Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the contested reconstruction of Nahr el Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp destroyed by the Lebanese Army in 2007, its effect on those displaced and the re-conceptualisation of “refugees” as a security threat. The paper is based on intermittent field research in the camp from 2007 until the present.

Paper long abstract:

The Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon are produced by specific modes of governance that has made camp-based refugees the country's poorest and most marginalised group. These are not traditional environments, but artificial ones seeking to contain, in the words of the Michel Agier, "the most...undesirable populations of the planet". Agier's critique takes its theoretical cue from the philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, especially the notions "space of exception" and "biopolitics" which is used here to theorize the reconstruction of the Nahr el Bared refugee camp in Tripoli, North Lebanon. In 2007, the camp was destroyed by the Lebanese Army and the about 30,000 refugees displaced in the largest battle in post-civil war Lebanon. The ruins of the Nahr el Bared camp are now a "hyperghetto" where the residents suffer from strict surveillance and segregation in what could be called a "permanent state of emergency". Rebuilding the camp has been delayed by complex ownership issues to land and property and the camp's reconstruction "securitised" by the Lebanese Army. At present, only about 1,000 of the about 5,500 displaced families have been able to return, the remainder are internally displaced, living temporarily in other camps or rented apartments. In Lebanon four refugee camps have been destroyed never to be rebuilt, telltale signs that ruined camps remain just that; ruins. To understand why, this paper analyses the contested reconstruction of Nahr el Bared, its effect on those displaced and the re-conceptualisation of "refugees" as a security threat.