Transitional place-making: Palestinian refugee experiences in Lebanon

02/14/24 • 46 min

This episode is a follow-up to an earlier conversation with Anne Lene Stein which focused on peace activism in Israel and Palestine. We invited her back onto the podcast to share another important strand of research with us, based on her recent work with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
As several of our other episodes discuss, forced displacement is a recurring legacy of conflict all around the world. In recent years, wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ukraine, the DRC and Sudan (to name just a few) have displaced millions of people from their homes; and in recent months hundreds of thousands more people have been displaced within Gaza, sometimes multiple times. This is not a new phenomenon; as Anne underlines, Palestinians have been seeking sanctuary in many different places, for many years - including in Lebanon, where some Palestinians have been living as refugees for multiple generations.
Anne begins the conversation by explaining what drove so many Palestinian refugees to Lebanon in the first place, over 70 years ago; and how many continue to live in supposedly temporary refugee camps around the country. She describes the challenging living conditions in these camps, the lack of freedom and rights for their inhabitants, and the ways in which the camps are governed and controlled by both internal and external forces.
This leads to a particular focus of Anne's research: how young people, born and raised in these camps, construct their identities and visualise their futures. For many displaced Palestinians, retaining refugee status is crucial in holding on to the right to return home some day; but this comes with significant costs, perpetuating poverty and disenfranchisement. Anne discusses some of the ways in which young people in refugee camps in Lebanon try to overcome the stigma attached to being displaced, pushing back against dominant narratives; how they use different media and methods to imagine 'home' in new ways, overcoming the 'politics of temporality'; and how they employ everyday acts of resistance to exercise agency and take more control over their lives. This gets us talking about peace imaginaries as well as habits of visualising forced displacement.
We end the episode by considering what lessons we might learn from the experiences of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon as we seek better ways to support people newly displaced by conflict. As Anne underlines, we need to find political - not just humanitarian - solutions; and we should invest in solutions that maximise refugee rights and avoid re-victimising people.
We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website.
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Previous Episode

AI-enabled military technologies: technology, ethics, trust, storytelling

In this podcast Alice interviews two guests, both based at the US Army War College and both researching AI-enabled military technologies. LTC Dr Paul Lushenko is the Director of Special Operations and a Faculty Instructor in the U.S. Army War College’s Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations. Paul has combined an academic career with regular military deployments, directing intelligence operations at the Battalion, Combined Task Force, and Joint Task Force levels. He is the co-editor of Drones and Global Order: Implications of Remote Warfare for International Society (2022), which studies the implications of drone warfare on global politics. With colleague Shyam Raman he has also co-authored Legitimacy of Drone Warfare: Evaluating Public Perceptions (Routledge in 2024), which explores public’s perceptions of legitimate drone strikes.
Dr Jerilyn Packer is an award-winning educator, specialising in the US military school system. Twelve years ago she transitioned into educational leadership, which enables her to engage in reflective practices and collaborative coaching with district and school leaders in the Department of Defense Education Activity. Skilled in strategic planning, professional learning, and data analysis, she partners with senior leaders to identify educational gaps and craft targeted solutions to improve achievement. Dr. Packer is currently running a research project which uses interviews and focus groups among senior officers to determine what shapes their trust in AI-enabled military technologies. Going forward, she hopes to employ this research in an upcoming role within the Senior Executive Service, so her findings will have broad policy impact.
Paul and Jerilyn help us grapple with recent technological developments in warfare which have huge implications for how governments, militaries and the public visualise conflict – and indeed peacekeeping – now and in the future. Indeed, as Paul’s 2022 edited volume underlines, drone warfare and AI require us to rethink the structural and normative pillars of global order. Between them, they discuss recent developments in drones and AI technologies; their increasing incorporation into military arsenals, strategy and practice; barriers to their use such as concerns around ethics, governance and trust; and the ways in which they are changing our habits of visualising war itself.
Among other topics, we touch on the dehumanising, racist and colonial dimensions of drone warfare; the moral questions posed by asymmetric/'riskless'/'post-heroic' conflict; and connections between Greek myths, dystopian science fiction and the new war-storytelling patterns that are increasingly inspired by AI. This episode offers important reflections, based on both Paul and Jerilyn's research, into the challenges and concerns of professionals who find themselves in an often 'uneasy partnership' with emerging military technologies, and poses critical questions about wider public understandings and perceptions.
We hope you find the discussion interesting. Paul dives deeper into these important topics in recent articles 'Trust but Verify' and 'AI and the future of warfare'. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website.
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Next Episode

Children, Childhoods and Child-Soldiering: critical lenses on war

In this podcast Alice interviews Dr Jana Tabak, an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Jana’s work focuses on children’s experiences of conflict in both the global south and the global north, and also on the role that our conceptions of childhood play in our habits of visualising war – and, indeed, in how our habits of visualising war shape how we view children and childhoods. More broadly she is interested in children’s political subjecthood and their ‘political becoming’: how ideas of children get deployed in global politics, how children’s agency as political actors gets constrained by adult frameworks, and what children can contribute to politics (and particularly to discussions of war and peace) when mechanisms for their inclusion work better.
Together with Marshall Beier, Jana has edited two influential volumes on Children, Childhoods and Everyday Militarisms (in 2020) and on Childhoods in Peace and Conflict in 2021. These draw attention to the multiplicity of both real and imagined childhoods, and how different militarisms intersect with and inform different childhoods around the world. Some of Jana’s published work focuses particularly on representations and conceptions of child soldiering in different parts of the world. In 2020 she published a monograph called The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress, along with a range of other articles on related topics; and her current project is looking specifically at recruitment of junior soldiers in the UK.
The episode begins with discussion of our norms of visualising children and childhood, particularly how concepts of children/childhood get constructed in and for global politics. Jana stresses that such habits tend to exclude children as political subjects in the present, while including them as potential citizens in the future. More worryingly still, Jana notes, the reduction of conceptions of childhood to one idealised model can end up 'othering' children whose childhoods (through no fault of their own) differ from standard/Western expectations.
We consider the tendency, when visualising children-in-war, to regard them as ‘passive skins’, victims with no agency to shape their own fate; and we also ask how this shapes our understandings of war and conflict, not just views of children and/as victims. Jana helps us look critically at the many forms of militarism which touch different children's lives, and we spend some time considering how 'child soldiers' tend to be visualised, in comparison with junior recruits to (e.g.) the UK's armed forces. Along the way, Jana stresses the importance of doing research with children as co-producers of knowledge, and of exploring the blurred/maleable boundaries of both childhood and war.
We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website.
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin