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Paper short abstract:

This paper follows Asma's journey as she repatriates her deceased brother's body from Lebanon to their beseiged hometown in Syria. It explores the fluid border regimes of Syria-Lebanon, connecting not-quite-legal cross-border journeys and the shared cultural and moral ideas of propriety.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decade, the rapidly changing border regimes of Syria and Lebanon have given rise to a fertile ground for increasingly accepted yet not-quite-legal modes of mobility. This is particularly evident among predominantly undocumented Syrians who cross the border between the two countries. Not within the law, yet not exactly illegal, some of the regulations governing cross-border mobility have been informal, shaped by shared values and norms that either underlie or fall outside official border policies.

This paper traces the story of Asma, a displaced Syrian woman in Lebanon, as she embarks on a cross-border journey to repatriate her deceased brother's body to their besieged hometown in Syria. The narrative unravels the challenges faced by Asma as she navigates through various restrictions on her mobility—from evading identification at checkpoints to ensuring safe transportation options and negotiating paperless border crossings. Through Asma’s journey, the paper sheds light on the fluid border regimes between Lebanon and Syria, establishing a connection between Syrian women's precarious border crossings and the shared moral imperative of respectful encounters with women and the deceased. The legitimacy of Syrians' informal border crossing practices, I argue, stems from the invocation of shared cultural and moral notions of propriety. These are particularly manifested through gendered, generational, and after-life modes of acceptable encounters. Ultimately, I contend that it is within these dynamic processes that border-crossers and regulatory border regimes actively shape and reformulate the landscape of transnational mobility.