Young refugees navigating the emotional legacies of displacement in Beirut through friendships

Conflicts in Syria and Iraq have displaced many young people and disrupted their relationships with family and friends. To refer to the legacies of displacement is to recognise a range of impacts, arising from the past, which remain active in the ongoing re-shaping of power relations that forced migration causes at both geopolitical and personal levels. We focus on how the legacies of displacement impact upon the emotional lives of young Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Beirut. We explore how these emotional legacies cause changes in friendships, but also how friendships are important for these young refugees to find ways of navigating these emotional legacies. We explore how emotional legacies have affected their everyday lives in the form of distrust, exclusion, boredom and loneliness. There are also gendered power relations that affect the different ways in which the boys and girls in our study are able to use friendships to navigate these legacies. However, we argue that all of these young Syrians and Iraqis navigate these emotional legacies through politically astute, often collectively achieved, forms of emotional reflexivity. This reflexivity allows them to find ways of continuing friendships or connecting with new friends, while contesting some of the more corrosive influences of distrust and discrimination.