CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VIII (1) ContemporaryEurasia81 | Page 6

PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMPS IN LEBANON: GOVERNANCE AND VIOLENCE
In “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”, Giorgio Agamben
described this kind of condition as living under a “state (space) of
exception”. 3 The paradox of the camp-based Palestinians in Lebanon today
is that they are “excluded from rights while being included in law-making”. 4
They enjoy neither the civil rights of the Lebanese, upon whose territory
they reside, nor those of foreigners living in Lebanon. Excluded from the
1951 UN Convention on Refugees, which stipulates that refugees have the
right to work without a specific work permit, Palestinians in Lebanon have
to not only secure this permit, but are also required to pay a rather high fee.
By virtue of their statelessness refugees represent a disquieting element in
the ordering of the modern nation-state. For all practical purposes, in that it
is only rarely and arbitrarily enforced, Lebanese law has been suspended
within the confines of the refugee camps. In this sense, the camps have
become “spaces of exception”. The residents live in a “zone of indistinction
between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the
very concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer make any
sense”. 5
Order and governance in the Palestinian refugee camps
There are currently 15 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The
most violence-prone are Ayn al-Hilweh (near Sidon (Sayda), South
Lebanon), Burj al-Barajneh (near Beirut), Burj al-Shemali (near Tyre (Sour),
South Lebanon), Nahr el-Bared and Beddawi (near Tripoli, North Lebanon).
The creation of “popular committees” in the Palestinian refugee camps in
Lebanon was based on the Cairo Agreement (1969). 6 Before the agreement,
the camps in Lebanon were governed by a state of emergency and were
under the control of the Lebanese security agency (Deuxieme Bureau).
Between 1970 and 1982, the Cairo Agreement stipulated that the police had
to negotiate access to the camps through powerful “popular committees”,
which granted or refused entry on a case-by-case basis. At the time,
traditional authority structures remained in place, as did customary forms of
dispute settlement. However, the camps thereafter witnessed the emergence
of a new elite, whose legitimacy was based on the Palestinian national
3
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 121.
Stephanie Silverman, “Redrawing the Lines of Control: Political Interventions by Refugees
and the Sovereign State System”, conference paper “Dead/Lines: Contemporary Issues in
Legal and Political Theory”, University of Edinburgh, (2008), 10.
5
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 121.
6
Article 2 of section 1 of the agreement calls for a reorganization of “the Palestinian
presence” in Lebanon through “the foundation of local administrative committees in the
refugee camps, composed of Palestinians, in order to defend the interests of the Palestinians
residing in those camps, in collaboration with the local authorities and within the framework
of Lebanese sovereignty”. See Palestinian refugee research Net “Appendix: The Cairo
Agreement (1969), http://prrn.mcgill.ca/research/papers/ brynen2_09.htm (accessed April 07,
2019)
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