Local Community Experiences of Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey
The term 'host' is widely used but often unquestioned in relation to it's meaning in displacement and migration discourse and practice. 'Hosts' are often assumed to be the long established communities in to which refugees arrive, and yet, as we have been exploring in Refugee Hosts, this is not always the case. In this blog,…
This blog post is an extract from Zeynep Sahin’s book ‘Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East’ published in December 2018. The book examines the patterns of legal, political and institutional responses to large-scale Syrian forced migration and how Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, three of the world’s top refugee hosting countries, responded to…
Refugee Hosts' writer-in-residence, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, will participate in the 'Migrant Knowledge: Early Modern and Beyond' event at the University of Cambridge next week. This three-day public event will bring together academics, artists, and activists to 'explore alternative ways of thinking and knowing about migration – of people, things, and ideas – rooted in the…
Throughout our research in Lebanon and Jordan, the Refugee Hosts project has been tracing how, why and with what effect the residents of diverse neighbourhoods have been responding to the arrival and presence of refugees from Syria. In her latest contribution to our Reflections from the Field Series, Refugee Hosts PI Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh draws…
Accounting for the roles of local communities is a key aim of our project, and of the 'Localisation of Aid' agenda more broadly. However, as a result of the mainstream narratives that pervade the literature on conflict-induced displacement, efforts to properly engage with the local have been held back by a failure to fully recognise…
In this piece, Katharine T. Weatherhead reflects on the discursive implications of the term 'welcoming' when used in refugee-related research. In particular, she asks: does the term enable nuanced engagement with displacement as a series of overlapping, relational encounters, in turn disrupting traditional representations that depict refugees as a vulnerable 'burdens', and hosts as active…
Refugees are Dialectical Beings: Part Two by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford and Refugee Hosts Writer in Residence To the ones who are en route, the ones whose stomachs are compasses and whose compasses are manifestos of nothing… Refugees are dialectical beings I The aridity of a camp presupposes the aridity of life.…
Exhibited as part of the 2017 Venice Biennale, Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (Refugee Hosts' PI) and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (Refugee Hosts' Writer in Residence) were commissioned to co-author this photo-essay for the Tunisian Pavillion's exhibition space, The Absence of Paths. You can see the original publication on The Absence of Paths here, and read Yousif's poem, 'In arrival, feet flutter…
By Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford As we write about the Self, the image of the refugee always floats nearby. It floats palpably and metonymically, as both its own entity and marker. At this moment in time, the refugee has become the conceit of bare survival, the naked survivor whose corpus is no longer…
Photo Gallery: Baqa'a Camp, Jordan By Samar Maqusi, University College London Baqa’a camp in Jordan is one of six emergency camps established in 1968 to shelter Palestinian refugees fleeing the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; when first established, it sheltered around 18,000 refugees, on an area of 1.4 km2; this makes it the largest camp in Jordan. Today,…
Refugee Hosts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.