Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
The camp and the city are both important for understanding the relationship between space and identity in the refugee experience of exile. In the Palestinian example, the camp has emerged as a potent symbol in the narrative of exile although only a third of refugees registered with UNRWA live in camps. Moreover, the city and urban refugees remain missing in most of the scholarship on the Palestinian experience with space, exile, and identity. Furthermore, there is little attention to how refugees understand the concept of the city and camp in their daily life. This article examines how Palestinian urban refugees in the Old City of Damascus conceptualized the relationship between the camp and the city. It illustrates how the concept of the camp remained necessary for the construction of their collective national identity while in Syria. However, the city was essential in the articulation of individual desires and establishing social distinction from other refugees. Thus, during a protracted exile it is in the interstice between the city and the camp, where most urban refugees in the Old City situated themselves, that informed their national belonging and personal aspirations.
1 All the names in this article have been changed. All interviews were conducted in Arabic and translated into English by the author.
2 al-Hardan, Anaheed, Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 60Google Scholar. On the number and types of refugee camps in Syria see “Where We Work: Syria,” UNRWA, accessed 8 April 2019, https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/syria.
3 Sayigh, Rosemary, “The Palestinian Identity among Camp Residents,” Journal of Palestine Studies 6, no. 3 (1977): 11–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parmenter, Barbara McKean, Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), 63–67Google Scholar; Peteet, Julie, Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camp (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Farah, Randa, “Refugee Camps in the Palestinian and Sahrawi National Liberation Movements: A Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Palestine Studies 38, no. 2 (2009): 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Knudsen, Are and Hanafi, Sari, eds., Palestinian Refugees: Identity, Space and Place in the Levant (London: Routledge, 2011), 1–9Google Scholar; Allan, Diana, Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Gabiam, Nell, Politics of Suffering: Syria's Palestinian Refugee Camps (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Feldman, Ilana, Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018)Google Scholar.
4 Kagan, Michael, “Legal Refugee Recognition in the Urban South: Formal v. De Facto Refugee Status,” Refuge 24, no. 1 (2007): 12Google Scholar; Kibreab, Gaim, “Why Governments Prefer Spatially Segregated Settlement Sites for Urban Refugees,” Refuge 24, no. 1 (2007): 27–35Google Scholar; Gabiam, Politics of Suffering, 122; Kublitz, Anja, “The Ongoing Catastrophe: Erosion of Life in the Danish Camps,” Journal of Refugee Studies 29, no. 2 (2016): 234, doi: 10.1093/jrs/fev019CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 “Alternatives to Camps,” UNHRC, accessed 19 December 2019, https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/alternatives-to-camps.html.
6 Marfleet, Philip, “‘Forgotten,’ ‘Hidden’: Predicaments of the Urban Refugee,” Refuge 24, no. 1 (2007): 39Google Scholar. See also Fábos, Anita and Kibreab, Gaim, “Urban Refugees: Introduction.” Refuge 24, no. 1 (2007): 3–10Google Scholar.
7 Malkki, Liisa, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Marfleet, “‘Forgotten,’” 40; Sandvik, Kristin B., “Negotiating the Humanitarian Past: History, Memory, and Unstable Cityscape in Kampala, Uganda,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2012): 112, doi: 10.1093/rsq/hdr021CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Malkki, Liisa, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Kibreab, Gaim, “Revisiting the Debate on People, Place, Identity and Displacement,” Journal of Refugee Studies 12, no. 4 (1999): 388–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Agier, Michel, “Afterword: What Contemporary Camps Tell Us about the World to Come,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 7, no. 3 (2016): 459–68, doi: 10.1353/hum.2016.0026CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Mohamed Kamel Doraï, “Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon: Migration, Mobility and the Urbanization Process,” in Knudsen and Hanafi, Palestinian Refugees, 69.
12 Marfleet, “‘Forgotten,’” 37.
13 Malkki, Liisa, “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995), 499CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marfleet, “‘Forgotten,’” 37–38; Agier, “Afterword,” 459; McConnachie, Kirsten, “Camps of Containment: A Genealogy of the Refugee Camp,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 7, no. 3 (2016): 404, doi: 10.1353/hum.2016.0022CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Turner, Simon, “What Is a Refugee Camp? Explorations of the Limits and Effects of the Camp,” Journal of Refugee Studies 29, no. 2 (2016): 3, doi: 10.1093/jrs/fev024CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Agier, “Afterword,” 462.
15 Turner, “What Is,” 2, 4.
16 Tuastad, Dag, “‘State of Exception’ or ‘State in Exile’? The Fallacy of Appropriating Agamben on Palestinian Refugee Camps,” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 9 (2017): 2159, doi: 10.1080/01436597.2016.1256765CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 174.
18 Ibid., 168–69 (emphasis in original).
19 Ibid., 176.
20 Ibid., 181.
21 Foucault, Michel, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, Paul (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 241Google Scholar.
22 Diken, Bülent and Laustsen, Carsten Bagge, “The Camp,” Geografiska Annaler Series B: Human Geography 88, no. 4 (2006): 443CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Agier, Michel, “Between War and City: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps,” Ethnography 3, no. 3 (2002): 317–41, doi: 10.1177/146613802401092779CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Massey, Doreen, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 9Google Scholar.
24 Turner, “What Is,” 3.
25 Rodman, Margaret C., “Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality,” American Anthropologist 94, no. 3 (1992): 640–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Diken and Laustsen, “The Camp,” 451 (emphasis in original).
27 Ibid.
28 Agier, “Between War and City,” 320; Turner, “What Is,” 3.
29 Agier, “Between War and City,” 320.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Tuastad, “‘State of Exception,’” 2161.
33 Feldman, Ilana, “What is a Camp? Legitimate Refugee Lives in Spaces of Long-Term Displacement,” Geoforum 66 (2015): 245, doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.11.014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 Ramadan, Adam, “Spatialising the Refugee Camp,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38, no. 1 (2013): 74, doi.10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00509.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Doraï, “Palestinian Refugee Camps,” 70.
36 Feldman, Life Lived in Relief, 175–76.
37 Bitari, Nidal, “Yarmuk Refugee Camp and the Syrian Uprising: A View from Within,” Journal of Palestine Studies 43, no. 1 (2013): 62, doi: 10.1525/jps.2013.43.1.61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 McKittrick, Katherine, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Brand, Laurie, “Palestinians in Syria: The Politics of Integration,” Middle East Journal 42, no. 4 (1988): 623Google Scholar.
40 Diken and Laustsen, “The Camp,” 451 (emphasis in original).
41 McKittrick, Katherine, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xiiiGoogle Scholar.
42 Ibid., xiv.
43 Veena Das and Deborah Poole, eds., Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 204), 13.
44 For more information on Jewish property in Syria, see Fischbach, Michael, Jewish Property Claims against Arab Countries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 Several thousand Damascene Jews remained in Syria and in the Jewish Quarter after the establishment of Israel in 1948. In the 1990s they were granted permission to leave the country, and the vast majority left. They were considered Syrian citizens, unlike the Jews who fled the country during the turbulent period of the late 1940s.
46 Kirsten McConnachie, “Camps of Containment.”
47 See Talhami, Ghada, Syria and the Palestinians: The Clash of Nationalism (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001)Google Scholar.
48 Not all Palestinians living in Syria have refugee status, residency, or are registered with UNRWA. Although I could not access figures, there are several hundred Palestinians who are without identification papers and considered stateless.
49 Lucy Hovil, “With Camps Limiting Many Refugees, the UNHCR's Policy Change Is Welcome,” Guardian, 2 October 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/oct/02/unhcr-policy-change-refugee-camps; Crisp, Jeff, “Finding Space for Protection: An Inside Account of the Evolution of UNHCR's Urban Refugee Policy,” Refuge 33, no. 1 (2017): 87–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 Ramadan, “Spatialising the Refugee Camp,” 70.
51 Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 38Google Scholar.
52 Rodman, “Empowering Place,” 641.
53 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 38–39; Gabiam, Politics of Suffering, 131.
54 Allan, Refugees of the Revolution, 214.
55 Ibid., 66–67.
56 Sayigh, “The Palestinian Identity,” 5.
57 Feldman, Life Lived in Relief, 36.
58 Agier, “Afterword,” 464.
59 Sayigh, Rosemary, “Gender, Sexuality, and Class in National Narrations: Palestinian Camp Women Tell Their Lives,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 19, no. 2 (1998): 181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 Feldman, “What is a Camp?” 251.
61 Kibreab, “Why Governments Prefer,” 28.
62 Dryden-Peterson, Sarah, “I Find Myself as Someone Who Is in the Forest: Urban Refugees as Agents of Social Change in Kampala, Uganda,” Journal of Refugee Studies 19, no. 3 (2006): 382CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fábos and Kibreab, “Urban Refugees,” 4.
63 McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 10.