Refugees as Minorities: Displaced Syrians as a “New Minority” in Lebanon’s Sectarian Power-Sharing System

Résumé

Syria’s neighbourhood hosts currently about 5.5 million forcibly
displaced Syrians who have fled the war since its onset in 2011. More
than 3.4 million Syrians are registered in Turkey and around 2 million in
Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt (UNHCR, 2018). According to the UNHCR
(2017), the small Lebanese state hosts today around one million registered
Syrians, making it the country with the highest number of refugees
per capita (European Commission, 2018). How has Lebanon’s political
system dealt with the Syrian refugee issue and how have Syrian refugees –
a new “non-core
group”1 in Lebanon’s society – interacted with the state’s
sectarian configuration of power?
To unravel Lebanon’s politics of accommodation towards the Syrian
refugees and understand how this politics have played out, we focus on
the policy structures that the Lebanese state has set in place on the one
hand, and how Lebanon’s public and policy spheres have framed the Syrian
refugee issue on the other. In doing so, we show that the Lebanese state
and its various political factions have chosen a “half-hearted”
refugee
policy, flagging the manifold dangers that the integration and settlement of
“displaced Syrians” would pose to Lebanon’s political sociology. In the first
part, after providing a general overview of Lebanon’s political system and
its refugee politics, we describe the Lebanese government’s policy frame