Making sense of Lebanon’s approach to the (non-)securitisation of Syrian refugees: a political economic perspective

Abstract

Lebanon hosts an extraordinarily high number of refugees, and according to a widespread conviction nourished by Lebanon’s political class, they constitute a burden to the country. Thus, an explanation is needed for the fact that – contrary to many European political economies – on the domestic level, neither the central government nor organised social actors have made major attempts to securitise the refugees. Securitisation, ie the presentation of an issue as an existential threat through speech acts in order to legitimise the application of extraordinary measures, did take place, but the primary target audience was international actors. Lebanese authorities took extraordinary measures against Syrian refugees, and societal discrimination against them does exist, but both phenomena are not primarily the outcome of securitising speech acts. This paper proposes an explanation for Lebanon’s particular response to the immigration of Syrian refugees, thereby questioning that this constitutes a burden to Lebanon while highlighting that, by dramatising the ‘refugee crisis’, the Lebanese government aimed at receiving political rents. The main reason why no major political party or social movement put Syrian immigration high on the agenda is that, apart from the political class, assertive social segments of Lebanon’s society also gained from the presence of refugees.

Keywords:

• Syrian refugees
• securitisation
• political economy
• Lebanon
• rent-seeking
• speech act theory

Acknowledgements

I thank two highly engaged anonymous reviewers of Third World Quarterly. I am also grateful to Karim Bitar, who, as Director of the Institute of Political Science at Saint Joseph University of Beirut (USJ), hosted my projects.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Among the few cases of political systems that might have faced larger volumes of immigration of refugees in history is San Marino, which hosted 100,000 Italian refugees during World War II, a number of people that by far outweighed the country’s indigenous population.

2 Boswell is among the few who reject ‘the predominant view that 9/11 encouraged a “securitization” of migration control’ (Boswell 2007, 589). However, Boswell’s argument is confined to the observation that, in Europe, immigration did not become linked to terrorism in the years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and at the same time she admits that other securitisation policies related to immigration have taken place (Boswell 2007, 594–595).

3 Note that the low degree of politicisation and securitisation of the religious affiliation of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon is anything but trivial, for two major reasons (Meier 2014). First, contrary to other Middle Eastern countries hosting Syrian refugees, such as Jordan and Turkey, Lebanon is not a predominantly Sunni country. Rather, Sunni Muslims, who according to estimates comprise barely more than one-quarter of Lebanese society, are only the third largest religious group in Lebanon, after Shiʿa and Christians (Gärde 2012, 294–295). Second, prejudices towards other denominations exist, and there have been periods in Lebanese politics in which cleavages between religious affiliations have been constructed between both Christians and Muslims and Shiʿa and Sunni, with such affiliations becoming politicised and even securitised. This occurred particularly in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War, in the contexts of the immigration and political organisation of (mostly Sunni) Palestinian refugees, the Syrian military presence in Lebanon until 2005, and in the Saudi–Iranian rivalry for regional hegemony (Legrenzi and Lawson 2016; Beck 2020). However, all other things being equal, forces of cultural resistance against the politicisation and securitisation of religion have been better developed in the contemporary history of the Mashriq than in Europe (see Makdisi 2019). This applies both on the level of the political class – as becomes manifest in political alliances crisscrossing religious boundaries – and on the level of the society, which is committed to a concept of basic acceptance – rather than the European paternalistic idea of tolerance – of religious diversity and the promotion of interfaith dialogue on an equal footing (Preisler 2011; see also Haddad and Fischbach 2015).

4 For an alternative approach that is largely compatible with rentierism, see Leenders (2012, 9).

Additional information

Funding

The Carlsberg Foundation supported this work under Grants CF15-0089 and CF21-0125.

Notes on contributors

Martin Beck

Martin Beck, who received their academic education in Tübingen, Germany (doctorate in social sciences in 1994 and ‘habilitation’ in political science in 2001), currently serves as a Professor of International Relations and Security Studies in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Kurdistan Hewlêr (UKH). Martin is also affiliated with the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and is Associate of GIGA (German Institute for Global and Area Studies). They have previously worked as a researcher, academic teacher and political advisor in Europe (Tübingen, Hamburg, Bremen and Odense), the USA (Denver, Colorado), and not least in the Middle East (Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq). Their research covers international politics and political economy, in particular regional power relations, the Arab–Israeli conflict, regional oil politics, securitisation studies, comparative analysis of rentier states, and migration studies. Martin has published in pertinent journals and with renowned publishing houses. They are co-editor and co-author of two chapters in Beck and Richter (2021), Oil and the Political Economy in the Middle East: Post-2014 Adjustment Policies of the Arab Gulf and beyond (Manchester: Manchester University Press). For more details see their profile at ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Beck-14?ev=hdr_xprf.