises in
discussions of borders and migration. Borders legitimate and naturalize the
control of movements of people around the globe by closing to some and opening
to others; that is, not everybody who crosses borders is made migrant – others
are prized as volunteers. The work of analyzing this
contradiction prompts me to question my positionality as a researcher and as a
volunteer. I will focus on this task in the last part of this paper. This
paper, however, actually originated from reflections
on my position, on what allowed and legitimized my travel and my presence
there. I thus adopt reflexivity and positionality as necessary methodological
means to deal with questions of borders and mobility in our global,
asymmetrically interconnected present.
DISOBEYING
“B/ORDERS” – PRACTICES OF DESTABILIZATION
One of the main
responsibilities of the volunteers in Lebanon is to accompany refugees during
their movement through the country. The main offices and hospitals are situated
in the bigger cities, Beirut and Tripoli, located in the center
of the country – a geographically central position which reflects the
politically central position of these cities as symbols of the state and its
authority. As such, travel toward these central places is regulated by soldiers
at checkpoints positioned on the main roads, with more checkpoints closer to
the city. These checkpoints stand as deterrent barriers around the capital,
filtering who is allowed access and who is considered a threat. Cars can drive
through them undisturbed, but a soldier can randomly stop any of them and
inspect the documents of its passengers. Syrians without documents would be
arrested. Volunteers accompany Syrians mainly in order to
prevent their arrest, or, if this is unsuccessful, to quickly activate an aid
chain of lawyers and activists working to monitor arrests and to assist in
getting people released.
One day, I was traveling with
A and F, two other volunteers, and Q, a twenty-four-years-old Syrian man living
in the same camp.4 As usual, we were traveling on a communal van, part of the
public transportation in Lebanon. Together with five or six other passengers,
we were speeding toward the city, where Q had an appointment at a hospital. He
had no regular residence permit and no documents with him, except for Syrian
documents. Once at the checkpoint, the soldier stopped the minivan, opened the
door, and asked for all men’s documents – women were never asked for documents according to the social norm. Q handed over his Syrian ID
card; the soldier asked Q to exit the van and follow him. Until that moment we
were sitting silently, one row in front of Q. Then, before Q got up, F said to
the soldier, “Don’t worry, he is with us”. We would explain that he was “with
us” to assure the soldier that Q’s travel was in a way allowed, legitimized.
Initially, we would speak in
English, then a bit in Arabic, but we would switch between the two languages.
The practice of emphasizing our Westernness served as
our pass(port). We would rely on our physical aspect, our way of dressing, on
the red cover of our European passport and, mainly, we would talk in English
instead of Arabic (even when we could have) and Italian (our own language),
even if the soldier could not understand English. Everything worked to manifest
our privileged position as white Western Europeans. We would not mention the
name of the organization, which would have sounded meaningless to the soldier,
and would not have given us any legitimate role; moreover, the stamp on the
passport actually labeled us
as tourists.
However, we could be
perceived as fitting the image of the Western humanitarian worker, and we hoped
this would give us the authority to continue our travel.
The soldier stood for a while
looking at the four of us, then he turned to Q: “you should not leave the
camp”. And he finally let us go. “Next time do not leave the camp”, he
repeated, as a warning. The van left, we all breathed a long sigh of relief,
and the fear that Q could be arrested left us. One of the passengers, a
Lebanese man sitting in the front, turned to Q, remarking, once again, that as
a displaced Syrian, he was not allowed to leave the camp.
BORDERS AT
WORK
During this episode, national
borders are dispersed everywhere: the Lebanese geographical boundaries, the
camp, and the border recreated by the checkpoints toward the county’s urban
power centers (the capital, as well as government
buildings). The very act of passing through any of them – even when unavoidable
(fleeing from war, or having to go to hospitals) – marks Syrian bodies as “trespassers”,
as “transgressors”, “culprits” and “threats” for the country and its
inhabitants.
Firstly, let me briefly
elaborate on how I understand this “criminalization” through (border)
regulation. None of these borders exist physically, and they are not
impenetrable. Syrians could always cross them. Not even the national boundaries
have been completely closed to them, even if in 2015 the measures to limit the
issuance of visas drastically reduced the number of Syrians eligible to apply
for it. This law maintained few possibilities for Syrians to cross the border according to the rules – for instance, there are visas
allotted for “humanitarian reasons”, but only for “extreme humanitarian cases”,
in which compliance is highly discretionary and extremely unlikely (PAX & Alef 2016). The existence of this near-fictitious chance
preserves the differentiation between a legal and an illegal order and shifts
responsibility and guilt onto Syrians when they resort to smuggling. This
border regulation systematically produced the crime and the conditions for
Syrians to “commit” it – remember that, before 2014, Syrians could cross the
border visa-free.5 “To cross” a border turned into breaching or violating it.
Syrians, more than fleeing subjects, transnational displaced people, become
illegal migrants, criminals, violators.6
Similarly, the soldier and
the passenger referred to the camp as a delimited, separated, closed area. But
this camp, like almost any other in Lebanon, was an unofficial, informal camp,
a self- arranged grouping of huts arising on a former farmer’s land, with
neither precise boundaries nor walls or fences. Still, refugees were expected
to comply with this re-produced border separating citizens and non-citizens, as
the soldier in the van reminded Q. Once again, crossing an imaginary border
made Syrians responsible for transgressing the common order.
Both the checkpoints and the
camp show that national boundaries, defending the integrity of the nation, have
been moved “from the ‘edge’ to the ‘center’ of public
space” (Balibar 1998, 111). They operate not only as
lines to (not) be crossed but as filtering systems (Balibar
1998) and isolating zones, hiding and removing the presence of undesired Syrian
refugees from sight. However, it also suggests that borders are not relevant as
physical, visual objects. As Henk Van Houtum and Olivier Kramsch
notice, in their physical morphology, they are, instead, relevant because of
the “representation and interpretation that they embody” and their
“objectification and realization through everyday social practices” (Van Houtum & Kramsch 2005, 3).
Borders are entrenched through their daily reproduction operated by different
actors. We see the border divide being accepted and naturalized, and people
drawing a constant division between an "us" and a "them" (in this case, for instance, by the soldier and
by the passenger). Borders thus become matrices informing our everyday
orientation toward who is perceived as other. These “decisive borders” (Balibar, 111) operate in several domains of our everyday
lives. They affect the possibilities for solidarity – as the prejudice towards
the passenger might demonstrate. It is of great importance to consider how
borders are brought into the terrain of daily life, because here they can be
negotiated, reinforced, or conversely destabilized, as volunteers’ acts can
show.
Thus, I am looking inside the
van, where the soldier who opened the door starts asking for documents. A
“border gaze” reverberates within the van: an invisible, impenetrable border (Sharham 2010, 75). Toward this border gaze, I now turn my
attention. Volunteers and Syrians are crossed by this gaze. But, even though
they are both foreigners in the country, their presence in the van is
questioned in a different way The soldier’s gaze
positions volunteers and refugees and their belonging in that space of the van
differently. What (other) kind of “b/order” is at work here? Which matrices
inform and enable the volunteers’ practice, as well as the soldiers’ decision?
In this regard, the van, both
a means of movement and a space of control and restriction, is understood as a
metaphoric space of human mobility. Sitting in the van means actualizing the
effective feasibility of global mobility, being able to exercise our freedom to
move once we have crossed the borders. The “border gaze” exerted in the van
filtered who was entitled to global mobility and who was not. Volunteers’
legitimacy and authority result from a precise regime of global border control.
The soldier’s gaze did not only evoke and reproduce a national border which
separates national citizens and “foreigners”, but also the very imperial border
that defined who can move over the globe and who can’t - who can be a “global
citizen” and who is cut out (Mignolo 2000, 2006).
VOLUNTEERS AND
REFUGEES AT THE CONVERGENCE OF BORDERS, BODIES, AND SPACES
Consider Shahram
Khosravi’s words: “[the border] gaze is not an
innocent act of seeing, but an episteme determining who/what is visible and
invisible” (Khosravi 2010, 76). The issue of
visibility/invisibility, if cautiously applied to this context, can offer
important insights. Khosravi refers to a border gaze
exercised on migrant’s bodies especially inside Europe, where they are
objectified by racial modes of seeing. They are invisible because they are not
recognized as an equal social and political existence, but they are always
noticeable and observed. Questions of visibility and invisibility have also
been central to studies about the systematic whiteness of contexts such as the
academy and the airport, as Sara Ahmed discusses in her “A phenomenology of
whiteness” (Ahmed 2007). Whiteness, more than just a characteristic or property
of these bodies, is the starting point, “the background”, “the behind”.
Whiteness makes non-white bodies stick out while guaranteeing white bodies
un-noticeability. This invisibility reflects and allows bodies’ access,
orientation, and movement in the space, by making these bodies feel familiar or
alike with it.
Making necessary distinctions,
I think it is possible to draw a parallel between these theories and the
episode of the van. In the van, it is Q’s invisibility that allows him a safe
passage and, in fact, until the checkpoint and the control of documents, the
body of Q, as well as of other Syrians, does not stand out; is not visible.
Conversely, the volunteers’ presence is mainly noticed, depending on their
physical appearance or clothing. However, I suggest that the volunteers’
attempt to be recognizable, in particular as white
Europeans, as well as the request to pass and its verbalization in English, in
order to make their white privilege explicit, all demonstrate that the
implications of visibility/invisibility are overturned. When volunteers kept on
using a foreign language (specifically English), they did not mean to engage in
dialogue or to be understood, but to gain the legitimization to travel, and to
extend that to the (potentially) criminalized body of Q. We spoke English (not
Arabic or Italian) to display our privileged presence and positionality within
the global matrix, reminding the soldier that “white” (and English-speaking)
entails an entitlement to safe and undisputed mobility. Volunteers knew that, when
“caught” in this space of mobility, the co-presence of their phenotypical
characteristics and their visibility would make the difference, simply for how
they “belonged” in the van.
By looking at how the bodies
of volunteers and refugees respectively can inhabit the same space, that of the
van, differently, we experience the politics of borders, mobility, and
migration as intertwined and racialized domains. Indeed, “racialized borders”
regulate the movement of people (Shahram 2010, 4,
40). Volunteers feel confident, almost familiar within that site of mobility
and control. This familiarity recalls Ahmed’s work on whiteness and the
relation between spaces and bodies: as certain spaces
have extended the surface of white bodies, these bodies can live, move, stand
in this space unnoticed, unquestioned, unstopped. In contrast to Syrians, the
volunteers’ presence in the van was normalized by the marks of their privilege
(Ahmed 2007, 149). The space of the van suggests that the terrain of global
mobility (of which the van is a symbolic embodiment) is informed by a “default
position” of whiteness and reminds us of the consequential “difference” once
one does not happen to be white (or in the possession of the “right” passport).
The van is a space of
asymmetric mobility, one characterized by two types of mobilities:
one that is questioned and limited and one that is not. Consequently, Syrians
are put in a position of need and dependency on volunteers. The very presence
of European volunteers’ bodies in the van evokes a history of coloniality (Bhimani & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2011), which separate volunteers and
refugees on hierarchical, intertwined lines. The matrix operating in this daily
practice confirms the contemporary consistency of colonial and imperial
differences between different nationalities (Mignolo
2006). For this reason, when studying borders and migration, our attention
should be focused not only on refugees as if they were the only “border-
crossers”: there are also the volunteers, who arrived in Lebanon and sat beside
them in the van. Different nationalities come with different entitlements and
privileges, uniquely regulating their right to mobility, giving one the “right”
and possibility to help while putting the other in the (forced) condition of
being helped.
ON THE
VOLUNTEERS, THE FREE TRAVELERS, THE GLOBAL CITIZENS, ME.
As Anton Schutz points out,
“through politico-juridical discourse and regulation, this [border] system” has
“created a politicized human being (a citizen of a nation-state) and a ...
‘no-longer- human being”’ (quoted in Sharham 2010). I
invite the reader to consider his words, to insist on the tight hierarchical,
dialectic relation that keeps embedded together both the figure of the citizen,
here an international traveler, even a rescuer, or
fieldworker, and the figure of the “needy”, the disempowered other. These two
subjectivities are not only intertwined but implicated in a colonial present. A
broad strand of literature has focused on how border regulation, policies, and
discourses have produced the refugee as a “de-politicized” subject. I suggest
here, the need and importance to focus on the parallel creation of the figure
of the “international volunteer” as a “global citizen”, and its implication
with the de-politicization of the other as “the needy”.
The figure of “the volunteer”
arises as a central mobile subject in the arena of global mobility. European
governments and institutions and UN agencies promote several fellowship
programs for young citizens to volunteer abroad in projects of international solidarity
and social- economic development. For instance, in support of refugees trapped
in refugee camps. The figure of the volunteer enters the same international
order and regulation of global mobility that sets the conditions for asylum
seekers and refugees to be vulnerable and dependent on others (Black 1994), and
volunteers might be one of their “rescuers”. The regime of border regulation
has thus morally connoted two opposite mobile subjects: the illegal, needy
migrant, un-free and dependent, and the voluntary helper, the rescuer,
supportive and sympathetic. These figures are captured here in their dialectic
dependency. Their encounter might maintain the dual system of “repression” and
“compassion” (Fassin 2005) in which refugees are
trapped inside camps. Finally, in this relation of dependency of refugees on
volunteers, the border between “us” and “them” operates ordered on a colonial
divide.
Volunteerism is particularly
moralized in Western Europe (Muehlebach 2012, Rozakou 2016) as much as their global mobility: Europeans
are not only endowed with the right to movement, but such mobility is framed as
unproblematic, desirable, and even necessary. Therefore, there is an explicit
necessity for volunteers, including myself, to engage with our positionality
when going to volunteer in Lebanon: to consider what our privileged position as
mobile volunteers – in my case also as a researcher – in such a racialized
space of mobility not only is but, moreover, can be? How, in this view, might
we be taking up this space, standing beside and supporting “illegal” travelers?
As young, white, able-bodied,
cisgender, Italian citizens, me and the other volunteers of the van fit with a
widespread public image that is fashioned by European institutions promoting a
model of “active citizenship” (Rozakou 2106), and
embodied by the figure of the young volunteer, moralized (white) figure,
representative of European citizens. With the practice of accompaniments, the aforementioned group of volunteers takes their positionality
into account and makes the first step towards realizing the possibility for
solidarity within historically hierarchical and unequal relationships.
The Italian organization
shows one way to critically engage with the problematic conceptualization of
necessary and desired volunteerism, for instance when aspiring volunteers apply
to be part of it. The organization asks for their engagements beyond the
request for skills or professionalism because such criteria easily and
uncritically put volunteers in a position of superiority and power over the
refugees. Requiring or claiming volunteers to have “professional skills” to be
exported abroad, in fact, would mainly function as a justification for their
travel, by assuming that such skills are lacking,
needed, awaited, necessary – thus reinforcing the diametrical position of
dependency in which those who cannot travel are fixed. Instead, their practices
of solidarity start by acknowledging that volunteers’ passports, and the privilege
linked to them, are the very factor enabling their presence abroad, in the camp
(and the van), more than particular personal skills.
Thus, owing to their privilege, they can facilitate Syrians’ safe mobility
within the country. By accompanying migrants, volunteers respond to their
privilege and subvert its exceptionality. They subvert the logic that
classifies and categorizes different bodies, defining who can travel and who
cannot, that governs the possibilities for global mobility.
CONCLUSION
Instead of studying the
crossing of borders by refugees and volunteers as separate phenomena, in this
paper, I looked at these figures as they appeared together in the shared space
of the van. Firstly, I showed how our van, our space of mobility, became painfully
synonymous with whiteness – how the volunteers’ presence went completely
unquestioned in contrast to that of the refugee. Secondly, by considering them
together, we saw the emergence of a colonial divide underpinning the politics
of global mobility which still affects the way in which different bodies can
live, move and extend into different spaces. I considered, hence, how practices
of aid can become highly problematic due to how the figures of the volunteer
and the refugee are already intertwined in a historical, political,
hierarchical relationship. These two figures are therefore ordered on a similar
divide and re-enforcing a relation of dependency.
I thus proposed the urgency
for volunteers to consider their positionality, a necessary precondition for
the possibility of solidarity. By doing so, volunteers and refugees delve into
the social and historical conditions, privileges, and inequalities which
grounded their encounter, in order to find a different
way to engage with them. Volunteers resorting to their passport is one possible
outcome: it offers them “the possibility to develop discursive spaces” together
with refugees, to “begin to explore [their] relationship with one another” (Sehdev 2011, 272) within an imperial and racist terrain.
This paper aimed to elicit
questions not only on how to participate in practices of solidarity and support
the other’s movements, but also how to report on them without remaining
embedded in Eurocentric, or better, modern/colonial categories of thought: without
reproducing
the Eurocentric hierarchical
framing of “us” and “them”. The border I explored between volunteers and
refugees is a matrix that would affect our understanding of solidarity by
ordering solidarity relations on the axis us-them. However, we should
acknowledge that volunteers and refugees’ encounter is already embedded in this
dilemmatic duality, bringing to a sterile point our queries on the volunteers’
effective disruption or reproduction of hierarchies in practices of help toward
refugees.
In a way, this volunteers’
practice actually warns that “we are stuck” (Ahmed
2007), in showing volunteers acting as a pass for Syrians and enabling, solely
thanks to their presence, their capacity to move in Lebanon. However,
volunteers’ practice brings this border – between them and refugees – to the
surface, where the order that has been fixed can be destabilized. It aims to
unmask the pervasiveness and implications of our privileges and bring them to
the surface, to contrast their predisposition to remain on the background,
where they turn invisible. Being concerned with how these two categories might actually co-constitute and re-produce each other means,
firstly, refusing to accept volunteers’ and refugees’ unequal positions as a
given, but instead as historically and politically produced. It also means
challenging the idea of the need for “our” intervention and unmasking the
invisible mark of privilege on which our position is hinged. It helps to keep
open “the force of the critique” (Ahmed 2007, 165) toward this form of human
encounter – between “international volunteers” and “forced migrants” – before
it is normalized as an encounter that can be planned by one side, taking its
unequal setting for granted; before we dismiss its facet of marker of the current
regime of control over global mobility that reinforce and maintain colonial
differences.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Firstly, I would like to
thank the Syrian refugees and the volunteers mentioned in this article and many
others who are still resisting in the north of Lebanon. Secondly, this article
would not have been possible without the support of Dusting Gordon, who
critically guided me through the process. I would also like to thank the
anonymous reviewers for their comments and feedback, which pushed me further in
the elaboration of the article. Finally, I am thankful to many friends who,
sometimes unknowingly, inspired me with their work and their words, and
stimulated many of the ideas here explored: among them, in
particular, Peter Teunissen, Olivier Kramsch, Kolar Aparna and Ileana Tauscher. I preciously
keep with me all the conversations and discussions we had together.
FOOTNOTES
2 For the purpose of my
argument, as for the success of volunteers’ intervention, volunteers must be
understood as white Western, thus privileged, citizens, more than just
Italians. As I will show in the following sections, volunteers accrue the
necessary authority to defend Syrians by making evident their provenance from
the white Western world. Moreover, I consider them firstly as European, to
recall European historical production of the image of global citizenship in regard to its citizens, and the dispatching of volunteers
around the globe, in opposition to the problematized migration of migrants come
from the “Global South”.
3 Here, I refer to Syrian as “refugees” even
though they do not have the legal status in Lebanon. I do not use it as a legal
category but I adopt the emic definition of ‘refugee’; in the understanding of
volunteers and organizations operating with refugees, Syrians are recognized as
entitled to asylum protection.
4 Names are hidden to guarantee anonymity
5 For more Information about the new legislation
see for instance: https://lb.boell.org/en/2015/05/05/visa- requirements-syrians-lebanon-continues-destabilize
6 Police practices toward undocumented Syrians
changed depending on whether they entered the country legally or illegally: so whether they crossed the border before or after 2015.
Displaced Syrians who arrived before 2015, but could not renew the residence
permit after, would also be arrested but detained to a lesser degree than
Syrians arriving after 2015 who did not have any documented authorized
entrance. Being “marked” by smuggling, they were subjected to much more
suspicious controls if arrested. The problems thus appeared to be not so much
having, or not having, a legal status in Lebanon (that almost no one had) but
the very act of crossing the border.
REFERENCES
Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London:
Routledge.
Ahmed, Sara. 2007. “A
phenomenology of whiteness”. Feminist Theory, 8(2):
149–68.
Balibar, Étienne.
2009. “At the Borders of Europe”. In Étienne Balibar,
(ed,), translated by James Swenson We the people of Europe?, 1-10.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Balibar, Étienne.
2009. “World Borders, Political Borders”. In Étienne Balibar,
(ed,), translated by James Swenson We the people of Europe?, 101-14.
Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.
Beirut Research and
Innovation Center, Lebanese Center
For Studies and Research. 2015. “Citizens perceptions of security threats
stemming from the Syrian refugee presence in Lebanon”. International Alert. Available Online: http://www.international-
Alert.org/sites/default/files/Lebanon_SSRSyrianRefugees_EN_2015.pdf (Accessed
April 2, 2018)
Bhimani, Salima and Gaztambide-Fernández,
Ruben. 2011. “Specters of Kant: Can there be a post-
colonial cosmopolitanism?” Paper presented at the Annual Curriculum and Pedagogy
Conference, Akron, OH.
Black, Richard. 1994.
“Livelihoods under Stress: A Case Study of Refugee Vulnerability in Greece”. Journal of Refugee Studies, 7(4): 360-377.
Fassin, Didier.
2005. “Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in
France”. Cultural Anthropology, 20(3): 362-87.
Gaztambide-Fernández, Ruben A.
2012. “Decolonization and the pedagogy of solidarity”. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1 (1):
41-67.
Jagarnathsingh, A., Ayoub, N., Blakal, M., Kahwagi, M.N., Yammine, L., Younes, M. AbiYaghi, M.N. and Yehia, N. 2016. “Formal informality, brokering mechanisms,
and illegality: the impact of the Lebanese state’s policies on Syrian refugees’
daily lives.” Beirut: Lebanon Support.
Khosravi, Shahram. 2010. “Illegal’ traveler: an auto-ethnography of borders. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Mignolo, Walter.
2000. “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical
Cosmopolitanism”. Public Culture, 12(3):
721-48.
Mignolo, Walter.
2006. “Citizenship, knowledge, and the limits of humanity”. American Literary History, 18(2): 312-31.
Mourad, L. 2017.
“Inaction as Policy-Making: Understanding Lebanon’s Early Response to the
Refugee Influx”. Project of Middle East Political
Science. Available Online:
https://pomeps.org/2017/03/29/inaction-as-policy-making-understanding-lebanons-early-
response-to-the-refugee-influx/ (Accessed April 2, 2018)
Muehlebach, Andrea.
2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
PAX & ALEF, 2016. Trapped in Lebanon. Available Online: https://alefliban.org/wp
content/uploads/2016/11/Trapped-In-Lebanon-_ALEF_PAX_May2016.pdf (Accessed April 2,
2018)
Rozakou, Katerina.
2016. “Crafting the Volunteer: Voluntary Associations and the Reformation of
Sociality”. Journal of Modern Greek Studies. 34(1):
79-102. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed June 21, 2018).
Sehdev, Robinder. 2011. “People of Colour in Treaty”. In Ashok Mathur, Jonathan Dewar and Mike DeGagné,
(eds.), Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the lens of
cultural diversity, 263-74. Ottawa, ON.: Aboriginal Healing Foundation.
Simon, Jonathan. 2007. Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American
Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schütz, Anton.
2000. “Thinking the law with and against Luhmann,
Legendre and Agamben”. Law and Critique, 11(2): 107–36.
Van Houtum,
Henk, Kramsch Olivier, and Zierhofer Wolfgang, eds. 2005. B/ordering space. Ashgate, UK:
Aldershot.
Welch, Michael. 2002. Detained: Immigration Laws and the Expanding I.N.S. Jail Complex.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.