Under the guise of resilience: The EU approach to migration and forced displacement in Jordan and Lebanon

ABSTRACT

Building “resilience” to insecurity and crisis is high on the European Union (EU) agenda. EU uptake of this buzzword is especially significant with regard to migration and forced displacement. Uncertainty, however, remains about what resilience is, how it translates into practice, and what its implications are. In this article, we analyze EU humanitarian and development policies and provide empirical insight into resilience-building in Jordan and Lebanon. We show that EU resilience thinking highlights strengthening the humanitarian-development nexus, responsibilizing crisis-affected states, and framing refugees as an economic development opportunity for refugee-hosting states. We also find that how resilience translates into practice depends on the local context and interests of the actors involved. For the EU, resilience-building is primarily a refugee containment strategy that could jeopardize the stability of refugee-hosting states. We conclude that resilience-building in Jordan and Lebanon may ultimately threaten rather than safeguard the security of Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• European Union
• humanitarian aid
• development
• migration
• forced displacement

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the guest editors of this special issue, two anonymous reviewers, and colleagues from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for their valuable and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Rosanne Anholt is a Ph.D. candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Political Science and Public Administration. She holds an M.Sc. in Management, Policy Analysis and Entrepreneurship from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research looks at resilience, the humanitarian-development nexus, and local ownership in the context of crisis governance in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey.

Giulia Sinatti is an ethnographer with an interest for migration governance and its linkages with development, humanitarianism, and human security. An engaged scholar, she also advises intergovernmental and United Nations agencies, civil society, and grassroots organizations in the migration field. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

ORCID

Rosanne Anholt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3596-9861

Giulia Sinatti http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8702-3886

Notes

1 For instance, in the 2007 European Consensus on Development. The 2007 communication Towards a European Consensus on Humanitarian Aid does not include the term “resilience” or “resilient”, whereas the 2008 joint declarations on The European Consensus on Humanitarian Aid mention “resilience” once—in relation to disaster risk reduction. Unlike the European Consensus on Development, the European Consensus on Humanitarian Aid was reaffirmed, rather than revised, in 2018.

2 Interview by first author, non-governmental organization staff member, Jordan, October 2018.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute for Societal Resilience at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.