Exporting Institutional Ambiguity in Refugee Governance: How Lebanon’s Politics of Uncertainty Mirrors Europe’s Politics of Abandonment and Exhaustion

Lebanon is one of the main host countries in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, now sheltering the highest per capita number of refugees in the world. Its response to the arrival of some 1.5 million Syrian refugees was initially characterized by a ‘no-policy-policy’ that revolved around the prohibition of formal refugee camps and the discouragement of official refugee registration. The resultant institutional ambiguity – characterized by pervasive informality, liminality, and exceptionalism – is routinely assumed to be a manifestation of the state fragility and ‘bad governance’ that allegedly epitomize the Middle East. Questioning this premise, the paper draws out the empirical parallels between the formal policies and informal practices that govern refugees in Lebanon and the governance of ‘irregular’ migrants in Europe. The paper establishes that Lebanon’s manufacturing of refugees’ vulnerability is not merely contingent on capacity and resource deficits associated with state fragility but is partly a strategic approach to control and exploit refugees and to enforce their return. As such, it mirrors rather than contrasts with European countries’ de facto policies of abandonment and exhaustion that similarly aim to discourage migrants from coming to Europe and ‘encourage’ those that are there to leave.