The Political and the Humanitarian in Lebanon

What is it about?

This paper primarily aims at enlarging qualitative knowledge on how social settings and personal relations change while turning into spaces of humanitarian aid provision. Two diverse emergencies that Lebanon has faced will be taken into analysis: the internal displacement caused by the Israel-Lebanon July War in 2006 and the 2011-2014 massive influx of Syrian refugees. In this framework, while dealing with the sudden presence of non-state actors replacing the void historically left by the central state, this paper will illustrate how the 2006 displaced and now the Syrian refugees locally develop moral resilience, gratitude or mistrust towards the humanitarian programmes, and cultivate expectations of mutual assistance. In the wake of what has been first applauded—and then discarded—as the “Arab Spring”, a phenomenological analysis of the social changes, engendered by the temporary presence of humanitarian actors in chronically neglected settings, can offer an inner perspective of how people socially respond to emergency crises.

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Why is it important?

The humanitarian factor has hardly ever been explored with a bottom-up approach in Lebanon. The study is informative about how people - both aid providers and recipients - experience conflict through the provision of humanitarian assistance. This enhances qualitative knowledge of how to design and implement emergency programmes, and what social impact they may have in the long run. It also informs about the kind of relations that are established between local aid actors and the international humanitarian apparatus, which normally entails the bureaucratisation and standardisation of aid work.

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