To coincide with World Refugee Day, we provide this article on Rights for Time's refugee focused case study in Lebanon.
Rights for Time Lebanese Case Study
‘Politico-legal temporalities and refugee policy making’
Our case study in Lebanon works on understanding how the practical times of refugee policy, such as the Global Compact for Refugees, interact with the long memories of displacement across generations and geographies. The research addresses the current deficiencies of refugee policy making, including the violence, inefficiencies and missed opportunities that the current a-temporal thinking produces.
Specifically, the case study explores the historical legacies and perceptions that have informed the crafting of Lebanon’s politics of reception towards Syrian refugees.
Our study design focuses on the following overarching objectives and methodological goals:
- Retracing the history and temporalities of displacement in Lebanon as a case study with broader insights for humanitarian governance
- Understanding through policy discourse analysis how the practical times of refugee policy interact with the long memories of displacement across generations and geographies.
- Drawing on case studies as “tunnels”, time capsules or exploratory tools for understanding the nexus between time and policy
- Linking temporalities to existing protection challenges
- Testing the concept of an interdisciplinary temporal lens and developing interdisciplinary peer-to-peer protocols (policy, poetics, and law)
The aim is to understand how refugee policies interact with broader social and cultural settings and how such policies are constructed along a continuum of perceptions and communal imaginaries, that are accumulated across time. In doing so, our case study interrogates the temporal commitments of politics, of law, of outsiders, and of calls to ‘action’. From and an arts and humanities perspective, the case study will also address the undisclosed poetics of refugee temporalities. The anticipated impact of this case study is to inform multiple stakeholders as to why externally sponsored policy templates often clash with local realities and explain how engaging with context-based temporalities can inform the adoption of policy solutions that are more attuned to realities.
Outputs include peer reviewed publications, protocols, pamphlets and a webinar. Project leads are Dr Tamirace Fakhoury (Centre for Lebanese Studies, Lebanon), Dr Ben Warwick (UoB, UK) and Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge (UoB, UK)
