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Year:: 2020
Contributor:: Saadeh, Ryan (creator); Winder, Alex (thesis advisor); Muhanna, Elias (reader); Brown University. Middle East Studies (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Refugees; Syria; Lebanon; Security; Insecurity; Sovereignty; Securitization
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/446t-3045

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Abstract:: Since 2017, Lebanese politicians have increasingly urged Syrians to return to Syria, citing the presence of nearly 1.5 million displaced Syrians in Lebanon as sources of instability, social tensions, and general economic ills. But in 2019, the criminalization and marginalization of Syrians in Lebanon reached a new peak as demands for Syrians to return to their war-torn country coincided with material pressures for them to do so. Despite pre-existing government corruption, economic precarity, environmental degradation, reliance on clientelism and patronage networks, and poor infrastructural development afflicting a wide segment of the Lebanese population, it is nevertheless the presence of refugees which receives a widespread and disproportionate amount of blame for the conditions in Lebanon. However, the “securitization” and marginalization of Syrian refugees in Lebanon is not simply a reaction to the Syrian Civil War. I argue that the treatment of Syrians in Lebanon as threats post-2011 is shaped by anxieties of national sovereignty and identity that emerged in the twentieth century, the post-Cold War reconfiguration of sovereignty, and the securitization of migration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These present-day ethnonationalist and class-coded antagonisms of Lebanese towards Syrians are derived in part from a post-colonial struggle for statehood and sovereignty. Within this struggle, various iterations of Lebanese nationalism and visions for Lebanese identity were articulated in relation to and interwound with ethno-sectarian and class-coded conceptualizations of Syria and Syrian identity. Furthermore, the prevailing conception that Lebanon is a “weak” or “fragile” state, developed during the post-Cold War period in wake of the Lebanese Civil War, masks dynamics of contentious plural governance and security provision in Lebanon that offer alternative understandings of insecurity and state sovereignty. Lebanese politicians elevate ethnonationalist and ethno-sectarian frameworks to mask other cross-cutting socioeconomic and geographic factors that are at play within Lebanese society. By “signaling out” to international actors using globalized discourses of insecurity and preconceptions of Lebanese politics and society as sectarian, fragile, and generous towards displaced populations, these politicians covertly appeal to international donors and political allies to advance their political aims. This has resulted in a rhetoric that in effect shifts discussion of vulnerable displaced persons as at risk instead to as a risk. Thus, the Lebanese government and para-state security actors’ response to the post-2011 refugee crisis by a “push for return” capitalizes upon language describing Syrians as threats to the Lebanese social fabric, resulting in increased violence and precarity for Syrians in Lebanon.
Notes:: Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2020; Concentration: Middle East Studies

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Saadeh, Ryan, "From Brother to Other: Sovereignty, (In)security, and the Construction of Syrians as “Threats” in Lebanon" (2020). Middle East Studies Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/446t-3045

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Middle East Studies Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Middle East Studies department.
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From Brother to Other: Sovereignty, (In)security, and the Construction of Syrians as “Threats” in Lebanon