Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Displaced Syrians in Lebanon face a multitude of legal, social and political categories that operate together to structure their lives and opportunities. One important site of juxtaposition of these various categories can be found in the area of municipal governance, namely in the form of bannered discriminatory curfews that line the public squares of many of Lebanon's urban neighbourhood, towns and villages. The various named 'targets' of these curfews—whether foreigners, Syrians, displaced, labourers, brothers or the disembodied 'motorbike' (a class marker in this context)—instantiate the complexity of issues of Syrian belonging in this context. This article examines these categories through their historical, political and social dimensions, and through the lived experience of Syrians who encounter, negotiate and—at times—resist them. Building on over a year of fieldwork in Lebanon from October 2015 to December 2016, this article relies on a diverse set of sources, including ethnographic observation, documents and interviews with a wide array of actors including Lebanese citizens and displaced Syrians, mayors and municipal police officers, as well as lawyers, journalists, aid workers and central government officials.

**** Note that the pagination of this article has been adjusted due to resolving a production error in another article in this issue.*** ; **** Notez que la pagination de cet article a été ajustée en raison de la résolution d'une erreur de production dans un autre article de ce numéro. ***

Addresses topics including: Why do researchers have a responsibility to refugees?; the ethics of framing research questions in refugee research; the ethics of conducting field research with refugees; and the ethics of research dissemination.

Since the 2015 refugee "crisis," much has been made of the distinction between the legal category of refugee and migrant. While migration scholars have accounted for the increased blurring of these two categories through explanations of institutional drift and policy layering, we argue that the intentional policies utilized by states and international organizations to minimize legal avenues for refugees to seek protection should also be considered. We identify four practices of policy "conversion" that have also led to the increasingly problematic distinction between migrants and refugees: (1) limiting access to territory through burden-shifting and other practices of extraterritorialization; (2) limiting access to asylum and local integration through procedural and administrative hindrances; (3) the use of group-based criteria as a basis of exclusion; (4) the inclusion of non-Convention criteria within resettlement schemes. Drawing upon a historical institutionalist approach and a wide array of empirical sources—including 3 years of combined primary field research conducted in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey between 2013 and 2016—we demonstrate that states are actively pursuing a greater degree of control over the selection of refugees, in practice making refugee resettlement closer to another immigration track rather than a unique status that compels state responsibility.

Since the 2015 refugee "crisis," much has been made of the distinction between the legal category of refugee and migrant. While migration scholars have accounted for the increased blurring of these two categories through explanations of institutional drift and policy layering, we argue that the intentional policies utilized by states and international organizations to minimize legal avenues for refugees to seek protection should also be considered. We identify four practices of policy "conversion" that have also led to the increasingly problematic distinction between migrants and refugees: (1) limiting access to territory through burden-shifting and other practices of extraterritorialization; (2) limiting access to asylum and local integration through procedural and administrative hindrances; (3) the use of group-based criteria as a basis of exclusion; (4) the inclusion of non-Convention criteria within resettlement schemes. Drawing upon a historical institutionalist approach and a wide array of empirical sources—including 3 years of combined primary field research conducted in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey between 2013 and 2016—we demonstrate that states are actively pursuing a greater degree of control over the selection of refugees, in practice making refugee resettlement closer to another immigration track rather than a unique status that compels state responsibility.