MSM research on Palestinian refugees presented in Washington DC

MSM Research Fellow Nora Stel recent shared her expertise on governance in and institutions at the annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), one of the world’s leading academic institutions for the study of the Middle East and North Africa Region that was held from 22 to 25 November in Washington D.C.

She presented a paper titled ‘The Children of the State’? How Palestinians from the Seven Villages Negotiate Sect, Party and State in Lebanon. In this paper, Nora discusses processes of nationalization of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. She explores the case-study of the community hailing from the village of Salha, now in occupied Palestine, currently living in Shabriha, a small town near the city of Sur in South Lebanon. Adopting the ‘negotiated state’ framework, the paper offers an agency-oriented, bottom-up perspective on the community’s gaining of citizenship and shows how the people from Salha have acquired citizenship not merely to gain access to, but also ensure a degree of independence from, the Lebanese state and political parties.

The conference, consisting of more than 270 sessions and hosting over a thousand researchers, policy-makers and practitioners from the entire world, brought together expertise on issues ranging from the Arab Spring to the Syrian refugee crisis and the rise of the Islamic State and sought to provide policy input on matters as diverse as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement seeking to generate Israeli accountability, the effects of the Unites States’ concealed ‘toxic war’ in the region and the connections between the Gulf’s rentier states and religious radicalization.

Nora’s paper is based on her PhD research, supervised by Professors Wim Naudé, Georg Frerks and Irna van der Molen, which is among others supported by Yale University’s Middle East Studies Council as well as the American University of Beirut’s Issam Fares Institute where she is an affiliated scholar. Nora writes a regular Blog on her fieldwork in Lebanon, and teaches qualitative research methods in MSM’s Research Methods and Skills (RMS) program.

Click here to watch a short video of Nora Stel talking about her ongoing research in Lebanon.

Related reading
Wim Naudé, Nora Stel (2013) “Public-Private Entanglement: Entrepreneurship in a Hybrid Political Order, the Case of Lebanon”, IZA DP No. 7795

Nora Stel (2013) “Entrepreneurs In The Dark: The Impact Of Fragile And Hybrid Governance On Lebanese Entrepreneurship — A Case-Study Of The Electricity Sector,” Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship, 18(03).

Wim Naudé, Tilman Brück and Philip Verwimp (2013) “Business under Fire”, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 57 (1).

Nora Stel (2013) “Eviction and Migration in an Institutional Vacuum: the Case of a Palestinian Gathering in South Lebanon,” Jadaliyya website.