How do refugees navigate the UNHCR’s bureaucracy? The role of rumours in accessing humanitarian aid and resettlement

Abstract

In conflict situations, rapid changes can occur in the conditions in both host and home countries. In the context of such uncertainty, how do refugees navigate the bureaucratic apparatus of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to obtain humanitarian aid and resettlement? We carried out fieldwork in 2019 in Lebanon and found the UNHCR’s bureaucracy to be a ‘black box’ for refugees in relation to the provision of information on humanitarian aid and resettlement. In this context of limited information, we found that rumours – widely considered to be uncertain truths – contributed to shaping participants’ understanding of the UNHCR’s decisions on the provision of aid and resettlement. In this article, we highlight the interpretive aspect of rumours and argue that refugees engage in interpretive labour as a result of the unequal relationship between themselves and the UNHCR’s opaque bureaucracy and provision of information. While refugees have to provide the UNHCR with detailed and highly personal information in interviews and household inspections, officers provide refugees with only generic responses, leading refugees to make their own interpretations of the bureaucratic decision-making processes. We conceptualise this interpretive labour as a collective process that contributes to generating rumours among refugee groups.

Keywords:

• Refugees
• rumours
• UNHCR
• Lebanon
• humanitarianism
• resettlement

Acknowledgements

We thank Ms Watfa Najdi, who facilitated and conducted some of the interviews together with the lead researcher for this project. We thank Prof Cathryn Costello and Dr Mirjam Abigail Twigt for their insightful comments. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 According to the UNHCR’s records in 2020, only 914,648 Syrian refugees and asylum-seekers were registered with the UNHCR (UNHCR 2020a, 2020b). Note that UNHCR statistics exclude those who could not register with the UNHCR since 2015 according to the Lebanese government’s requirement.

2 Agreement for Economic and Social Cooperation and Coordination between the Lebanese Republic and the Syrian Arab Republic, available at http://www.syrleb.org/SD08/msf/1507751474_.pdf [accessed 28 October 2020].

3 UNHCR, Resettlement Data Finder, available at https://rsq.unhcr.org/en/#Oa9c [accessed 28 October 2020].

4 In this section, when we talk about humanitarian aid, we refer to food and cash-based assistance. When discussing UNHCR related assistance, Syrian interviewees primarily focused on monthly food assistance, followed by monthly cash assistance and winter assistance, and less on medical assistance, because this was already very limited. Iraqi refugees mentioned irregular assistance they received from UNHCR.

5 Interview with a Syrian refugee, 14 August 2019, Bar Elias.

6 Interview with a Syrian refugee, 1 August 2019, Hamra.

7 Interview with an Iraqi refugee, 10 August 2019, Nabatiyeh.

8 Ibid.

9 Interview with a Syrian refugee, 14 August 2019, Bar Elias.

10 Interview with a Syrian refugee, 7 August 2019, Beirut.

11 Interview with a Syrian refugee, 14 August 2019, Bar Elias.

12 Interviewee with a Syrian refugee, 24 September 2019, Tripoli.

13 Interview with an Iraqi refugee, 10. August 2019, Nabatiyeh.

14 Interview with a Syrian refugee, 24 September 2020, Tripoli.

15 Interview with a Syrian refugee, 4 August 2019, Ghazze, Beqaa.

16 Interview with a Syrian refugee, 14 August 2019, Bar Elias.

17 Interview with a Syrian refugee, 21 August 2019, Beirut.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the European Research Council-funded project ‘Refugees Are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights’ [grant number 716968].

Notes on contributors

Derya Ozkul

Derya Ozkul is Research Officer at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. She holds political science and international relations degrees from the London School of Economics and Boğaziçi University. Previously, she worked at the University of Sydney, School of Social and Political Sciences. As a DAAD alumna, she held fellowships at Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and Bielefeld University in Germany.

Rita Jarrous

Rita Jarrous is a postgraduate student in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She currently works as a research assistant for a collaborative project between the Insititute for Global Prosperity at University College London, the American University of Beirut, and the Center for Lebanese Studies that looks into questions of migration and infrastructure in Lebanon. She studied political science and international affairs and worked as a researcher at the Palestine Unit at UN-ESCWA.