Relational Construction of Protection. : a Refuge-Space for Syrians in Beirut ; La construction relationnelle de la protection : un espace-refuge des Syriens à Beyrouth

Since 2011, Syrians have fled their country at war to take refuge in Lebanon, a country that does not grant them rights as refugees. How, then, do they manage forms of protection if they are not considered as having rights to it? What does this protection mean socially, in a context where its implementation relies mainly on civil society, via the legal system of kafāla (sponsorship)? Thus, dependent on the hospitality of the host society, what experience of refuge does the implementation of the protection of Syrian refugees, by the “host” populations, condition? From there, how do exiles navigate the margins of a society, whose social protection is not itself the responsibility of the state? These are the questions that this dissertation aims to answer. The objective is to understand how, in the absence of a right to legal asylum, the social institution of relationships of obligations fills the gaps of the international assistance system.In a context where the city is a stakeholder in the “refugee crisis” and in the local dimension of its responses, the urban scale is the selected framework for this study. In doing so, ethnography unfolds in a monographic perspective on Hayy Gharbe: an urban margin in the South of Beirut, which has become a settlement area for refugees from Syria, and a historic refuge for a group of urban poor (displaced people from southern Lebanon, Doms, Bangladeshi women workers). I explore how the social relations of sponsorship and obligation between hosts and Syrian refugees produce forms of private protection that constitute a norm of public protection. At the crossroads of urban anthropology, critical study of international aid, and sociology of migrations and law, the dissertation reconstructs, in a first part, the making of Hayy Gharbe's refuge-space as space of an alternative right of protection, in its historical, social, and political dimensions. It brings together the ethnographic study of this urban object, with the multi-sited analysis of different actors involved in the ...