Moral hazards and humanitarian rackets : the case of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon

Abstract

The predominant scholarship on the Palestinian camps can be characterised as an activist literature which reinforces the humanitarian narrative that camps are places of victimisation. This tends to be an outcome of a number of factors. Firstly it represents the political commitment that many scholars profess towards the cause of the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon. Such a disposition involves the censoring of certain unsavoury facts which might challenge the cause for refugee rights. The invisibility of refugee economic agency in the dominant scholarly output is also a result of limited research methodology. Much of the scholarly output on the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in recent years relies either on the interview method or focus group, both of which reinforce the refugee self-identification as victims in narrative based data collection. This thesis diverges greatly from the predominant scholarship by making visible the economic activities, through numerous anecdotes and case studies, which are routinely performed by refugees especially when interfacing with humanitarian agencies. It does this through utilsing ethnographic data garnered from participant observation and therefore represents data that has not been mediated through the translation of intermediaries. Although the Palestinian refugee camps are often portrayed as sites of crisis, it is unusual for scholars to also explore that they can be sites for the realisation of great economic opportunities and that we cannot focus on humanitarian problems without also understanding the fact that the very conditions which produce crisis are also the same conditions that provide economic profits to certain refugee groups. Under such conditions humanitarian logic not only hides refugee economic agency, but humanitarian assistance can exacerbate economic exploitation.