Estella Carpi, The Politics of Crisis-Making. Forced Displacement and Cultures of Assistance in Lebanon (Indiana University Press, 2023).
Front cover artwork by Syrian artist, visual storyteller, and clown Dima Nashawi.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Estella Carpi (EC): This book is not the planned output of a single project; this means I did not start this research with the a priori purpose of writing a book. This book is instead the result of my engagement with the practice and thought of humanitarianism and other forms of crisis management, as well as of my relationships with people in Beirut’s southern suburbs (called Dahiye Janubiyye in Arabic) and the northern governorate of Akkar. As such, the book is an attempt to weave together years of doctoral and postdoctoral research on the identity politics of humanitarian aid provision and the relational history between humanitarians, political actors, and ordinary residents of Dahiye and Akkar.
As an author, I believe, I have been quite demanding with my readers, as they will need to process a large number of accounts from different segments of Lebanon’s society, including refugees from Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Sudan, and Lebanese internally displaced people. In this sense, it is a polyphonic ethnography, where I really wanted to unearth the complexities that underlie everyday talk around the humanitarian experience in Lebanon.
I also intended to interrogate the unquestionably positive aura with which humanitarianism vests itself: an unquestionability which makes any sort of critique a taboo, and some acts of assistance—especially those championed by the Western world—well-intended. In my critical analysis, humanitarianism emerges as a pillar of today’s neocolonial morality, centered on including and taking care of the war-affected Global South. Against this backdrop, this book conveys my endeavor to question the taboos of the humanitarian lifeworld where we always need to talk about “refugees” or “IDPs” and impersonal “crises” but not about the economic status of those who assist the crisis-affected, and not about the fictitious boundaries of such social memberships. The purpose was also de-exceptionalizing humanitarianism, that is not an aberration in the contemporary world, as we all ended up dealing with it.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
EC: This book’s main rationale revolves around how it is not crisis per se that impacts people’s lives in positive or negative ways, but it is rather crisis management and the crisis discourse which can powerfully reshuffle social relations, polities, and class-based groups. Naming this reshuffling as “crisis-making,” it primarily speaks to three tropes of academic literature: the wrestling between politics, neutrality, and ethics; the ethnocracy of the assistance regime; and the moral economy of transnational humanitarianism in Lebanon.
Much has been written on humanitarianism as a form of politics; I also corroborate this idea, but it should not be the end of the story. How are the political underpinnings of humanitarianism continuously renegotiated across different social groups and polities, and how does it become a lifeworld? These are the generative questions that the book grapple with.
In this framework, a recurrent theme is the negative fetishization of local politics, while Western politics, extensively operated through humanitarianism in Lebanon, is always out of the question as a problematic source of partisanship, favoritism, and epistemic violence. With such a predominant politics of blaming the local and self-indulging, a common broken record from NGOs is that, “in a country like this,” they do what they can. By this token, anthropologists critical of humanitarianism are often accused of generating an echo chamber of armchair ranting; instead, I believe that shrugging off the politicization of aid only because—from Yugoslavia’s to Sri Lanka’s and Lebanon’s war-induced humanitarian economies—is not a new discussion, and is problematic, to say the least. It should still be discussed right because its workings—as much as the denial of the actors using aid as a political strategy—are deeply rooted and longstanding.
Finally, war cannot be the mere ecology of humanitarianism in Lebanon, which experiences repeated urban destructions and a collapsed welfare system. By acknowledging such an intersection, the book also provides a brief review of the local history of assistance provision and the histories of urban and infrastructural reconstruction, such as the Elyssar and Solidere projects in the 1990s, the Waad project after the July 2006 war in Dahiye, and the reconstruction of the Beirut eastern suburbs in the aftermath of the 2020 Beirut port explosion.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
EC: This book embodies my first manuscript-length effort to weave a fil rouge across different research endeavors which happened over a decade-long span. As an output combining more than one research experience in Lebanon, it enabled me to use my previous expertise in a twofold way: first, as someone who had worked in the charity sector and, indeed, came up with the book’s research questions for a PhD project some years after. And second, I found my expertise in linguistic anthropology and my previous MPhil research on Lebanon’s everyday speech of great help. Indeed, conducting fieldwork in Levantine Arabic and knowing the theoretical areas where identity work and everyday speech intersects made me well-placed to question humanitarianism as an encompassing terminology (for example, when I discuss Lebanese Shiite NGOs) and as a politics of self-identification influenced by social atmospheres.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
EC: I hope I will have academics as well as practitioners and policymakers among my readership. While the book largely speaks to long-standing academic debates such as political neutrality and social cohesion, it intends to inform practice and policy by offering historical evidence of how solidarity and empathy, the presumably underlying messages of humanitarianism, are getting lost in the contemporary bureaucratization of the humanitarian experience. I particularly hope this work impacts the way professional recruitment in the humanitarian sector is organized across unequal political geographies, and how crisis response, often being decontextualized, is (mis)understood in hegemonic policy and practice.
In terms of social impact, I can already affirm that the book is often being perceived as standing “against humanitarianism.” In a sense, it certainly is: who would not stand against it, if they care about a healthy functioning of politics and society? Humanitarianism, indeed, comes as a litmus paper of such a functioning. However, I am still strongly hopeful that the book succeeds in also unravelling the vastly nuanced ways of being a humanitarian.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
EC: At the moment, I am pursuing two research ideas that are about different geographic contexts but, importantly, they relate to one another. First, I am presently exploring how group-oriented ideas and practices—such as access to and choice of healthcare—travel from one group to another. I am broadening my knowledge of crowd psychology and of the healthcare biographies of Syrian and Lebanese Turkmens in Akkar. For this purpose, I question identity politics and sectarianism as the exclusive start of any conversation in Lebanon. In line with the “ethnicization of needs and services,” a key concept I unpack in the book, my endeavor is to document the fluid character of social membership in Lebanon.
Likewise, in Istanbul, a city historically affected by earthquakes, where I also lived, I am interested in understanding how to make state and grassroots-led disaster knowledge cognizant of migrants’ and refugees’ living conditions and access to safer housing. Both research ideas—apparently antithetical in that they question the social group as a well-bounded entity to then reinstate it—suggest how, on the one hand, there is no self-evidence in any group belonging but, on the other, the peculiarities of each group should not go unheeded as they reveal a lot about the outgroup’s gaze and the ingroup’s response to it.
J: What is the impact of the presence of such a huge number of organizations on the Lebanese workforce and the economy?
EC: I address this matter in chapter four, when I discuss the moral economy of aid work and its structural inequalities, and in chapter six, where I refer to some later research I carried out on refugee livelihoods in Akkar, which shows no lasting positive impact of the international humanitarian presence on the governorate’s economy. Overall, the so-called process of “NGOization” affects society at different scales.
From an employment perspective, it tends to provide temporary jobs for Lebanese people, especially those in their twenties and thirties, holding university diplomas and owning a good command of English. In Akkar, at a time when the Syrian crisis was attracting more funding (2012 to 2016), several Western-funded NGOs used to recruit local professionals. However, in the years that followed, a gradual decline in job opportunities with international NGOs was as tangible as the decline in services for the refugees from Syria. The ephemeral foreign humanitarian presence—and its temporary resourcing of the local economy (for example, employment of local drivers, increased local food consumption, hiring of facilities and properties)—caused a further precarization of skilled work for a class of local practitioners who, due to less privileged mobility rights and a lower professional authority generally assigned to them, were unlikely to continue a transnational career in the humanitarian sector.
Moreover, from a social perspective, the temporary employment of local people in Western-dominated humanitarian organizations did not even challenge this arbitrary hierarchy of internationals versus locals, including unjust inequality in pay-scales, expertise, and exposure to risk.
Excerpt from book (from Chapter 4, pp. 130-132)
In parallel with the climax of compensatory humanitarianism and the formalization of the Syrian refugee crisis, the media portrayed Lebanon as a vexed host state, triggering microsocial responses to the crisis in Akkar’s society. On the one hand, from the orthodox perspective of long-term displacement, refugeehood historically evokes the global need to label receiving societies as hosts who receive public acknowledgment for their protracted hospitality. On the other hand, the Halba experience shows that the formal humanitarian response to the crisis encouraged Lebanese residents to reconfigure previous Syrian migrants as refugees in a bid to reclaim their homes. While some Syrian migrant workers ran shops in Akkar before 2011, in the wake of the official response to the crisis—institutionally enacted only with the first LCRP in late 2014 and becoming visible with the emplacement of an unprecedented number of INGOs—they became homogenously portrayed as refugee guests whose presence had to be temporary. This was especially relevant for Lebanese residents returning from abroad, having worked for different periods in places such as South America or other Arab countries. Owning and managing shops and discouraging Syrians from accessing public spaces were collective practices of homemaking that allowed the Akkari hosts to reinvent their relationship with the Syrians.
Halba’s residents opened shops selling a combination of hardware, tires, carpentry, and garden tools. The shops containing hardware and tools (locally known as mahallet khardawet w adawet zira‘iyye) were seen as a guarantee of local ownership: “There’s no Syrian refugee or migrant that ever opened such shops in the area. They normally work in this sector as occasional assistants. In the beginning, during the war, there were only two or three shops like this,” affirmed Hadi, a Lebanese resident. “It eventually became the largest business in Halba.” Many shops were owned by Lebanese who had lived in Tripoli and decided to go back to Akkar during the Lebanese Civil War as there was “less political trouble” in the villages if they wanted to open a shop. Many shop owners had personal stories of past mobility and economic migration, especially during the 1980s, when, as some locals recall, Syrian nationals worked in hardware shops in greater numbers. Waleed migrated to Baghdad to work as a waiter for one year before he decided to return to Lebanon and inherit his father’s shop, which is still located close to Halba’s roundabout. Likewise, Hadi migrated to Venezuela, where he ran a clothing shop for eleven years. In 1986, he decided to come back to Lebanon to give his children access to the same education he had received, and he opened a hardware and agricultural tool shop.
A temporal dimension now divides Syrian nationals, who previously managed these hardware shops, and Akkari returnees. From a local perspective, Syrians have always been entitled to provide temporary labor in Akkar as they used to do in the capacity of migrant workers before the Syrian conflict. Throughout the twentieth century, indeed, Syrians mostly provided seasonal work with neither the intention nor the social comfort to create a proper Syrian community in Lebanon by bringing their families with them. The concept of circular mobility describes such migration and inhabitation patterns. Aubin-Boltanski and Vignal found a continuum between preconflict mobility patterns and the current situation of refuge. The return of Lebanese migrants and their exclusive entitlement to own hardware shops contrast with Syrian nationals’ inability to cultivate a sense of personal stability in Lebanon, leading refugees to experience a sense of “permanent temporariness”. Local refusal to have Syrian nationals in the same jobs as Lebanese not only highlights the typical rejection of sharing life and welfare with the refugees, which happens everywhere, but also points to a struggle over the Other’s temporal horizons.
This tension between refugees and locals, along with the increasingly long-term perspective of the humanitarian system (traditionally thought of as providing temporary and short-term action), gives rise to a double clash of temporalities in which permanent Syrian nationals in Akkar are considered threats. While refugees seek to expand their temporal perspectives (lacking other options), residents struggle over their exclusive right to return to, live, and proliferate in Halba with no temporal restrictions. Among the so-called host communities, the role of returnees in this practice of homemaking has gone unheeded.
The expectation for Lebanese returnees to work in Halba’s hardware shops is locally experienced as a collective act aimed at morally and economically monopolizing a commercial activity. It also illustrates the interface between human experiences of migration—in this specific case, between Lebanon, Venezuela, and Iraq—and historical trajectories of socioeconomic practices. Hardware shops in Halba mark an assertive, collective form of home-making to which refugees are not entitled. In other words, owning and managing a hardware shop becomes the local signifier of national legitimacy to “home” and implement comfortable patterns of social order. Such practices of homemaking and order-making are the local response to the officialization of crisis. The resulting existential divide between Lebanese residents and Syrian refugees in respective ability and inability to develop long-term perspectives in Halba—echoing the lack of temporal perspectives for Iraqis and Sudanese in Dahiye—plays a role in negotiating territorial permanence. As Brun incisively writes, “this emptying of the future [of refugees]—or the rendering of an abstract future—shows that the emergency imagery decontextualizes and ‘de-situates’ the lives of people experiencing a crisis.” In this way, the historical sociology of the Syrian presence in North Lebanon was swept away by the institutionalization of the so-called Syrian refugee crisis, shifting the global focus from political terror to individual trauma and giving rise to the denormalization and pathologization of the Syrian presence in Akkar.