Echoing and re-echoing refugee policies in the international system: The Lebanese state and its political imaginary

Abstract

This article sets out to contribute to the debate on how Arab refugee hosting states, generally regarded as norm recipients and recalcitrant implementers of refugee law, have sought to shape, localize, and reconfigure understandings and practices of asylum. More broadly, it also hints at how states draw on the question of asylum to craft “political imaginaries” defined as certain ways of seeing, representing, and enacting the political to entrench power structures and strategies of governance. Drawing on the example of Lebanon, traditionally considered as a peripheral actor in the Euro-Mediterranean migration system, I explore how the small state has recast the understandings of refugee reception and resisted some prescriptions for refugee solutions. In doing so, the Lebanese polity, I argue, has twinned its refugee politics with a broader logic of governmentality vying on sectarian and geopolitical imaginings.