دانلود کتاب نیروی کار فلسطینی و اردوگاه برج البراجنه: به سوی اقتصاد سیاسی انتقادی اردوگاه‌های پناهندگی بلندمدت در سطح جهانی

The conversation recounted in the above excerpt came up during a coffee at Najah’s home in Burj al-Barajneh camp. I had become friends with Najah and her sister-in-law, Manal, through the local NGO in which they worked, and in which I volunteered during my first year of fieldwork in the camp. They were both second-generation Palestinian refugees who had grown up in Burj al-Barajneh camp, living there for the duration of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1991) in the course of which they had grown to adulthood, married, and established households of their own. Manal’s parents and their families were expelled in 1948, from the now depopulated villages of Kūīkāt and Fāra, located in the Galilee. Najah’s father and his family were also expelled in 1948. However, they were urban dwellers from the port city of ‘Akkā who had maintained ties with the village they had recently migrated from in the Galilee. Najah’s mother and her family were Lebanese rural–urban migrants to Beirut. Najah’s father’s Lebanese employer introduced him to her mother’s family in part to convince him not to elope with a Lebanese Shi’a woman. Like her mother’s family, Najah’s father’s family are Sunni Muslim, as was Najah’s father’s employer. Soon after their marriage, Najah’s parents moved to Burj al-Barajneh camp which after the Cairo Agreement of 1969 was removed from the authority of the Lebanese military intelligence and placed under the authority of the political parties comprising the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). This abbreviated account of Manal and Najah’s families’ histories and the excerpt from my fieldnotes complicate the representation of official/“formal” refugee camps in the Global South as “spaces of exception” where refugees are “warehoused” and “reduced to bare life”. Over the decades, despite the Lebanese state’s legal restrictions on the presence of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, as well as the internecine violence of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1991), Palestinian inhabitants of refugee camps in Lebanon have established and maintained ties with citizens of their host-state through their labour and through intermarriage. These shifting ties of unequal exchange continue to connect the local political economies of official/“formal” refugee camps in Lebanon with the political economy of their environ, as well as with regional and global capitalist economies. At the same time, the social and economic capital accumulation facilitated by these relationships is uneven and has changed over time, contributing to the emergence of new inequalities within camp communities and between Palestinian refugees and Lebanese citizens. Similar dynamics have been observed and analysed by other researchers who have also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in refugee camps located in postcolonial nation-states in Asia and Africa (Alimia, 2022; Betts et al., 2017; Jansen, 2018; Omata, 2017; Monsutti, 2021). However, the valuable insights of this body of scholarship need to be combined with an analytic approach that problematizes understandings of “the Global South”, and “the Global North”, in terms of a fixed political geography (Dirlik, 2007; Mintz, 1976). The early twenty-first century saw a proliferation of scholarship questioning policymaking assumptions about the temporality of refugee camps and the protection they provide to refugees (Diken & Lautsen, 2005; Fassin, 2012; Feldman, 2018; Hanafi & Long, 2010; Hyndman, 2000; McConnachie, 2016; Pandolfi, 2003; Perera, 2002; White, 2023). Drawing on Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s critiques of the modern state, this body of scholarship has analysed refugee camps as techniques of power aimed at governing “populations” deemed surplus by the contemporary global system of states. In this book, I argue that, while the paradigm of “encampment” may be a rhetorically powerful strategy to build movements of transnational solidarity around the rights of refugees and migrants, it does not facilitate a nuanced understanding of the experiences of particular groups of refugees and migrants themselves. Nor does it permit an understanding of how those experiences may change over time with shifts in the global capitalist economy. Such an understanding requires a sustained focus on the unwaged and waged labour of both women and men refugee/migrants, as well as historic shifts in how that labour has been mobilized in order to ensure the social reproduction of a particular refugee/migrant group over multiple generations.