Young Refugees and Forced Displacement: Navigating Everyday Life in Beirut

Young Refugees and Forced Displacement is about young Syrian and Iraqi refugees navigating the complex realities of forced displacement in Beirut. It is based on a British Academy funded two-year project with 51 displaced youth aged eight to 17 and under the care of three local humanitarian organisations.

Focus groups, interviews and innovative arts-based methods were used to learn about their everyday lives. At the end of the project we coproduced with them a public mural, allowing unexpected epistemological and methodological reflections on researching refugees and the "right to opacity." Families and friendships, humanitarian caregiving, racism, discrimination and everyday decencies and civilities make up the stuff of the ordinary, everyday encounters of refugeedom, defining both its sharper edges and its more inadvertent and quietly political ones.

Refugeedom, as we conceive, includes "the humanitarian condition" but goes a little beyond it, to become also a human condition of political alterity. Thus, in navigating refugeedom the young Syrians and Iraqis become sophisticated political and moral actors, emotionally reflexive as they engage layered subjectivities to define the terms of their own forced displacement. This book will be of interest to policy makers, organisations, social science scholars, students, working on refugees, displacement, humanitarianism, intimacies, emotions, racism and discrimination. It may also be of interest to with displaced youth.