Tamirace Fakhoury (Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs in the Department of Social Sciences at the Lebanese American University, and Director of the Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution, Lebanon)

Date: May 23rd 2019

Time: 18:30 - 20:30

Place: IEMed (Carrer Girona, 20, Barcelona)

Title: Refugee Politics in the Middle East: Historical legacies and governance dilemmas.

Abstract: Syria’s neighborhood currently hosts almost 6 million forcibly displaced from Syria. In this context, international actors have provided assistance to both refugee and host communities so as to help Syria’s neighbours cope with the refugee quandary. Notwithstanding this, response plans have been underfunded, host governments have stressed the limitations of their coping mechanisms, and refugees have been caught in a vicious circle of vulnerability. This seminar will review the overarching policy and historical legacies characterizing refugee governance in the Middle East. It will then explore how state actors namely Lebanon and Jordan and key supranational institutional bodies such as the European Union (EU) and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) have collaborated but also clashed on the refugee issue, generating ‘governance dilemmas’ on the ground and impacting refugee livelihoods and protection needs. The conclusion will show the implications of these dilemmas for the global refugee regime and for the power dynamics in the transregional Mediterranean system.

Bio: Associate professor in Political Sciences and International Affairs in the Department of Social Sciences, and the associate director of the Institute of Social Justice and Conflict Resolution (ISJCR).  Furthermore, she has taught at the summer sessions at the University of California in Berkeley between 2012 and 2016. Fakhoury earned the Jean Monnet fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2010/2011) and the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the German Institute of International and Area Studies in Hamburg, Germany (2014/2015).  Her core research and publication areas are: power-sharing in divided societies, Euro-Mediterranean migration dynamics and governance, Arab states’ coping mechanisms with forced migration, and the role of immigrant communities and diasporas in democratization, and conflict transformation. Fakhoury has published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the International Spectator, the European Foreign Affairs Review, International Migration, the Middle East Journal and Current History. She is a member of the core coordination team of the Global Migration Policy Associates in Geneva and a member of the Steering Committee of the University Alliance for Refugees and At-Risk Migrants (UARRM)

Recommended Readings:

• Fakhoury T. (2018). "Multi-level Governance and Migration Politics in the Arab World: The case of Syria’s displacement," Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
• Brand, Laurie A. and Tamirace Fakhoury (2018). “Migration and Transnational Governance: Middle East Cases and Challenges.” Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies 5 (1).
• Fakhoury, T. (October 2017) “Governance Strategies and Refugee Response: Lebanon in the Face of Syrian Displacement” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49 (4) 681–700.

For the upcoming GRITIM-UPF seminars, please visit this link.