Public Culture Repressentations of Displacement from the Middle East and North Africa Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh As you walk on the trace Of those who left before you, While the moon is faint in the sky, Say to yourself, if you can: Absence is the trace of those who disappeared. — Yousif M. Qasmiyeh Forced migration moves in and out of the public sphere, with political, media, and civil society attention ebbing and lowing across time and space.1 However, while displacement is increasingly common — “one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum” (UNHCR 2015b) — and also increasingly protracted, with over half of the world’s refugees (more than 14 million people) having been displaced for over ten years, the vast majority of contexts of forced migration typically remain invisible in the global North until moments identiied as “crises” arise, puncturing and punctuating this invisibility. In the contemporary context, and since the summer of 2015 speciically, European and North American political discourses, media represenThis piece draws on research supported by the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council (2005 – 9), the Leverhulme Trust (2011 – 15), the Oxford University Press Fell Fund (2012 – 14), and the Henry Luce Foundation (2014 – 16). I thank Paladia Ziss and Nell Gabiam for their research assistance in the United Kingdom and France, respectively, and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh for his insightful feedback on an earlier draft of this article. 1. The lines of poetry in the article’s epigraph are quoted from Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh 2010: 294. Public Culture 28:3 doi 10.1215/08992363-3511586 457 Copyright 2016 by Duke University Press Published by Duke University Press Public Culture Public Culture tations, and civil society campaigns have become saturated with images of certain refugees, in particular those from the Middle East. The current hypervisibility of Middle Eastern refugees in media and political discourses is, on many levels, understandable given the sheer number of refugees leeing from diverse, intersecting crises and conlicts across the Middle East and farther aield and also in light of the challenges faced by Northern states and Northern-led organizations attempting to respond to these processes of forced migration. However, hypervisibility is itself regionally governed; it is arguably not the “humanitarian crisis” evolving in the Middle East but rather Europe’s (self-)position(ing) as a space overwhelmed by the arrival of an estimated 1 million refugees in 2015 that is at the core of this process of hypervisibilization in the European public sphere. In contrast, forced migrants across the global South remain invisible precisely because they are of no consequence to Europe. Ultimately, processes of (hyper)visibility have themselves also simultaneously been characterized by the reinscription of diverse forms of invisibility and marginalization. This article draws on my research with and about refugees from the Middle East and North Africa both to historicize and to contextualize what I refer to as intersecting processes of repressentation and footnoting (following Jacques Derrida) in the study of, and diverse responses to, forced migration (FiddianQasmiyeh 2010, 2014a, 2016a). In particular, I evoke the concept of repressentation to examine the extent to which certain groups of forced migrants and certain identity markers (real, imagined, and imposed), on the one hand, and certain modes of “humanitarian” response to forced migration, on the other, are centralized and heralded while others are concealed from public view for diverse reasons and with different effects. The deconstructive framework underpinning my work as a whole leads me purposefully to centralize what has previously been assigned a peripheral position throughout the ever-expanding “archive of knowledge” (Foucault 1989: 25) vis-à-vis particular refugee situations and simultaneously to critically interrogate how, why, and with what effect only certain bodies, identity markers, and models of humanitarian response become hypervisible in the public sphere. I start by tracing the roles of visibility and invisibility in constituting the “ideal refugee” (and the concomitant igure of the “a-refugee”), before turning to my ongoing research into refugee-refugee humanitarianism as an invisible form of Southern-led (rather than Northern-led or Northern-dominated) responses to displacement from Syria. 458 Published by Duke University Press Public Culture Repressentations and “Ideal Refugees” Repressentations Since the beginning of the conlict in Syria, Syrians have moved not only within and across borders but also in and out of favor with different international actors. Until an individual who had allegedly entered Europe with a Syrian passport was identiied as one of the perpetrators of the November 2015 Paris attacks, Syrian refugees were in many ways positioned as the “ideal refugees” in Europe: their requests for asylum were not only “legible” for decision makers, but they were considered to be both legitimate and priority “candidates” for international protection. In effect, asylum seekers from Syria in Europe have been “fast-tracked” due to the hypervisibility of their vulnerability and their worthiness of protection. Such was the experience of Nabil, whose application for asylum in the United Kingdom resulted in the granting of protection in less than one month in the summer of 2013, and Hosam, who was granted refugee status only two months after applying for asylum in France in 2014 (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2016b; Gabiam and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2016). The speed and apparent eficiency with which asylum claims have been processed when submitted by individuals leeing persecution in Syria is particularly notable when compared with the insecurity that has typically characterized asylum proceedings, with Middle Eastern asylum seekers in the United Kingdom often having to wait for up to ten years to have their claims for refugee status resolved (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh 2010). The temporality of insecurity faced by asylum seekers in Europe is based not only on their point of origin but also on the geopolitical context in which their cases are being reviewed (ibid.). At the same time as Nabil’s and Hosam’s asylum claims were processed so rapidly, a hierarchy of recognition and worth has emerged, with other refugees having been rendered “bad refugees” or even what I denominate as “a-refugees,” whose very existence is denied or who are not considered to be worthy of humanitarian or political support (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015a: 176). While Syrians were prioritized for registration on the Greek island of Lesbos and their onward migration to the Greek mainland was facilitated by the authorities, Iraqis and Afghans were situated as “second-tier refugees” destined to wait longer and receive less humanitarian assistance than their Syrian counterparts (Domokos and Kingsley 2015). By late 2015, Western and Eastern European states were deporting asylum seekers who were neither from Syria nor from Iraq or Afghanistan, refusing to allow them entry into their countries and returning them to Greece. Throughout those processes, other refugees from across the Middle East and North Africa, Southeast Asia, and farther aield have been rendered invisible “as” refugees deserving of 459 Published by Duke University Press of Displacement Public Culture Public Culture protection. Indeed, this is not a historical anomaly, since groups including Palestinians have often been represented as a-refugees. While applied here to the context of Syrian refugees in Europe, I irst explored in detail the concept of the ideal refugee as a key igure against whom “other refugees” are simultaneously compared, and constituted, in my irst book, The Ideal Refugees (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2014a). This book examined how, why, and to what effect refugees from the non-self-governing territory of the Western Sahara (known as Sahrawi refugees), who have been based in refugee camps in Southwest Algeria since 1975, have systematically been presented by observers from across the global North as “unique” and “socially superior” to “other refugees” (ibid.). It was in The Ideal Refugees that I irst developed the analytical framework of repressentation to examine not only how refugees are represented by others — academics, the media, politicians, and aid agencies — but also how refugees represent both themselves and other refugees and how these processes relate to the politics of survival. Centralizing the signiicance of intersectionality within postcolonial analyses, I examined the processes through which Sahrawi refugees’ Islamic belief and practice have been rendered invisible, while claims of secularism, democracy, and gender equality have been purposefully highlighted by the Sahrawis’ political representatives throughout their interactions with diverse audiences from across the global North. Ultimately, I argued that the erasure of Islam and violence against women and the centralization of secularism, democracy, and gender equality in the Sahrawi oficial discourse emerge as discursive strategies invoked to position the Sahrawis as “the ideal refugees” precisely as a means to secure both essential humanitarian assistance and political support for the quest for national self-determination from Northern state and nonstate actors. An additional dimension that is particularly pertinent in the contemporary refugee situation in the Middle East and Europe alike pertains to the strategies that may be mobilized by refugees to secure legal status by aligning themselves with the igure of the “ideal refugee.” Indeed, refugees are not merely “affected by” policies and politics, nor do they merely “have” lived experiences that can be documented, recognized, and analyzed by different stakeholders. Rather, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and I draw on Augusto Boal (1992) to argue that refugees are “spectactors” who not only observe the structures that frame their lives but “who resist, negotiate and enact a number of discourses and counter-discourses, thereby embodying processes of individual and collective transformation” (FiddianQasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh 2010: 295). Such a focus does not intend to romanticize or celebrate refugees’ agency or to argue that all refugees have equal ields of vision or of action (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2011). Indeed, the hypervisibility of refu460 Published by Duke University Press Public Culture gees from the Middle East and North Africa has often emerged due to the securitization of asylum seekers in general and Muslim refugees in particular, in which refugees’ agency has been perceived, and represented, as threatening in nature. In the context of refugees from the Middle East, including refugees leeing the conlicts across Syria, hypervisibility and agency are not benign terms, since they have frequently been the framework through which refugees have been represented as threats, including of terrorism (Kingsley 2015) and of patriarchal violence against women (Hoffmann et al. 2016). As Derrida (2000b: 57) notes, “The blessing of visibility and daylight is also what the police and politics demand.” However, it is precisely against the backdrop of the securitization of asylum seekers, Islamophobia, and the constitution of “Muslim others” as quintessentially patriarchal and “barbaric” that refugees have at times developed a range of representational strategies to secure humanitarian, political, and legal support, including precisely by disavowing their religious beliefs (Akram 2000; FiddianQasmiyeh 2014a) or by centralizing their minority (religious, gendered, or sexuality) status “as” victims of the archetypal Muslim other (Akram 2000) to meet the expectations and preferences of aid providers and decision makers (Ticktin 2005; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015c). While developed as a means of analyzing the power relations between refugees, their political representatives, and Northern aid providers in the case study of the Sahrawi refugee camps, the concepts of the ideal refugee and repressentation are traveling concepts (following Said 1983), which can help us understand how, why, and to what effect refugees from the Middle East and North Africa attempt to present themselves as deserving of protection in the contemporary refugee situation. In contexts of marginalization, hostility, and overt violence, refugees may variously present themselves as members of the moment’s “ideal” refugee group or attempt to blur or magnify identity markers to ensure their physical, and existential, survival. For instance, the erasure of particular identity markers combined with the magniication of other features identiied as being prioritized by the international community can be seen in the cases of non-Syrian asylum seekers who have taken on the persona of the Syrian refugee in the hope that this will expedite the granting of protection, even when their “real” asylum case may clearly meet the grounds for being granted refugee status under the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees (on the latter, see also Sandvik 2011). In the context of the Syrian refugee situation in Europe, such “performances” have led to the increasing usage of “dialect testing” to ilter out “real” Syrians from those asylum seekers presenting themselves as such to access registration 461 Published by Duke University Press Repressentations of Displacement Public Culture Public Culture systems, humanitarian assistance, or refugee status (UK Government 2015). As observed by Derrida (2000b: 91), “Language resists all mobilities because it moves about with me,” and yet the question remains: “Is language in possession, ever a possessing or possessed possession?” (Derrida 1998: 17). In spite of this potential paradox, European policy makers have mobilized this process of linguistic accompaniment to determine the “true” origins of the asylum seeker. While oficially used as a means of rejecting or supporting claims of belonging to well-documented persecuted groups (Naysmith 2015) in spite of the extensive documentation on this practice’s unreliability (e.g., Green 2015), dialects have also often been used as a means of waging war. In the context of the Lebanese civil war, for instance, key shibboleths were used to differentiate Palestinian refugees from Lebanese citizens, with those “mispronouncing” the shibboleths being readily identiied and persecuted accordingly. The instrumentalization of dialect testing as part of immigration and asylum procedures in Europe (e.g., UK Government 2015), however, is based on a number of key assumptions that are anathema to many refugees’ lived experiences and, indeed, to the ethnic and national heterogeneity of societies in the Middle East and North Africa (and elsewhere). Major challenges include the extent to which mothers and fathers, or broader family members, may speak different dialects within the same household and the extent to which children may develop their own hybrid dialect as a result (Qasmiyeh 2013, 2016). So too is this the case of children who have studied outside of the Middle East, to return speaking neither their mother tongue nor the language of their formal education luently (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015c: 48, 63). Among those displaced by the Syrian conlict and seeking international protection are people who speak not one hyperaudible dialect but a range of dialects with diverse accents precisely due to this heterogeneity, which has itself been the cause of persecution in the past. Overlapping Displacements The contemporary displacement scenario is characterized not only by increasingly protracted displacement but also by overlapping displacements (FiddianQasmiyeh 2012, 2015c). That is to say that individuals, families, and communities displaced by the Syrian conlict have often been displaced internally and internationally on one or more occasions in the past. While largely remaining on the margins of media, political, and academic attention, the Syrian conlict has displaced not only Syrian citizens but also Palestinians, Kurds, and Iraqis (et alia) who were living in Syria as refugees and stateless people at the outbreak of 462 Published by Duke University Press Public Culture the civil war and who have subsequently been displaced both within and from Syria (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015b, 2016b; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh 2016; Gabiam and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2016). I do not intend to argue that Palestinians and other non-Syrian nationals displaced from Syria are resolutely invisible in the global North, since numerous counterexamples prove the contrary: in particular, the images of the siege of the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in Damascus in 2013 and of Aylan Kurdi’s body lying on a Turkish beach in 2015 have already been recognized as emblematic images of the Syrian conlict that, at the time, prompted a paradigm shift in the global North’s political, humanitarian, and empathic responses to the overlapping conlicts and crises occurring in and emanating from the Middle East (Gabiam and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2016). In effect, when Palestinian refugees leeing the siege of Yarmouk have reached Europe, they have often been recognized as being in need of international protection — as exempliied, in fact, by the cases cited above of Nabil and Hosam, who were granted asylum in the United Kingdom and France, respectively, as Palestinians raised in Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria. Nonetheless, these deining moments remain temporary “snapshots” puncturing and punctuating longer-standing processes of the invisibility of those overlapping groups of displaced people who have remained in their region of origin, sharing (and contesting) spaces with citizens and other refugees alike in contexts characterized by what Derrida so astutely conceptualizes as “hostipitality” (Derrida, 2000a, 2000b; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015a, 2015c; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh 2016). Indeed, in spite of the predominance of media accounts pertaining to the refugee crisis in Europe and declarations that “the European project” itself is at risk by virtue of the mass arrival of refugees in and across the European space, the vast majority of refugees from Syria continue to be hosted in neighboring countries, as is the case worldwide (86 percent of all displaced people remain within the global South [UNHCR 2015a]). And apart from emerging during unique moments of crisis, both displaced people in the global South and the diverse responses developed by state and nonstate actors in the global South have remained on the margins of academic, political, and policy accounts of forced migration. South-South Humanitarianism Academics increasingly recognize the existence of multiple humanitarianisms, including “humanitarianisms of Europe, of Africa, of the global, and of the local” 463 Published by Duke University Press Repressentations of Displacement Public Culture Public Culture (Kennedy 2004: xv), and yet humanitarian action not borne of the Northerndominated and highly institutionalized international regime has remained largely neglected in academia (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Pacitto 2015; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015c). Academics and practitioners alike have long argued that humanitarianism (as ideology and as practice) reproduces, rather than disrupts, Northern colonial ties of exploitation and control over the South (Dufield 2007). Postcolonial and critical studies of humanitarianism have long critiqued Northern actors’ motivations behind, and models of intervening in, situations of conlict and displacement. Inter alia, they have highlighted the neocolonial power imbalances between Northern donors and Southern recipients, the hegemonic representations of the needy and desperate “other,” and the inherent paternalism of protection scenarios in which Northern actors are positioned as the only forces able to save “them” (e.g., Rajaman 2002; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2014b). In this context, when Southern actors’ responses to conlict-induced displacement have been analyzed, academics and policy observers have often expressed concerns that such responses may be motivated by ideological and faith-based priorities, rather than adhering to the “international” humanitarian principles of neutrality, universality, and impartiality (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2011; FiddianQasmiyeh and Ager 2013; Ager, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, and Ager 2015; FiddianQasmiyeh and Pacitto 2015). Throughout such debates, the humanitarian dimension of Southern actors’ responses to processes of forced migration has been not only questioned but often automatically discredited. In contrast, my analysis of the genealogy and contemporary manifestations of South-South humanitarianism starts from the premise that critically analyzing the power relations underpinning Southern responses to conlict-induced displacement is essential in order to avoid either prematurely idealizing these responses as egalitarian and empowering processes that challenge neocolonial humanitarian interventions or demonizing them a priori through the application of securitization frameworks that have arguably prompted much of the academic and policy focus on faith-based humanitarianism (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2011, 2015c). To better understand the motivations, nature, and impacts of Southern-led initiatives to displacement from Syria, my research aims to centralize refugees’ own experiences of and perspectives on initiatives and programs designed and implemented by “Southern” actors in support of refugees from Syria. By bringing refugees’ voices to the forefront, my work continues to strive not only to examine refugees’ lived experiences of displacement and receiving aid but also to shed light on refugees’ understandings of humanitarianism and the extent to which 464 Published by Duke University Press Public Culture they consider that diverse Southern-led responses to conlict-induced displacement can or should be conceptualized as “humanitarian” programs. Such an approach is particularly signiicant in order to transcend debates regarding the desirability or tensions of “alternative” forms of humanitarianism that, until now, have been monopolized by Northern academic and policy perspectives (FiddianQasmiyeh 2015c). Furthermore, bringing refugees’ voices to the fore also requires us to explore the agency of refugees as not only recipients but also providers of assistance, by examining underresearched processes of “refugee-refugee humanitarianism.” Critically assessing the implications of these processes is particularly signiicant given the increasingly protracted, and often overlapping, nature of conlict-induced displacement in the Middle East. Refugee-Refugee Humanitarianism and Hostipitality Commentators have argued that civil society groups, in spite of their invisibility in media and political representations projected from and to Europe, are in fact the most signiicant actors supporting refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey (see, e.g., IRIN 2012; Gatten and Alabaster 2012). These initiatives have included Lebanese, Jordanian, and Turkish citizens providing food and shelter to refugees (IRIN 2012) and local faith-based organizations delivering aid and providing spiritual support to refugees in Jordan (El-Nakib and Ager 2015), but also protracted Palestinian refugees offering support to “new” refugees seeking sanctuary in Lebanon (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015b; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh 2016). In many ways, the refugee-led initiatives developed in response to existing and new refugee situations challenge widely held (although equally widely contested) assumptions that refugees are passive victims in need of care from outsiders (Harrell-Bond 1986; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2014a, 2015b). While Palestinian refugees’ very existence has often been denied and they have been positioned as the quintessential a-refugees (see above), the example of “established” Palestinian refugees offering humanitarian support to “new” refugees situates Palestinians as active providers of support, rather than as dependent recipients. Equally, it relects the extent to which refugee camps can become “shared spaces,” spaces to which new refugees can head in search of safety (Qasmiyeh and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015b). However, far from idealizing these responses, this example simultaneously raises key questions vis-à-vis the power imbalances and processes of exclusion and overt hostility that may characterize local responses to conlict and also regarding the sustainability of such refugee-led responses in contexts of widespread, and overlapping, precariousness and violence. 465 Published by Duke University Press Repressentations of Displacement Public Culture Public Culture Derrida’s notion of hostipitality is particularly pertinent in elucidating, as well as problematizing, the relationship between welcoming and rejecting neighbors in times of conlict and peace alike. Hospitality — a “quasi-synonym of ‘welcome’ ” (Derrida 1999: 45) — is never absolute; rather, it is always “parasitized by its opposite, ‘hostility,’ the undesirable guest . . . which it harbors as the self-contradiction in its own body” (Derrida 2000a: 3). Hospitality inherently bears its own opposition (and opposite), the ever-present possibility of hostility toward the other who, at one time, has been welcomed at the threshold. The possibility of rejection — and overt violence — is always already there, and a neighbor can only ever welcome another neighbor in a conditional way: to offer welcome is always already to have the power to delimit the space or place that is being offered to the other. As such, whether we are the host or the guest in asylum, we do not know what hospitality is — it is ultimately unknowable and also unachievable (ibid.: 4): “Perhaps no one welcomed is ever completely welcome” (ibid.: 6). In effect, Palestinians — whether the hosts or the guests in this case study — have never “known” what it is to “be” “completely welcome[d]” in the Middle East (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015c: 109). “We Arrived in the Camp, Not in Lebanon” Baddawi is a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon that was established in 1955 and — while estimates vary widely — was home to between twenty-ive thousand and forty thousand Palestinians before the outbreak of the Syrian conlict. Like other Palestinian camps across Lebanon, Baddawi is beyond Lebanese jurisdiction and has long been characterized by violence and lawlessness. However, while the Palestinian camps are commonly referred to as “islands of insecurity” (Sayigh 2000), Baddawi has also become a space of protection and assistance for thousands of “new” refugees from Syria since 2011.2 These new refugees include Syrian nationals who have led violence and persecution in their country, but also Syrian Palestinians, Kurds, and Iraqis who have been displaced from refugee camps and cities across that country. While they may be categorized as new arrivals in Lebanon and Jordan when compared with these “established” refugee communities, refugees from Syria are now oficially categorized as protracted refugees, and indeed for thousands of Palestinians and Iraqis, this is the 2. This is not the irst time that Palestinian refugees in Baddawi have hosted new refugees, having provided sanctuary to an additional ifteen thousand Palestinians displaced from nearby Nahr el-Bared refugee camp when that camp was destroyed during the ighting between Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese army in 2007. Ten thousand Palestinians from Nahr el-Bared camp remained in Baddawi by 2009. See Qasmiyeh and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013 and Qasmiyeh 2016. 466 Published by Duke University Press Public Culture second, third, or fourth time that they and their families have been displaced by conlict. During a ield trip I took in the summer of 2015, many of my interviewees in Baddawi camp reiterated that when they led Syria they “arrived in the camp” and just “passed through Lebanon.” Having crossed the Syria-Lebanon border, they were physically on Lebanese territory and yet explained that they had traveled directly to, and arrived in, Baddawi camp, where established residents and local organizations offered them shelter, food, and clothes. In many ways, the camp has superseded the (hypervisible) Lebanese state, with many refugees from Syria explicitly stating that, from the very onset of their journeys, they had identiied Baddawi as their intended destination. Indeed, in spite of the extreme poverty and ad hoc clashes that take place between the Palestinian factions that compete to assert their presence or control different parts of the camp, Baddawi continues to be perceived by many new refugees as safer than any of the spaces available outside of the existing Palestinian camps. The Palestinian refugee camps are thus simultaneously “islands of insecurity” and “islands” that are in many ways separated from national Lebanese policies vis-à-vis new refugees, whether these national policies offer support or (as is increasingly the case) restrictions on their presence in Lebanon. Refugee-Refugee Solidarity and Hierarchies of Inclusion and Exclusion In many ways, arriving in the camp — whether Baddawi or other Palestinian camps in Lebanon — has relected the emergence of a new form of solidarity: solidarity between old and new refugees. Established refugees in Baddawi camp and new refugees often have a great deal in common, providing strong foundations for this form of refugee-refugee support: inter alia, they share the legal and political status of being refugees and an embodied understanding of the nature and impacts of violence, dispossession, and displacement. Sharing the increasingly cramped space of Baddawi refugee camp, in many ways, has been an opportunity to form part of the broader refugee nation, a space of solidarity in which they can — following Jean-Luc Nancy (2000: 4) — “be with” other refugees, rather than arriving as outsiders to a Lebanese city. However, refugees in Baddawi are not positioned equally, nor have they been equally welcomed or had equal access to the services and resources available. Ultimately, “togetherness and being-together are not equivalent” (ibid.: 60), and a new hierarchy of refugee-ness has emerged, even though this hierarchy is different from that relected in and reconstituted by European media representations 467 Published by Duke University Press Repressentations of Displacement Public Culture Public Culture and state policies. In Baddawi, established residents describe “other” refugees “as” refugees, clearly differentiating between the camps’ natives (the original, authentic refugees) and the newcomers (somehow inauthentic and challenging the rights, and space, of established refugees). Indeed, this differentiation between the refugee self and other parallels increasing tensions between established and new refugees, not only over the limited space in the camps, but also over increasingly limited resources and job opportunities there. Baddawi camp has become a space in which both of the United Nations’ refugee agencies are present: the “global refugee agency,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), provides assistance and protection to all refugees from Syria apart from Palestinians (who remain invisible in UNHCR statistics and programs [Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2016b]), while the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has a mandate to provide support only to Palestinian refugees, including both established and new Palestinian refugees in the camp. Following the UNHCR’s arrival in the camps, camp residents have transformed UNHCR into a verb: the camps have been “UNHCR-ized.” Through this process, Palestinians who had originally worked for the UNRWA — the main employer in the camps — have shifted, when possible, to UNHCR positions, which are more highly paid than UNRWA roles. Established Palestinian refugees who used to provide help to other Palestinians in the camp through the UNRWA are now helping Syrian refugees through the UNHCR. Simultaneously, Palestinians are becoming increasingly aware that the UNRWA itself is a feeble and frail body unable to cope with the weight of their presence and existence, rights, and needs for the present and the future. They are thus coming to terms with the inescapable disappearance of this body, which is being overshadowed and smothered by the UNHCR. With Baddawi camp’s already limited services and infrastructure severely underresourced, established camp residents and local organizations are increasingly running out of resources to support new refugees and, indeed, their own immediate families. Just as antagonism between refugees and citizens around the world has been well documented, and as non-Syrian refugees become increasingly frustrated by the unequal treatment of asylum seekers across Europe and North America, so too are insecurities and inequalities becoming increasingly visible in Baddawi camp among and between new and established groups of refugees. Concluding Thoughts In this highly complex and underresourced crisis, refugee-refugee humanitarianism — while relegated to the margins — continues to ill a signiicant gap, provid- 468 Published by Duke University Press Public Culture ing material, emotional, and spiritual support to many of those who have been displaced by the Syrian conlict and remain within their region of origin. Such support is highly valued by many new refugees, and yet local, refugee-to-refugee assistance, by neighbors who are simultaneously identiied as part of the refugee self but also the refugee other, is becoming increasingly unsustainable as time passes. From the initial sense of sorority and fraternity that underpinned the “welcoming” of new refugees by Palestinians in Baddawi camp, established refugees have increasingly questioned the short-, medium-, and long-term implications of hosting new refugees and of the UNHCR-ization of the camps. As established residents have refocused on their own situations, hospitality has been increasingly replaced by a sense of detachment from new refugees’ needs; ultimately, this has shifted to a response that has embodied, at best, the “unwelcoming” of new refugees and, at worst, overt hostility and violence. Across the Middle East and Europe alike, solidarity, welcome, and hospitality have been interspersed with and superseded by exclusion, violence, and hostility toward refugees. In spite of the hypervisibility of refugees from Syria in the European and North American public spheres — whether framed as objects of pity or fear — the vast majority of refugees (who primarily remain in the global South) and the vast majority of Southern-led responses to displacement have remained invisible. The tropes of visibility and invisibility have provided the framework guiding this article, which has aimed to examine the ways in which refugees from the Middle East and North Africa have been represented to and by different stakeholders, including the ways in which refugees represent themselves to neighbors, aid providers, and decision makers. In so doing, it has been my intention neither to idealize nor to demonize refugees but rather to centralize the ways in which refugees negotiate the politics of survival and of solidarity in contexts of overlapping and seemingly ever-expanding precariousness and hostipitality. Today, as in the past, it is equally the case that refugees’ “existence is exposed and exposing” (Nancy 2000: 17), while simultaneously, “absence is the trace of those who disappeared” (Qasmiyeh, in Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh 2010: 294). References Ager, Joey, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, and Alastair Ager. 2015. “Local Faith Communities and the Promotion of Resilience in Contexts of Humanitarian Crisis.” Journal of Refugee Studies 28, no. 2: 202 – 21. Akram, Susan M. 2000. “Orientalism Revisited in Asylum and Refugee Claims.” International Journal of Refugee Law 12, no. 1: 7 – 40. 469 Published by Duke University Press Repressentations of Displacement Public Culture Public Culture Boal, Augusto. 1992. 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Fiddian- Qasmiyeh, Elena. 2010. “Concealing Violence against Women in the Sahrawi Refugee Camps: The Politicisation of Victimhood.” In Global Perspectives on War, Gender, and Health: The Sociology and Anthropology of Suffering, edited by Hannah Bradby and Gillian Lewando Hundt, 99 – 110. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. ——— . 2011. “Faith-Based Humanitarianism in Contexts of Forced Displacement.” Journal of Refugee Studies 24, no. 3: 429 – 39. ——— . 2012. “Invisible Refugees and/or Overlapping Refugeedom? Protecting Sahrawis and Palestinians Displaced by the 2011 Libyan Uprising.” International Journal of Refugee Law 24, no. 2: 263 – 93. ——— . 2014a. The Ideal Refugees: Gender, Islam, and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. ——— . 2014b. “Transnational Abductions and Transnational Jurisdictions? The Politics of ‘Protecting’ Female Muslim Refugees in Spain.” Gender, Place and Culture 21, no. 2: 174 – 94. ——— . 2015a. “Conlicting Missions? 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Said, Edward W. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Vintage. Sandvik, Kristin B. 2011. “The Physicality of Legal Consciousness: Suffering and the Production of Credibility in Refugee Resettlement.” In Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, edited by Richard A. Wilson and Richard D. Brown, 223 – 44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sayigh, Rosemary. 2000. “Greater Insecurity for Refugees in Lebanon.” Middle East Research and Information Project, March 1. www.merip.org/mero/mero 030100. Ticktin, Miriam. 2005. “Policing and Humanitarianism in France: Immigration and the Turn to Law as State of Exception.” Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7, no. 3: 346 – 68. 472 Published by Duke University Press Public Culture UK Government. 2015. Language Analysis: Instruction. April. www.gov.uk /government/publications/language-analysis-instruction. UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2015a. Global Facts and Figures. Geneva: UNHCR. ——— . 2015b. “Worldwide Displacement Hits All-Time High as War and Persecution Increase.” June 18. www.unhcr.org/558193896.html. Elena Fiddian- Qasmiyeh is a lecturer in human geography, a codirector of the Migration Research Unit, and the coordinator of the Refuge in a Moving World research network, University College London. Her research examines the intersections between gender, religion, and forced migration, with a focus on the Middle East. Her recent publications include The Ideal Refugees: Gender, Islam, and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival (2014) and South-South Educational Migration, Humanitarianism, and Development (2015). She is a coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (2014). 473 Published by Duke University Press Repressentations of Displacement