Somdeep Sen

An emerging framework for providing education to Syrian refugee children in Lebanon

Less than 10% of the estimated total of 11 million Syrians who fled their homes, have actually reached Europe; around 4.8 million Syrian refugees live in neighbouring countries and over 6.6 million are internally displaced people (IDP) within Syria (Migration Policy Centre, 2016). In 2014, the author travelled back to northern Syria, where she conducted anthropological fieldwork in the past between 1997 and 2002, and visited the IDP camps of Atmeh and Qah. This chapter maps out the situation of Syrian children in these IDP camps, compared to trajectories of Syrian refugee children to Europe. Located in so-called “hard-to-reach-areas”, IDP camps are camps of liminality by their locality and marginalisation, “betwixt and between” (Turner, 1969). The IDP camps are not supposed to be permanent, yet all signs are present they will grow into permanent settlements as observed with satellite imagery. Due to the lack of international aid, children in these camps struggle with a severe lack of basic needs supply and education. By comparing the trajectories of Syrian children in Europe with those living inside IDP camps, the author considers the nexus between agency, locality, liminality, mobility and trajectories. The empirical material is based on personal fieldvisits to IDP camps, satellite imagery and interviews with Syrians in Syria, Turkey and the Netherlands. (Less)The war in Syria has forced millions of people to risk their lives to take refuge in neighbouring countries. This has brought to spotlight a generation of young people from birth to adolescence ridden with deprivation and direct violence. Provision of formal and non-formal education has been among the many interventions intended to minimize the impact of forced displacement, rehabilitate war-related trauma, ensure some continuity of children’s rights and equip young generations with means to contribute to rebuilding their societies. The mere provision of access to school, however, far from guarantees a safe, appropriate, and enabling education. Indeed, studies in Lebanon suggest that ensuring all refugee children have places in public schools is not only regarded as a key success indicator, but has also given way to refugee children being further marginalized, prone to ongoing violence and socially constructed as a burden to the host community. In this chapter, we draw on evidence from empirical studies in Lebanon and Jordan to suggest a framework of five dimensions for developing educational programmes that provide refugee children with opportunities to begin managing their war-related experiences, offer relevant learning pathways, strengthen supportive social environments and shape policy environments that respond to children’s needs.

To Fight is to Exist

It is not a particularly novel academic endeavour to explore Hamas’ armed resistance. Nevertheless, this essay contributes to the conversation by deliberating on the organizations military faction through the stories my informants told of their experiences and memories of resistance. With these stories in mind, I argue Hamas’ resistance is revered among Palestinians because of its ability to unmake and make for the Palestinian struggle. Hamas’ armed struggle, while incapable of defeating Israel, minimally unmakes by rendering its victims fearful and by challenging the viability of maintaining the occupation. In doing so it exacts far greater human and material costs from Palestinians than it does from Israelis. Nonetheless, I argue resistance makes by allowing each act of resistance to be named as a Palestinian act of resistance and its tragic repercussions as an occasion of Palestinian suffering. In this way, while an occupation is perceived by Palestinians as an effort to efface their legacy of existence from their historic homeland, violence permits the colonized to arrest this process of unnaming by ensuring that Palestine and its inhabitants’ Palestinianness are recognizable both to their adherents and their adversaries.