Advocating "Dignity" and "Return" for Lebanon's Palestinians: Imagining a Diasporic Project
Name:
Refugee Survey Quarterly-2014- ...
Size:
170.1Kb
Format:
PDF
Description:
Main article
Journal
Refugee Survey QuarterlyAbstract
The 2010 reform of the legal regime regulating Palestinians’ access to the labour market in Lebanon ignited a heated debate among Lebanese, Palestinians, and international political actors. This article analyses the advocacy initiatives preceding the reform to answer the following question: what signifiers of Palestinian-ness have Palestinian political entrepreneurs mobilised? In a nutshell, it shows how a group of non-governmental organizations working with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon re-shaped the references to “Return” and “Dignity” in order to create an intellectual environment favourable to their demands for legal reform. However, these two signifiers not only concern the issue of the work-related rights of Lebanon’s Palestinians, but they also envisage a specific form of emplacement of the Palestinian community in that country. From this perspective, they are the constitutive elements of a “diasporic project” of emplacement in which Palestinians collectively exist in an in-between (imagined) space situated somewhere between their host society and their homeland.Additional Links
http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/doi/10.1093/rsq/hdu007Language
enISSN
1020-40671471-695X
ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1093/rsq/hdu007