School of Arts & Sciences
Syria’s displacement: The politics of reception By Hanan Nasser
LAU hosts conference on a critical subject from cross-comparative and multi-disciplinary perspectives
page 28
Syrian displacement was the focus of a three-day cross-disciplinary conference organized by LAU’s Department of Social Sciences and Institute for Migration Studies (IMS), together with the German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg (GIGA). An interdisciplinary group of 25 junior and senior research specialists across the political science, anthropology, migration studies, and peace and conflict studies fields from Europe, the Middle East and the United States came together at the university’s campus in Byblos. The
participants not only compared Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey as refugee host countries, but also drew on examples from other regions, such as East Africa and Latin America. Assistant Provost for Special External Projects Wassim Shahin described the issue at hand as one of geography par excellence. He expressed his hope that humanitarian interventionism will lead to the “defeat of geography,” contrasting this hope to author Robert Kaplan’s evocation of the “revenge of geography.” Keynote speaker Yezid Sayigh, senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center (Beirut), asked the participants to play around with the concepts of migrants and refugees, underlining how we create categories to fit each word. Addressing the notion of space and what it represented politically and culturally, he raised the question of “which space is ours” and “which space is somebody else’s.”