Jasmin Lilian Diab

This chapter explores the ethical, methodological, and emotional complexities of conducting research with internally displaced persons (IDPs) in South Lebanon as an insider–outsider researcher. Drawing from both personal experience and academic inquiry, this chapter examines the tensions between proximity and detachment, the challenges of positionality, and the responsibility of bearing witness. As someone deeply connected to South Lebanon but not a current resident, this author’s research is shaped by a dual perspective that provides intimate access to displaced communities while concurrently necessitating critical reflexivity. The chapter investigates how intergenerational trauma and resilience are navigated within IDP communities, highlighting how displacement is not only experienced but also inherited. The chapter further unpacks the ethical dilemmas inherent in insider research, including the expectations placed upon researchers who share cultural and historical ties with their participants. Power dynamics, emotional entanglements, and the act of witnessing emerge as key themes, raising critical questions about advocacy, representation, and responsibility. Ultimately, this chapter offers a nuanced reflection on the practice of researching one’s own community, emphasizing the necessity for ethical engagement, self-awareness, and a commitment to amplifying the voices of the displaced people. It calls for scholars to embrace research as both an intellectual and a deeply human endeavor.

The 2023–2025 escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah triggered widespread displacement across South Lebanon while simultaneously generating extensive environmental destruction that continues to undermine prospects for return. This article examines how warfare-induced ecological damage including white phosphorus contamination, bombardment, deforestation, and the destruction of agricultural infrastructure, reshapes displacement trajectories in agrarian borderland communities. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework integrating environmental displacement theory, critical refugee studies, and political ecology, the study analyzes qualitative interviews with displaced agricultural workers whose livelihoods depend on land, water systems, and biodiversity. The findings demonstrate that displacement in South Lebanon cannot be understood solely as a response to immediate violence, but also to warfare-induced environmental transformation. Instead, environmental degradation including burned olive groves, contaminated soil, damaged irrigation networks, livestock loss, and disrupted agricultural cycles, has destabilized the ecological foundations that sustain rural life. Even where residents physically return, recovery remains partial and uncertain as farmers confront declining soil productivity, crop disease, market distrust, and persistent fears of contamination. Environmental destruction therefore converts temporary evacuation into protracted displacement by eroding the environmental systems that sustain local economies and social reproduction. By foregrounding ecological viability as a condition for return, the article argues that conflict-induced displacement in agrarian regions is shaped not only by security dynamics but by the transformation of landscapes themselves. Durable return, therefore, depends as much on environmental restoration as on the cessation of violence.

This article examines how Kurdish Syrian refugees in Lebanon imagine, enable or foreclose return to Syria during the post-Assad transition. Focusing on a community shaped by statelessness, Arabization and uneven recognition of cultural and linguistic rights, it draws on in-depth interviews and small-group discussions with Kurdish Syrians from Jazira, Kobani, Afrin and urban centres. The analysis traces how Turkish military incursions, contested governance, conscription risks, documentation gaps and property dispossession produce a pragmatic return calculus. Rather than a binary choice, return emerges as a conditional horizon dependent on enforceable guarantees of cultural recognition, political participation, protection from forced conscription, and mechanisms for documentation and restitution. Lebanon emerges as a precarious waypoint that sustains Kurdish networks while offering no secure future. Conceptually, the article advances a “conditional returnability threshold,” arguing that durable-solutions frameworks must move beyond regime-centric timelines towards rights-based, community-led conditions for dignified return.

Migration scholarship on the European Union has traditionally emphasized the structuring role of formal political measures in shaping migration flows and outcomes (Bakewell 2010; Massey 2023; de Ha...

This paper contends that Lebanon's Kafala system is not a flawed labour framework but a racialised apparatus of statecraft that governs migrant domestic workers (MDWs) through legal dependency, spatial confinement and moral surveillance. Drawing on 50 interviews with Filipino, Ethiopian and Sri Lankan MDWs, and key informants from civil society and international organisations, the study reveals how race, gender and legal status intersect to produce subordination within both domestic and public spaces. The paper argues that the home functions as a domestic border—where employers act as de facto migration authorities and racial hierarchies are naturalised through everyday interactions. Through a critical race and intersectional lens, it explores how nationality operates as a proxy for moral value, labour suitability and sexual respectability, shaping the experiences and perceived legitimacy of MDWs. Yet, the study also highlights forms of everyday resistance, from informal solidarity networks to micro‐acts of refusal and care, which challenge the racialised moral order of Lebanon's migration regime. Ultimately, the paper reframes migration governance as a technology of racialised control and argues that the domestic space is a site where state power is diffused, privatised and enacted—rendering the politics of race, labour and belonging most visible in the intimate.

This study examines how gender-based violence among Syrian refugee women in North Lebanon is shaped not only by interpersonal dynamics but also by political abandonment and fragmented governance. Drawing on trauma-informed qualitative interviews with seventeen Syrian refugee women in Tripoli and Akkar, the study uses a social-ecological and feminist political economy framework. Narrative analysis shows how chronic state absence normalizes violence and constrains women’s agency across everyday life. Participants described violence as embedded in daily survival, including navigating checkpoints, precarious informal labor, insecure housing, inaccessible healthcare, and limited pathways to justice. While displacement created some opportunities for autonomy, it also exposed women to new and intensified risks of violence. The findings position gender-based violence as a structural outcome of refugee governance and regional neglect, highlighting how violence becomes institutionally enabled and unevenly distributed across displaced communities.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study exploring the intimate and reproductive lives of Syrian refugee women in Lebanon, based on in-depth, structured interviews with 122 women across urban, rural, and peri-urban settings. Using a feminist and intersectional lens, it examines how displacement shapes sex, reproduction, and agency within a patriarchal context. While many participants were aware of contraceptive methods, access was constrained by misinformation, financial hardship, and male opposition. Sex was often described as a marital duty rather than a site of mutual pleasure, with few women able to assert consent or articulate desire. Participants expressed both longing for and ambivalence toward bodily autonomy, shaped by precarity. Although some younger urban women reported shifting attitudes, most accounts revealed entrenched gendered power relations limiting reproductive choice. The findings call for culturally sensitive, gender-transformative interventions supporting sexual and reproductive agency.