EU Engagement with Contested Refugee Returns in Lebanon: The Aftermath of Resilience

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.

How does the European Union (EU) engage with regional host states on refugee returns, which, when voluntary, are often seen as the most desirable ‘durable solution’ to forced displacement by the majority of refugees, host states and the international community alike? (Bradley 2013; Norman 2021) In 2011, in its revamped Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (European Commission 2011), the EU restates its intent to scale up its engagement in international refugee protection and to consolidate its interactions with partner governments on the external dimension of asylum. It also emphasises its ambition to be ‘among the frontrunners in promoting global responsibility-sharing based on the Geneva Refugee Convention’ in close coordination with partner governments and other organisations such as the United Nations Refugee Agency UNHCR (European Commission 2011, 5). In this regard, cooperation on returns in safety and dignity arises as one of the main goals of refugee responsibility sharing in the context of protracted displacement (Martin et al. 2018).

However, while the EU’s ‘New Pact on Asylum and Migration’ (European Commission, 2020) is preoccupied with realising and regulating the return of rejected asylum seekers from the EU – in many cases to the EU’s Southern Neighbourhood – no attention is given to the EU’s engagement with refugee returns within its Neighbourhood. Similarly, much literature has elaborated on the EU’s internal policy towards refugee returns (Molinari 2019). Still, we know little about how the EU integrates the issue of voluntary, safe and dignified return in the external dimension of its asylum policy in either rhetoric or practice. This also regards the question of how the EU’s external refugee policy tools interact with host-related factors affecting conditions for return. This is particularly remarkable considering that the EU has addressed key Mediterranean migration challenges by outsourcing the governance of forced displacement to non-EU partner governments (Chatty 2020; Panebianco 2020).

In this article, we therefore seek to understand how the EU frames refugee returns in its so-called ‘Southern Neighborhood’ and how it cooperates with neighbouring refugee-hosting states on upholding 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 conflict and where the EU has made tremendous investments to help build host state capacity and societal resilience in the face of displacement (Anholt and Sinatti 2020). Syrian refugees in Lebanon are now facing increasing pressure to return to their country of origin (Refugee Protection Watch 2020). Against this backdrop, we study how the EU has embedded the issue of returns in its external policies in rhetoric and practice.

We argue that the EU’s policy rhetoric and practice on returns in Lebanon has been defined by incongruities that have cast a pall on its ability to contribute to safe, dignified and voluntary returns in the context of Lebanon’s cumulative crises. In particular, we argue that the EU’s approach to refugee displacement in Lebanon, commonly framed as the resilience-building approach, is practically at odds with its framings on rights-based returns. We define the EU’s approach to resilience-building as a frame of action, which has the dual objective of enhancing refugees’ self-reliance and strengthening Lebanon’s capacity to host them (Fakhoury 2021).

This frame of action is not unique to Lebanon. Rather it reflects the EU’s approach to displacement in the neighbouring countries that have been affected by refugee displacement from Syria the most (European Commission 2016a, 2016b). Against this backdrop, together with regional refugee hosting states the EU has developed bilateral instruments, such as the 2016 Lebanon and Jordan Compacts as well as the EU-Turkey facility, which channel aid in exchange for host countries’ facilitation of refugees’ access to livelihoods, residency and work. These bilateral instruments have interacted with hosting governments’ policy legacies and contextual realities in different ways. Yet, they have all had an uneasy relationship with a rights-based approach to refugee protection needs (2021; Lavenex and Fakhoury 2021; Tsourapas 2019)

Below, we pursue our argument as follows. The first section briefly explores the policy landscape in Lebanon with a focus on trends of Syrian refugee returns. In the second section, we look at EU policy rhetoric and discuss how the EU frames its policy vision on refugee returns in its external asylum policy. We show that the EU seeks to align itself with international principles on return in dignity and safety. At the same time, it stays silent on its specific role and engagement in facilitating conditions for return in dignity and safety. In its 2017 ‘Elements of an EU Strategy for Syria’, for instance, the EU commits to ‘supporting the safe, voluntary and dignified return of refugees and internally displaced persons to their homes, and their inclusion into Syrian society’, stating that ‘in the longer-term this will need, among other things, a rights-based and victim-centred transitional justice mechanism and measures to encourage national and local reconciliation, such as a national dialogue, alongside profound judicial reform’ (European Commission 2017a, 17). Yet it shies away from operationalising its exact role in upholding and committing to these norms. In so doing, the EU crafts both discursive and practical room of manoeuvre, which allows it to tailor its engagement to situational complexities.

In the third section, we look at practice to determine how the EU actually enacts its role on promoting safe, voluntary and dignified returns that it fails to specify in its policy rhetoric. We explore ‘on-the-ground’ paradoxes that offer insights in the EU’s actual engagement with refugee returns in Lebanon and identify two modes of engagement prevalent in the EU’s practices in the face of refugee return in Lebanon.

The first concerns the gap between the EU’s normative rhetoric on preventing premature refugee returns and the concrete policy instruments that it crafts with Lebanon. Framed as tools of stabilisation and resilience-building, these policy instruments seek to build the capacity of Lebanon to host refugees (Wagner and Anholt 2016). At the same time, however, they have an uneasy relationship with sustainable legal remedies and with creating the underlying environment that would prevent premature returns (Lavenex and Fakhoury 2021). More specifically, these tools end up entrenching an erroneous logic of resilience-building (Badarin and Schumacher 2020) that contributes to formalising refugees’ precarity. This arguably runs contrary to what Ghosn et al. (2021) frame as refugee ‘anchoring’ in the host country before conditions for return become favourable.

The second mode of engagement we highlight is, in fact, a form of ‘de facto non-engagement’ on the issue of returns (Stel 2020, 2021). Through its normative rhetoric, the EU insists on a conception of refugee return in safety and dignity. In practice, however, the EU appears to turn a blind eye to the Lebanese government precipitating rash returns that go against this conception. Such non-engagement with actual situations of contested return and de facto refoulement privileges a pragmatic relationship with the Lebanese government with a view to upholding the EU’s architecture of externalisation (Fitzgerald 2020) over the commitments to safe, dignified and voluntary returns that it prioritises in its policy rhetoric.

Our findings contribute to both empirical and conceptual debates central to understanding expressions of power at the heart of the global refugee regime. They shed light on the geopolitical dimensions of EU engagement with refugee returns in its Southern ‘Neighborhood’ in both rhetorical and practical terms. Empirically, this breaks new ground by going beyond the EU’s obsession with returning migrants from Europe to scrutinising the EU’s engagement with return in the Global South, an empirically much more significant phenomenon. Theoretically, our argument offers a new perspective on the exercise and dispersion of transnational power by foregrounding ambiguity as a key governmentality (Stel 2020, 2021). The EU’s behaviour is usually understood through the lens of its longstanding role as a ‘realist actor’ (Seeberg 2009) and a ‘modest force of the good’ in its Neighbourhood (Barbé and Johansson-Nogués 2008). How the fundamental tension between norms and interests is navigated, however, is often left unexplained (Fakhoury 2021; Juncos 2017). Our case-study on the EU’s engagement with contested refugee return in Lebanon shows that discrepancy is an essential ingredient in this balancing act (Dimitriadi and Malamidis 2019, 4).

To understand EU policy rhetoric on Syrian refugee returns in Lebanon, we rely on an extensive desk review of policy statements adopted by the EU since the onset of Syrian displacement in Syria’s neighbouring countries generally and in Lebanon specifically. To track the EU’s on-the-ground engagement with returns, we depart from the premises that the EU’s external actions will be embedded in the local contexts where they are deployed (Fakhoury 2021; Wunderlich 2010). To that end, we explore the interactions between the EU’s policy frame and Lebanon’s refugee landscape.

In doing so, we use a variety of analytical strategies. We explore the implementation of the EU’s key external refugee policy instruments in Lebanon and rely on practitioner reports that have sought to assign value to the impacts of these instruments. We also take stock of the wealth of academic articles that have assessed the EU’s policy frame with regards to mass displacement from Syria since 2011 both in the region and in Lebanon. Further, through a textual analysis of speeches and statements, we pay particular attention to Lebanese officials’ interactions with the EU, and study how these interactions have shaped the EU’s policy frame on the ground. Over the period from 2011 to 2021, one of the authors has also been involved in more than a dozen of roundtables and workshops and had tens of conversations with EU and Lebanese policymakers, scholars and practitioners.

Based on these data, we do not seek to construct any correlative linkages between EU policies and patterns of return in Lebanon. Instead, we track how the EU’s rhetoric on returns on the one hand, and its practice of resilience-building on the other, interact with existing host-related factors inducing displaced individuals to return.

Context: The Return Policy Landscape in Lebanon and the Role of the EU

Refugee return, defined as any form of return to a refugee’s country of origin – ranging from voluntary to forced, from individual to collective, and from independent to assisted returns (Chimni 2004; Mencütek 2020) – is predominantly considered a post-conflict issue (Davenport et al., 2003). Yet, refugee-hosting states have historically pressured refugees to return even before conditions in their country of origin had become favourable (Ghosn et al., 2021). In the context of Syria’s war, Lebanon’s open-border policy (2011–2014) has gradually given way to repressive refugee politics. The one thing Lebanon’s divided elites agreed on regarding the contentious refugee issue was that refugees’ stay should be temporary, integration should be avoided at all costs, and, as stipulated in the 2014 October Policy, the number of refugees in the country should be decreased ‘by all possible means’ (Stel 2020, 72). In line with this, Syrian refugees, categorised by the Lebanese state as ‘temporarily displaced’, experience increasing hostility and massive restrictions on the right to work, access to education, healthcare, housing and mobility (Kikano et al., 2021; Mourad 2017).

As soon as the Syrian regime recaptured key rebel-held areas in 2016, major governing powers started lobbying the international community, including the EU, for ‘immediate return’ (Geha 2019). Lebanon’s General Security has organised various so-called voluntary return initiatives since 2017 (Hatoum 2018). Political parties such as the Christian-based Free Patriotic Current and the Shiite-based Hezbollah have also promoted and organised return through various initiatives. For instance, they have organised for refugees to be ‘vetted’ by the Syrian regime before return, and they have further facilitated return logistics (Mhaissen and Hodges 2019). UNHCR (2021a, 2021b) reported that about 63,752 registered Syrian refugees have returned since 2016 though the government maintained in 2019 that numbers were as high as 390,000 (Sewell 2020a).

Such return operations have been framed by humanitarian organisations as lacking transparency and accountability over repatriation in safety and dignity (Human Rights Watch 2020; Alef 2019, 2). In 2019, Lebanon’s General Security started applying tougher measures, leading to the deportation of Syrians who crossed into Lebanon ‘illegally’ after April 2019 (Sewell 2020a). These forced returns took place under highly questionable circumstances and are reported to have targeted people who entered Lebanon even before that date (Human Rights Watch 2019).

Research remains inconclusive as to whether factors in Lebanon or in Syria are overriding in determining return journeys (Alrababa’h et al. 2020). In any case, return movements from Lebanon to Syria have steadily increased since 2016, reaching a peak by 2019 (UNHCR 2021b). This period coincides with the worsening conditions in Lebanon and the government’s pressure on Syrians to leave (Sewell 2020b). Host-related factors such as discrimination and dire living conditions have significantly prompted Syrians either to return or to consider return even though conditions in Syria are not propitious (Alpes 2021; Baas 2018; Mhaissen and Hodges 2019; Refugee Protection Watch 2020).

Lebanon’s insistence on hasty returns has to be contextualised in its long-established politics of (non)asylum and in the various ways it blurs responsibility over refugee protection, one of which is by outsourcing refugee issues to external actors (Fakhoury 2020a; Janmyr 2017). Lebanon has long proclaimed itself as a transit country that considers return rather than local integration as the only durable solution. To bridge the gap between temporary stay and return, it has delegated refugee aid and protection to donor countries and to supranational organisations, specifically the UNHCR and the EU. Its reliance on the external refugee aid industry has allowed it to leverage its hospitality in exchange for funds and to blur its obligations towards the displaced (Tsourapas 2019).

Since the outbreak of Syria’s war in 2011, the EU has developed a spectrum of funding tools with the proclaimed aim to build Lebanon’s capacity to host refugees and dampen the negative spillovers of Syria’s cross-border conflict (European Union 2021a). As initial tools were criticised for focusing on refugees, the EU later accommodated Lebanese requests to divide aid between refugee and local communities (Mahdi 2020). In this context, the EU enshrined its external refugee aid policy into a broader resilience-building approach, which evolved into its guiding logic of intervention in Lebanon (Fakhoury 2021; Wagner and Anholt 2016). Indeed, the EU has emerged as the leading donor helping Lebanon to offset the costs of displacement. Since 2011, it has allocated 2.4 billion Euros to the country: 670.3 million in bilateral assistance, 716 million in humanitarian assistance, and 1.1 billion in ‘resilience assistance’ (European Union 2021a).

This focus on resilience entails investing simultaneously in the stabilisation of Lebanon’s institutions and economy and in the self-reliance of refugees to lessen their dependency on the Lebanese state and hence the ‘burden’ they pose to it (European Commission 2016a). The EU’s vision for resilience-building seems mostly driven by an economic governmentality (Anholt and Sinatti 2020). Many of the EU’s funding projects in Lebanon focus on promoting the economic resilience of the Lebanese state and society, which would then trickle down to create better livelihoods for Syrian refugees while at the same time benefitting Lebanon ‘after the refugees return to their country’ (Delegation of the European Union to Lebanon 2016). As elaborately discussed in the next sections, the 2016 EU-Lebanon Compact (European Commission 2016a/b) which allocates financial aid in return for the Lebanese state’s facilitation of temporary access for refugees to livelihoods, residency and jobs arises as a case in point. Support through other EU refugee tools such as the ‘EU regional trust fund in response to the Syrian crisis’ is pledged to development and reforms that ‘would include improved regulation and investment climate, strengthened public-private sector links and adoption of clear reform strategies’ (European Union 2017).

The EU hopes that its aid spurs a myriad of benefits for Lebanese host and refugee communities, ranging from enhanced capacity and increased local ownership over the refugee response to better refugee access to legal residency and jobs. In the light of Lebanon’s cascading crises that extend from the 2019 financial collapse to the 2020 Beirut Blasts, however, it is safe to say that this vision of a ‘resilient’ Lebanon has not been realised. More than 70% of Syrian refugees have been thrown under the poverty line, and only 20% of them have legal residency despite the government’s pledges to ease access to legal documentation (Alpes 2021; Khoder 2020).

In this setting, we ask: How has the EU framed and engaged with the issue of returns in Lebanon? More concretely: How does its politics of refugee aid, which aims at boosting refugee livelihoods and protection needs while reinforcing Lebanon’s capacity to host them (Delegation of the European Union to Lebanon 2016), interact with its intent to uphold conditions for sustainable, safe and dignified returns, as reiterated by the Chair of the European Parliament’s delegation for the relation with the Mashreq countries in 2020 (European Parliament 2020)? In the following sections, we look at EU policy rhetoric on returns and the EU’s practical, ‘on the ground’ engagement with the issue, respectively.

EU Policy Rhetoric on Syrian Refugee Return in Lebanon: The Declaratory Diplomacy of Safe, Voluntary and Dignified Return

This section draws on a critical discourse analysis of documentation produced in relation to the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the five ‘Brussels Conferences’ for ‘the future of Syria and the region’ that the EU has co-hosted since 2017 (e.g. European Commission 2016a, 2016b; European Commission 2017c, 2020; European Union 2017, 2018a, 2018b, 2019, 2021b). These policy documents, selected as core references for scrutinising the EU’s rhetoric on returns, define the EU’s regional response to Syrian displacement and return. They spell out the EU’s vision to create ‘lasting prospects’ (European Commission 2016b) for refugees in Syria’s neighbourhood, building the capacity of host governments to continue hosting refugees, promoting refugee protection as well as upholding principles for return in ‘safety and dignity’. They also set the background parameters for EU country-specific engagement with Lebanon.

Our analysis reveals three main dynamics that are further substantiated below. First, the EU sees refugee return as the most desirable and feasible of the three durable solutions that gravitate around local integration, resettlement and return. Second, it sees such returns as conditional – with emphasis placed on conditions ranging from safety, dignity, stability, voluntariness and information in different documents. Third, for actual specification on what such safe, dignified, well-informed and voluntary return entails – i.e. which concrete criteria need to be met for specific returns to be considered safe and/or dignified and/or voluntary – it defers to the UN. Thus, the EU commits to clear and principled parameters for the return of Syrian refugees in the form of support for the thresholds and conditionalities outlined by UNHCR in 2018 (UNHCR 2018). But it does not in any way specify its own role and responsibilities in this regard or outline concrete instruments or actions. The EU’s rhetoric here, then, appears to operate as a form of ‘declaratory diplomacy’ (Fakhoury 2020b, 12).

In a regional context, the EU has repeatedly reaffirmed its stance that returns should only happen in dignity and safety. The 2017 report on the implementation of the ENP confirms the EU’s position that refugee returns should be ‘voluntary, dignified and safe’ and are only desirable when a ‘credible political solution is underway’ (EC, 2017b, 6). This is further illustrated by the co-chairs declarations of the various Brussels Conferences. In 2017, this declaration highlighted the ‘importance of safe, voluntary and dignified return of refugees, in accordance with international law and once conditions are in place’ (European Union 2017). The 2018 declaration states a commitment to work towards providing for refugees with ‘the basic conditions to be able to return to their homes in a dignified, safe and voluntary way when conditions allow’ (EU, 2018a).

To clarify what ‘safe, dignified and voluntary’ practically means and when such conditionalities for return would be met the EU refers to the ‘Protection Thresholds and Parameters for Refugee Return to Syria’ formulated by UNHCR in 2018 (UNHCR 2018). This document sets parameters for safe and dignified return, the most crucial of which are as follows: significant and durable reduction of hostilities; a formal agreement on return with the Syrian government; the Syrian government’s guarantee that returnees’ physical, legal and material safety is ensured; and respect for the UNHCR’s supervisory responsibility and guarantees for its unhindered access to all refugees and returnees (UNHCR 2018). The document also explicitly warns against premature returns induced by ‘negative push factors’ which will ‘have a devastating impact on refugees and further destabilize Syria and the region’ and urges partners to make sure their programmes are ‘based on careful analysis so as to not incentivize returns or create pull factors for refugees’ (UNHCR 2018, 2, 4).

What the EU will actually do to help uphold and guarantee these UN parameters for return in the face of pressures for premature returns, however, remains unspecified in its ENP and its visions as presented at the Brussels Conferences. These documents acknowledge the occurrence of forced returns. For instance, the co-chair declaration of the second Brussels Conference, held in 2018, states that the conference participants, including donor and host countries, should do more ‘to ensure the continued and effective protection of refugees against risks of forced evictions and returns’ (European Union 2018a). In 2021, the Brussels Conference co-chairs declaration called on regional host countries to uphold the non-refoulement principle and refrain from deportations (EU, 2021b). What precisely should or would be done by the EU and what processes it would put in place or support to uphold safe and dignified returns, however, is not operationalised. The same goes for all other references to conditional return in the studied documents: what the EU will do to establish or ensure the list of conditions routinely reiterated is never clarified.

This lack of concrete instruments or commitments by the EU to help guarantee rights-based return in the ‘third countries’ in which it seeks to build refugee and state resilience as a governance strategy from afar reflects a dilemma: the EU’s struggle to reconcile its obligations to, on the one hand, support the refugees that increasingly exercise their right to return and, on the other hand, guarantee the safe and dignified nature of such returns. The co-chairs declaration of the 2019 Brussels Conference, for instance, ‘underscored that return is an individual right, to be exercised at the time of one’s own choosing’ (European Union 2019, 2). At the same time, it finds that conditions for return in line with international law are still not in place. It ultimately concludes, therefore, that although refugees always have the right to return, ‘conditions inside Syria do not lend themselves to the promotion or facilitation of organised voluntary returns’ by the conference participants (European Union 2019, 2). The co-chairs declaration of the subsequent Brussels Conference reiterates this, stating: ‘While conditions inside Syria do not lend themselves to the promotion or organisation of large-scale voluntary return, in conditions of safety and dignity in line with international law, participants underscored that return is a right to be exercised based on an individual’s free and informed decision’ (European Union 2020).

The EU has agreed with Lebanon on return as the most desirable durable solution to forced displacement. The Lebanon partnership document accompanying the proceedings of the 2018 Brussels Conference, for example, expresses support for ‘UN-facilitated returns’ (EU, 2018b, 2). In 2019, the EU gave a statement that

The European Union reiterates its position that it has never advocated for a settlement or integration of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We agree with our Lebanese counterparts that their stay in Lebanon is temporary. We also agree that returns should happen in so far as they are voluntary, dignified, safe, and in line with international law. (European External Action Service 2019)

Still, pending a political settlement in Syria, the EU has repeatedly argued that conditions for return are not yet favourable and that there is thus a need for a temporary solution before the ideal durable solution can be implemented. As we substantiate in the next section, that temporary solution has been resilience-building.

What is striking here, however, is that apart from reiterating its intent to consolidate its humanitarian aid into a longer-term development policy (L'Orient Le Jour 2021), nowhere does the EU clearly spell out how its politics of resilience-building in Lebanon will mitigate the negative push factors that have increasingly incited refugees to return. By acknowledging that Syrian refugees’ stay in Lebanon is temporary while at the same time stressing that refugee returns are conditional on a quite elusive, political settlement in Syria set to happen in the future, the EU paves the way for a range of inconsistencies. In the below, we show how these incoherencies play out on the ground. We demonstrate that the absence of a clear commitment to facilitating favourable return conditions and the prioritisation of temporary resilience that favours good relations with ‘partner’ governments (Filiu 2019) to ensure effective refugee containment in the region over the creation of sustainable legal remedies result in two modes of engagement that undercut rather than enable safe, voluntary and dignified return of Syrian refugees: building temporary resilience pending refugee return, and de facto non-engagement.

EU Policy Practice on Syrian Refugee Return in Lebanon: False Resilience and Non-engagement

Widening the Gap between Resilience-building and Rights-based Returns

As outlined in the context section above, in anticipation of the emergence of the conditions that would support return as a durable solution, the EU’s vision for a transitory solution has consisted of resilience-building. Regarding Lebanon, as underscored, this approach has been operationalised in the bilateral policy instrument known as the EU-Lebanon Compact. Indeed, in the wake of displacement from Syria, the EU did not renew its previous partnership plan with Lebanon. Rather, in 2016 it negotiated new policy priorities aimed at boosting Lebanon’s capacity to deal with the refugee challenge (Fakhoury 2021, 5) Adopted at the 2016 London Conference for the Support of Syria and the Region, the Compact is officially an annex to Decision No. 1/2016 of the EU-Lebanon Association Council agreeing on these new EU-Lebanon Partnership Priorities. It allocates financial aid with a view to boosting job creation, economic opportunities and institutional stabilisation in Lebanon in exchange for the Lebanese government’s promise to ease Syrian refugees’ access to legal residency and to the labour market.

Hailed as an innovative practice that could provide refugees with what the EU frames as more ‘lasting prospects’ close to home and within the region (European Commission 2016b), the Compact remains however a non-binding agreement, in essence a ‘declaration of intent more than anything else’ (Parisoli 2018, 44). Compacts, according to Gammeltoft-Hansen et al. (2017, 9), are a manifestation of the increasing legal ‘softifcation’ of the EU’s external migration policies, where less binding legal formats are opted for to prioritise flexibility over accountability. As a result, this type of international agreement, which operates ‘somewhere between politics and law’ appears ‘to lower existing standards of human rights’ (Gammeltoft-Hansen et al. 2017, 7, 4).

Indeed, the EU-Lebanon Compact remains disconnected from the creation of sustainable remedies for refugees (Lavenex and Fakhoury 2021). After signing the Compact, Lebanon announced a series of pledges at the successive Brussels conferences with a view to improving refugees’ access to protection and to livelihoods. It is important to stress, however, that in practice, the Compact failed to embed any refugee protection ingredient and does not spell out any concrete compliance mechanism on the part of the Lebanese state (Fakhoury 2021; Lauten and Nelson-Pollard 2017). With time, the state’s pledges to facilitate Syrian refugees’ access to legal residency and to remove obstacles hindering access to documentation and the labour market have been best portrayed as inconsistent (Howden and Alfred 2017; Stel 2020).

No sooner was the 2016 EU-Lebanon compact adopted than it was overshadowed by governing coalitions’ insistence on hasty returns. Further, following its adoption, ruling powers interpreted it as an instrument that – instead of defining a framework for Syrian refugees’ protection needs as the EU states it was initially intended (European Commission 2016b) – acknowledges the temporariness of their stay and the inevitability of ‘gradual return’.¹ Amid these realities, as refugees have increasingly faced pervasive violations of their rights, the Compact remained more of a ‘letter of intent’ than an effective policy instrument that has facilitated the EU’s cooperation with Lebanese authorities on refugee rights (Lavenex and Fakhoury 2021).² Ultimately, it has fed into the broader logic that refugees ‘will remain where they are – in conditions short of full local integration – and that somehow they will get by’ (Ferris 2018). Furthermore, its impact has gradually faded.³

Yet what does the Compact mean for the enactment of refugee returns? It presents return as the only durable solution to the Syrian refugee crisis. It also construes it as conditional on returnees’ safety. A commitment is made to working towards return in accordance with international law and host country interests:

Lebanon and the EU consider that the only sustainable long-term solution for refugees and displaced from Syria into Lebanon is their safe return to their country of origin, as conditions for such a return are met. Meeting the needs of refugees and displaced persons across and from Syria and of their host communities is an urgent priority for the whole international community, whose efforts in this direction should be intensified. Both sides will be mindful however to the imperative of building conditions for the safe return of refugees from Syria and displaced Syrians, including during the transition, in accordance with all norms of international humanitarian law and taking into account the interests of the host countries. (European Union and Government of Lebanon 2016, 3)

That such international humanitarian norms and host country interests could entail a fundamental tension, however, is not acknowledged even if the importance for ‘enhancing dialogue and cooperation on matters related to refugees, allowing for thorough discussion of concerns’ in a generic sense is stressed (European Union and Government of Lebanon 2016, 19). In fact, in the Lebanon Compact, the EU states that it respects Lebanon’s decision to consider Syrians as displaced persons rather than refugees and its aim to ‘reduce their numbers’, also through return, as long as this is safe and not amounting to refoulement (European Union and Government of Lebanon 2016, 12).

More fundamentally, the Compact stays by and large silent on the relationship that resilience-building as an interim solution has with persistently negative host-related push factors inciting rash returns. As underscored, focusing on refugee self-reliance on the one hand and strengthening of state capacities on the other as a temporary solution pending return has in practice come at the expense of rights-based refugee protection.⁴ Further, as critical voices show, the discourse and practice of resilience served to normalise Lebanon’s ‘abnormalities’ (Geha 2016),⁵ turning exposure to endemic challenges rather than safety and dignified living into the status quo (Wagner and Anholt 2016). In this sense, the EU’s approach to resilience as a mode of coping with adversity in a host state that seeks to decrease the number of refugees ‘by all possible means’ ends up undermining its very call for safe and dignified returns.

The Compact promises Lebanon financial support in return for an improved but temporary integration of refugees in its society and labour market. At first glance, this may seem an attempt to prevent rash refugee returns. However, in reality, the Compact not only formalises refugee precarity but becomes, as we substantiate below, an opportunity for the Lebanese government to legitimise calls for premature return (Fakhoury 2020b, 2021).

The EU goes out of its way in stressing that it does not in any way encourage permanent settlement of Syrian refugees in Lebanon and that it agrees with the Lebanese government that return is the only durable solution. However, considering the practical tensions between temporary resilience-building, of which temporariness often trumps resilience, and ‘safe and dignified’ returns, of which return gets priority over safety and dignity, the EU’s external refugee approach has nevertheless evolved into a site for policy contestation. More specifically, it has provided a fertile ground for Lebanese incumbents to justify the imperative of accelerated returns. Here key governing coalitions have argued that the EU’s continued financial investment in refugee stay in Lebanon would only contribute to the country’s destabilisation (National News Agency 2015; The Daily Star 2017). Such positions have had crucial implications for Lebanon’s return policy landscape as described in the context section above. They have also shaped the contextual field in which the EU has implemented its refugee policy instruments.

The term ‘resilience’ has always been regarded with suspicion by Lebanese officials, who preferred the term ‘stabilization’ to avoid any long-term connotations (Anholt and Sinatti 2020, 321). Reflecting this sensitivity, Lebanon has increasingly understood the EU’s approach of resilience-building as a guise for pushing for de facto integration, which is anathema to its own approach. In this context, governing powers have flagged the shortcomings of the EU’s strategy for an overloaded host state such as Lebanon, suggesting that the EU’s insistence on keeping refugees where they are contributes to Lebanon’s collapse and to undermining its sovereignty (Albawaba, 2018; National News Agency 2018). The policy script of a ‘destabilized Lebanon’ has come to function as legitimation for premature returns and a pre-emptive on EU critiques on such returns (Fakhoury 2021). Following the 2019 economic downturn especially, in the context of which more than 50% of Lebanese citizens have fallen below the poverty line, the EU's and UN's continued focus on refugee livelihoods and critiques of governmental calls for refugee return have become ever more contentious.⁶

The more protracted Syrian displacement became the more tensions between the Lebanese elites’ resistance to refugees’ stay and the European preference for a form of resilience that in practice might be seen as ‘integration’ became apparent (Naharnet 2018). Though reference to integration was carefully avoided in the Lebanon Compact and all other documents (Parisoli 2018, 44), this has not changed the fact that many Lebanese officials perceived and framed reality as increasingly moving in this direction (Reuters 2018).⁷ In this regard, and re-invoking the trauma of Lebanon’s protracted and extremely contested hosting of Palestinian refugees (Stel 2020), officials have fiercely questioned what they frame as the EU’s approach towards making refuge in Lebanon a lasting solution. They have called on the EU to divert its financial aid to Syria to incentivise refugees to return and to refrain from encouraging unwelcome refugee stay in Lebanon (Fakhoury 2021; The Daily Star 2019) and asked the EU to cooperate on rash refugee returns (Arab News 2019; Xinhua 2019).

In 2020, the Lebanese government has put forth a national return plan in which it expects the international community to cooperate on returns. The EU, however, has not formulated clearer policy positions on refugee returns from Lebanon to Syria in light of this arguably game-changing development. Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Hassan Diab used the 2021 Brussels Conference as a platform to call on the international community to support its national return plan for Syrian refugees (European Union 2021a). Since then, the EU has reiterated that conditions for return to Syria are not in place. But its enduring emphasis on ‘temporary’ resilience-building is now increasingly hard to present as a joint Lebanese-EU vision. Instead, Lebanese officials experience this more and more as a form of imposed integration. Although the EU has always firmly denied this – in November 2019, after being criticised for promoting integration in Lebanon as a durable solution, the EU rejected this allegation and reiterated that it sees return as the ultimate solution for the refugee crisis (European External Action Service 2019) – these dynamics have nonetheless led to incompatible logics and framings between Lebanon and the EU (Fakhoury 2020b).

Despite the EU’s continued emphasis on the fact that conditions for return are not met, these antagonisms may nevertheless shape the EU’s evolving policy rhetoric and engagement with returns. In 2017, Federica Mogherini, then the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, stated that a political solution was a prerequisite for voluntary and dignified return (Dartford 2017). In February 2019, however, when Lebanon announced support for return to ‘safe areas’ in Syria without waiting for a political solution (Mroue 2019), a response by the EU was nowhere to be reported. Around the same time, however, Mogherini did indicate that the EU was willing to carry on the provision of aid and shall ‘provide the needed political and economic support to guarantee a secure return for Syrian refugees to their homeland’ (Mroue 2019). She reiterated conditionalities of return, but simultaneously, at the third Brussels Conference, denied EU responsibility in determining whether such conditionalities are met, deferring to the UN and ‘Syrian refugees themselves’ to establish this (Delegation of the European Union to Turkey 2019). In what might be read as implicit acknowledgement of Lebanon’s eagerness to promote return, moreover, the co-chairs declaration of the 2021 Brussels Conference has framed assistance to both Syria and neighbouring host countries as no longer solely in terms of resilience-building, although this is still a dominant theme, but also as a ‘key component in enabling a voluntary decision by refugees to return’ (European Union 2021b).

De Facto Non-engagement on Premature Returns

Based on the above, we can thus conclude that the EU has neither committed to an explicit role in realising rights-based returns in Lebanon nor spelled out how its resilience-building approach is set to build a bridge between displacement and its aftermath, namely return when conditions become favourable. This elusive approach should be contextualised within the broader debate on responsibility-shifting versus shirking (Feith Tan and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2020). The Lebanese government has highlighted its overly generous contributions to the global refugee regime while expressing disappointment with EU member states’ insufficient efforts at burden-sharing (Fakhoury 2020b; Kuwait News Agency 2017). In this reality of asymmetrical burden-sharing, the EU’s capacity to set what Ruffa frames as an ‘an example-effect’ (Ruffa 2011, 572) or, in this specific case, to socialise Lebanese elites’ into its rhetoric on returns in safe, voluntary and dignified conditions has clearly been weakened.

This has resulted in what we consider EU non-engagement with the premature returns that are encouraged by the Lebanese government. As we showed, the EU rhetorically commits to safe, voluntary and dignified returns within Syria’s neighbourhood. At times, this has also defined its engagement. In November 2020, for instance, the EU refused to participate in the Russian-backed conference to initiate refugee return to Syria, which EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell called ‘premature’ (Cook 2020). At the same time, however, the EU in practice appears to have chosen to turn a blind eye to the return operations organised and encouraged by the Lebanese government that, as we described in the context section above, remain out of line with conditionalities of safety, voluntariness and dignity.

In its policy rhetoric, the EU generically reiterates the importance of non-refoulement. It also endeavours to build a stronger transition between its humanitarian and development policy in boosting refugee resilience in its neighbourhood L'Orient Le Jour 2021).⁸ Notwithstanding this, the EU shies away from publicly formulating clearer conditionalities on rash returns in Lebanon, leaving the question of how its politics of resilience-building interacts with persistent negative push factors in the country unaddressed. By delegating responsibility for monitoring return and upholding conditionalities for return to the UN, as shown in the policy rhetoric section above, it arguably engages into buck-passing behaviour (On this issue, see Ruffa 2011)

The EU’s decision not to act over Lebanon’s politics of return is not surprising as it is politically convenient. On the one hand, it reflects the fact that the EU’s external policy of resilience-building allows for general disengagement from thorny issues (Juncos 2017). On the other, more specific, hand, this non-engagement is to be contextualised in the EU’s longstanding role as a realist security-centred actor in Lebanon. The EU has generally shied away from engaging with Lebanon’s deeply seated and divisive geopolitical issues (Seeberg 2009) including, for example, the issue of Palestinian refugee camps (Ruffa 2011, 571). In the case of Syrian displacement, the EU has similarly adopted a rather depoliticised strategy that focuses on building resilience through financial aid, thereby avoiding entanglement with the underlying divisive issues thwarting refugee stay and prompting their return in Lebanon. These issues revolve mainly around the government’s adversarial refugee policy on the one hand and the various ways the Syrian conflict has seeped into Lebanon, polarising political coalitions on the other hand (Fakhoury 2020a).

This oscillation between a rhetorical condemnation of rash returns and a practical apparent non-engagement with Lebanon’s return policies is not merely a reflection of the incompatibility between norms and interests that we flagged above. It also signals a broader policy impasse whereby the EU cannot put alternative options on the table. If refugees are discouraged to come to Europe but cannot be reasonably expected to be continued to be hosted by strained regional host countries either, the EU’s resistance to returns within Syria’s neighbourhood risks becoming illusory no matter how often and firmly it is repeated. Amid shrinking resettlement opportunities and in the context of the EU’s attempts to tighten the nexus between returns and internal border management in its New Pact on Migration and Asylum (European Commission 2020), the EU lapses into a non-engagement with returns beyond its borders. By failing to offer Syria’s neighbouring countries’ solutions other than the resilience-building that is locally interpreted as imposed integration, the EU’s capacity to contest governments’ decisions to speed up return loses credence.

Conclusion

This article has looked at the tensions and incongruities at the heart of the EU’s external refugee policy when it comes to its capacity to act as a ‘bridge-builder’ between situations of displacement and repatriation. We have shed light on the EU’s ‘rhetoric-practice gap’ in its engagement with the issue of returns in Lebanon, and on the discrepancy between its rhetoric on returns in safety and dignity and its ‘on the ground’ resilience-building activities, which become enmeshed in broader spirals of refugee precarity. In its declaratory diplomacy, the EU warns against premature returns and cautions against negative push factors enticing rash journeys back to Syria. In practice, however, it has negotiated policy tools with the Lebanese government that elide the thorny albeit necessary creation of a foundational protection environment that could allow refugees to ‘wait it out’ and to return home only when conditions become favourable.

In the eyes of Lebanese officials, the EU’s resilience-building approach has evolved into a strategy of (de)stabilisation, creating an ‘opportunity structure’ for them to contest continued refugee stay and call for immediate returns. In response to such premature returns that defy UNHCR conditionalities, the EU has stayed with its rights-based rhetoric but has not formulated clearer country-specific policy actions in the face of such returns. In practice, the EU has refrained from publicly responding to everyday organised return journeys, privileging instead a politics of collaboration with Lebanon’s key governing powers. Against this backdrop, it has failed to offer a linkage between its policy of ‘temporary shelter’ and persistently negative host-related push factors for refugee return.

This is in line with observations by Hathaway and Gammeltoft-Hansen (2014, 6) that the EU’s commitment to international law is often symbolic rather than substantive. It suggests that the EU’s (non)engagement with refugee return in Lebanon ultimately follows from its need to appease Lebanon as a host country that frames itself as ‘overburdened’ to uphold the EU’s architecture of externalisation. The EU’s resilience approach, after all, boils down to a ‘responsibilization’ of host countries (Anholt and Sinatti 2020, 311; Chatty 2020). The EU’s vision for shelter – and later ‘perspective’ – in the region has always been subsidiary to its strategy of containment (Fitzgerald 2020; Strange and Oliviera Martins 2019). This strategy, in turn, is dependent on its ‘partnerships’ with regional host countries (Adamson and Tsourapas 2018; Oliveira Martin and Strange 2019; Seeberg 2018). Good relations with ‘partner’ governments then tend to be prioritised over refugee protection, a reality that has also informed the EU’s interpretation of ‘resilience’ (Anholt and Sinatti 2020).

The issue of refugee return in this sense highlights the fundamental asymmetry in the ‘partnerships’ that the EU pursues with its southern neighbours (Feith Tan and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2020, 347). Lebanon’s push for returns, and the EU’s pairing of a normative rhetoric on returns with non-engagement over contentious return operations, illustrates that while the EU can bank on ‘non-entrée’, its ‘partners’ are left to pursue similar objectives through return-bordering-on-refoulement (Hathaway and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2014, 7; Schwartz 2020). The governance of mass displacement from Syria, in which states and organisations have devolved, shared, shifted and diverged on responsibilities (Panizzon and van Riemsdijk 2019) is one of the latest examples of how such asymmetries of power play out, affecting refugees’ home or onward journeys.

In light of these conclusions, our findings have implications for understanding not only the EU’s migration management in terms of refugee return but also the nature and consequences of its externalisation strategies, specifically the position of resilience-building in these (Fakhoury 2021). ‘Resilience’ has become the linchpin in legitimising and operationalising the EU’s outsourcing of refugee shelter and protection to regional host countries. But remarkably little research has as of yet been done on what Anholt (2020) has called ‘resilience in practice’. We have taken this up regarding the issue of refugee return in Lebanon, where resilience has been interpreted and operationalised in specific ways that emphasise temporariness and unfold in a wider field of inconsistencies.

Further research is however warranted when it comes to investigating the EU’s resilience-building approach in situations of displacement and its interaction with negative host-related factors inducing refugee return in neighbouring countries such as Jordan and Turkey. In the latter cases, through the Jordan Compact and the Facility for Refugees in Turkey, the EU has – in different ways and to a different extent – invested in and incentivised labour market inclusion and other forms of integration (Gordon, 2021; Lenner and Turner 2018; Tsourapas 2019). Here, we emphasise the importance of factoring in variation in contextual trajectories to account for how the EU’s resilience approach interacts with individual countries’ enactment of return.

In Lebanon, much more so than in other regional host countries for Syrian refugees, the EU has embraced (conditional) refugee return as the preferred durable solution for displacement. The country’s political reality has meant that the EU has systematically framed its resilience approach as itself expressly temporary – until safe, dignified and voluntary refugee return is feasible. This makes our observation that the EU has not built a bridge between temporary resilience building and safe, dignified and voluntary returns in Lebanon all the more pressing.

The EU’s ‘resilience in practice’ approach in Lebanon and its implications for return has however broader insights to convey. Crucially, it is politically functional in that it obscures responsibility in how returns should be operationalised and what actors bear consequences for the ‘aftermath’ of the EU’s resilience approach in first countries of asylum. ‘Resilience’ acknowledges temporality whilst advocating for self-reliance, thereby blurring responsibility over what resilient outcomes are to be expected and how these outcomes interact or coexist with host-related push factors enticing return.

This resilience approach has also meant that the EU’s politics of refugee aid has remained divorced from a protection environment, feeding into the formalisation of precarity that prompts refugees to contemplate return. Here, unresolved tensions in the EU’s positioning on refugee return – between commitment to international law and host country interests and between working towards return and upholding conditionalities – come fully to the fore. By focusing on temporary resiliency until conditions for return become ripe, EU instruments such as the 2016 Lebanon-EU Compact both exacerbate refugee precarity and antagonise partner governments that perceive such policy tools as part of an asymmetrical power differential (Lavenex and Fakhoury 2021). It is in this sense that they carry grave consequences for refugees’ lives.

Following the outbreak of the pandemic and the stalling of options including resettlement, displaced Syrians have expressed feelings of entrapment in Syria’s neighbouring states (Alpes 2021; Refugee Protection Watch 2020; Sewell 2020b; UNHCR 2021a). Stuck between a rock and a hard place, many of them are increasingly choosing to embark on dangerous boat departures or to return to Syria to face an uncertain future. Tracking how EU refugee policies are enmeshed in the broader ‘manufacturing’ of precarity in regional transit-turned-host states (Norman 2021) helps us to better understand the multifaceted factors driving refugees to return under duress. In this sense, our analysis fundamentally questions the default and by now gratuitous narrative of safe, voluntary and dignified return. We show how assumptions of refugee empowerment and self-reliance embedded in imaginaries of resilience might result in repackaging ‘soft deportation2017) as voluntary return.

Ultimately, our analysis calls for the EU to rethink how its external migration policy ought not only to engage with the creation of more lasting solutions in host states but also with the afterlife of such ‘solutions’, namely how they inhibit or facilitate pathways for voluntary return in safety and dignity. We call for more research on how the EU can act as a bridge-builder in situations of displacement and repatriation, ensuring that its external refugee policies explicate responsibility rather than institutionalise opacity when it comes to refugee return.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Shoshana Fine and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the paper. We also thank Britt Meyers for her research assistance. Acknowledgments go to the Center for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg-Essen for convening an authors’ workshop on refugee return and for the Sciences Po KFAS Program in Paris for funding part of this research.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the fellowship program of the Center for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg-Essen, Germany and by the Sciences Po KFAS Program at Sciences Po in Paris, France..

Notes

1. Interview with Lebanese officials – March and February 2019.

2. Interview with Lebanese ministry employee – January 2019.

3. Interview with Lebanese ministry employee – February 2019; interview with EU official – October 2021.

4. Conversations with civil society activists – 2019-2020.

5. Idem.

6. Informal conversations with scholars, journalists and practitioners in Beirut – 2019–2021.

7. Conversations with Lebanese officials – 2019 and 2020.

8. Interview with EU officials – October 2021.