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| 1 |
ID:
191438
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| Summary/Abstract |
While much literature has concentrated on the EU’s policy to return people from within its borders, this article seeks to understand how the EU cooperates with refugee-hosting states beyond its borders, in its ‘Southern Neighbourhood’, to uphold conditions for voluntary, safe and dignified returns. We build on the case of Lebanon, which hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide after receiving more than one million displaced Syrians in the wake of Syria’s 2011 war, and where the EU has made tremendous investments to help build ‘resilience’ in the face of displacement. Although the UN concludes that conditions for safe return to Syria are not in place, Syrian refugees in Lebanon are now facing increasing pressure to return to their country of origin. We show that the EU’s policy rhetoric and practice on returns in Lebanon has been defined by incongruities that cast a pall on its ability to contribute to rights-based returns. In rhetoric, the EU aligns itself with international principles on return in dignity and safety – without, however, explicating its own role in realising such principles. In practice, its resilience-building approach remains at odds with such framings because it leaves the question of how resilience-building interacts with negative push factors for return in the host country unaddressed. ‘Resilience’ then contributes to the formalisation of precarity that prompts refugees to return prematurely. It is, moreover, co-opted by Lebanese politicians who argue for rash returns while pointing at the destabilising effects of what they see as imposed integration. These contestations incentivise the EU to opt for non-engagement with actual situations of contested returns so as to maintain partnerships for externalisation.
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| 2 |
ID:
157235
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| Summary/Abstract |
Since the 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has implemented an extensive governance project in Lebanon that is often regarded as contributing to the weakness of the Lebanese state. Challenging such zero-sum logic, this article explores the institutional interdependencies between the PLO and the Lebanese state and their different yet mutual interests in governance coordination. It conceptualises the relations between the PLO and the Lebanese state along a continuum of mediated stateness and thereby contributes to both the operationalisation of the notion of the mediated state and our understanding of the diverse empirical manifestations of the PLO’s governance in Lebanon.
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| 3 |
ID:
183727
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| Summary/Abstract |
How must we understand and conceptualize the rationales and repercussions of remote warfare? This article contributes to scholarship on the ontology of remote war by analysing how Dutch officials engage with responsibility for the bombardment of an Islamic State weapons factory in Hawija, Iraq in 2015 under Operation Inherent Resolve. It observes that the main feature of Dutch officials’ accounts of Hawija is their diverse claims to not knowing about civilian casualties. Official narratives shifted from denial to secrecy to strategic ignorance. Bridging work on secrecy from the field of critical security studies with work on strategic ‘unknowing’ from ignorance studies, we propose a new take on the Foucauldian notion of ‘regimes of truth’. The regimes of truth that emerge to justify shifts to remote warfare – that it is riskless, precise and caring for civilian others – rely not merely on secrecy and denial but on feigned and imposed ignorance about casualties. Whereas denial can be disproven and secrecy has an expiration date, ignorance is more elusive and open-ended and hence politically convenient in different ways. Deliberate unknowing does not just postpone investigation and accountability but fundamentally and indefinitely obstructs it and thus sustains the regimes of truth for future remote wars.
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