Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty

Refugee Governance in Lebanon

Nora Stel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429785818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide and is central to European policies of outsourcing migration management. Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty is the first book to critically and comprehensively explore the parallels between the country's engagement with the recent Syrian refugee influx and the more protracted Palestinian presence.

Drawing on fieldwork, qualitative case-studies, and critical policy analysis, it questions the dominant idea that the haphazardness, inconsistency, and fragmentation of refugee governance are only the result of forced displacement or host state fragility and the related capacity problems. It demonstrates that the endemic ambiguity that determines refugee governance also results from a lack of political will to create coherent and comprehensive rules of engagement to address refugee 'crises.'

Building on emerging literatures in the fields of critical refugee studies, hybrid governance, and ignorance studies, it proposes an innovative conceptual framework to capture the spatial, temporal, and procedural dimensions of the uncertainty that refugees face and to tease out the strategic components of the reproduction and extension of such informality, liminality, and exceptionalism. In developing the notion of a 'politics of uncertainty, ' ambiguity is explored as a component of a governmentality that enables the control, exploitation, and expulsion of refugees.

Introduction Chapter of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Chapter 1

The Lebanese state

Twilight institutions and the making of hybrid order

You have political leaders in this country, they don’t have the sense of governance. They have the sense to make consensus on how they can maintain their power-sharing platform. But that’s it. That’s it. This is very simple. It is simple as it is. I cannot add more and I don’t have to add more and there is nothing to add. Because all the intelligent solutions are here; they don’t want to adopt intelligent solutions. They want to keep creating problems and problems and problems and problems and talking and talking and talking. That’s it. And if someone like me, for example, came in and has an official position, they can propose a first solution, a second solution, third solution, fourth solution … And it will not work.¹

In this book, I want to shed light on the ways in which Lebanese authorities strategically uphold and extend institutional ambiguity to deal with so-called refugee ‘crises.’² This assumes that ambiguity follows from both state structures and the behaviour of the people constituting these structures. It does not assume that state agencies are the only organizations implicated in the institutionalization of ambiguity. Businesses, transnational networks, and humanitarian regimes will all have a stake in this process. My concern with states follows from my interest in thinking through the relation between ambiguity and political forms of power. But most of the organizational logics explored in this book for state agencies might be fruitfully extrapolated to other societal realms. In fact, the notion of stateness that is put forward in this chapter sees the state as a hybrid, mediated assemblage that encompasses much of what traditional, formal approaches to the state would consider to lie beyond it.

To understand the political work that institutional ambiguity might do for Lebanese state agencies in their governance of refugees then requires two things: first, to establish a way to conceptually understand ‘the state’; and, second, to make sense of the empirical specificities of the Lebanese state in light of such a conceptualization. Drawing on and contributing to debates on hybrid order and twilight institutions, the chapter’s first two sections address these issues respectively. The final section subsequently reflects on the structural, systemic features of institutional ambiguity in Lebanon, considering the peculiarities of its state system and political arrangements. This chapter thereby sets the scene for the case-study chapters that will follow and that will focus on the more agential dimensions of Lebanon’s governance of the Syrian and Palestinian refugee presence in the country.

Conceptualizing the state beyond the illusion of sovereignty

Many regional host states for refugees are considered ‘weak’ or ‘fragile.’ In working towards a better understanding of the political functionality and institutionalization of ambiguity, however, such a pathological approach to governance is hardly helpful. Discarding any reality that does not live up to an abstract European ideal-type as ‘failed’ reifies rather than interrogates disorder. Drawing on work on ‘the anthropology of the state’ (Sharma and Gupta, 2006; see also Das and Poole, 2004; Gupta, 1995, 2012; Hansen and Stepputat, 2001; Joseph and Nugent, 1994; Klem, 2012; Kosmatopoulos, 2011; Olivier de Sardan, 2008; Trouillot, 2001), I thus take ‘fragility’ as the starting point instead of the conclusion of my attempt to think through the political work that institutional ambiguity does. In this chapter, the premise is that, as a result of the legacies of colonialism and war as well as current geopolitical realities, sovereignty in the states that host the majority of the world’s refugees is contested (Bacik, 2008; Fregonese, 2012). No single political authority can impose its will and use violence with impunity. This makes governance complex and unpredictable per definition.

In the shifting assemblages of formal state agencies, political parties, ‘traditional’ authorities and ‘strongmen,’ civil society organizations, religious institutions, and private enterprises, it appears as if ‘the state does not exist and the state is everywhere’ at the same time (Ismail, 2006: 165). As further explored in the next section, in Lebanon too, ‘the state’ [al dawle] seems to simultaneously represent everything and nothing. References to the state are often very generic, without an indication to a specific actor, institution, department, ministry, or person. It could refer to a municipality, the government, the army or police, the national electricity company, or all of those at the same time. For refugees especially, the state is often an external, largely unknown, and unspecified ‘they,’ a vague, faceless, address-less entity.

This paradox of simultaneous presence and absence can be unpacked by distinguishing between a ‘state system’ and a ‘state idea’ (Abrams, 1988; Migdal, 2001). The state system then refers to the collection of actors, practices, and institutions that legally make up the state as understood in a colloquial sense, constituting a material reality. The state idea is the socio-political construct that gives these actors, practices, and institutions a perceived coherence and collective intention and thereby conjures the state as an ontological structure. This tension between systems and ideas is relevant to the structural aspects of institutional ambiguity. When investigating ambiguity, dichotomous distinctions between ‘state’ and ‘society’ or between ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ are useless. What is at stake is not mapping who or what is inside or outside the state, but rather the shifting overlap and dynamic co-constitution of different forms of political authority by a variety of governance actors.

The notion of hybrid sovereignty is helpful in this exercise (see the work of Balthasar, 2015; Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 1997; Hoffmann and Kirk, 2013; Kingston, 2004; Raeymaekers, Menkhaus and Vlassenroot, 2008; Risse, 2013; Risse and Lehmkuhl, 2007; Scheye, 2009; Van Overbeek, 2014; Wickham-Crowley, 1987; Wiuff Moe, 2011). The idea of hybridity emphasizes the multiplicity and interactive nature of governance and stresses the symbiotic relation between what are often thought of as bounded political actors or separate institutional fields. If ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ are recognized as mutually constitutive, distinctions like public and private and formal and informal become a moving target. These constructed boundaries can be claimed and denied by authorities and the people these authorities purportedly govern (although, as we will see, most often more successfully by the former than by the latter). The matter at hand, then, is not to define or pinpoint ‘the state,’ but rather to explore the empirical manifestations of the state system’s inherently ‘elusive, porous, and mobile’ interfaces with other forms of political authority (Mitchell, 1990: 77).

If a ‘political order’ is the sum of institutionalized power and governance relations that one can empirically grasp at a given time and place, then hybrid political orders are countries that do not have a sovereign authority or one single focal point of governance (Boege et al., 2008; Boege, Brown and Clements, 2009; Hagmann and Hoehne, 2009; Kyed, 2017). Sovereignty is never absolute, but some ‘orders’ are more hybrid than others.³ This regards the extent to which state systems have been able to co-opt governance functions. Hybridity often reflects the effects of colonial divide-and-rule legacies and neocolonial institutional imposition. It operates on various fronts. Hybridity regards a multiplicity of political authorities (inside and beyond the formal state system), a plurality of political institutions (with de facto practices often holding as much sway in political decision-making as de jure policies) and changeable political dynamics (where protracted communal power bases are combined with volatile alliances) (Stel and Van der Molen, 2015). In short, hybrid orders refer to a situation characterized by ‘contradictory and dialectic co-existence’ of governance actors in which ‘diverse and competing authority structures, sets of rules, logics of order, and claims to power co-exist, overlap, and intertwine’ (Boege et al., 2008: 17). The idea of hybrid order or hybrid sovereignty thus puts the tight, complex, and changing relations among different governance actors centre stage. This brings into focus the political heterogeneity and non-synchronicity that is essential to understand the structural components of institutional ambiguity.

Under hybrid sovereignty, governance, the organization of public goods and political decision-making, thus takes place inside but also beyond the state system. Various political authorities that are simultaneously part of and parallel to the state system compete for and negotiate over the power to govern. These ‘twilight institutions’ are authorities that command significant governance capacity and legitimacy, but are outside or only partially included in the formal state system (Lund, 2006). They often draw on the state idea in organizing and legitimizing their provision of security, welfare, and representation, casting their governance activities in ‘languages of stateness’ (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001; Stel, 2016). From the perspective of fragility, these authorities compete over governance power with the formal state system. In reality, however, their ‘twilight’ nature means that they more often partially co-opt – or are co-opted by – the state system, which governs in a mediated or negotiated manner (Menkhaus, 2006; Hagmann and Péclard, 2010; Scheye, 2009; Stel, 2015, 2017). In hybrid orders, various governance actors are ‘doing the state’ together (Migdal and Schlichte, 2005: 14). To work with hybridity, essentially, is to approach the state as a strategic field in which relationality – actors’ embeddedness in multiple and dynamic networks – is the constitutive element.

As my account of Lebanon’s political order that follows shows, I do not mean to romanticize hybridity or mediation. Elite collaboration in practice does little for accountability, and competing regimes of violence undermine human security in many ways. But a conceptual premium on relationality allows for a more nuanced understanding of neopatrimonialism. Neopatrimonialism revolves around the idea of ‘state capture,’ the notion that the ‘public’ state system is appropriated by the ‘private,’ or communal, interests of authorities that initially operated beyond this formal state system but have come to occupy it. The state system is then perceived as an empty shell that is nevertheless the ‘ultimate prize’ for political elites because of the redistributable resources it brings with it and the inherent legitimacy it can tap into in the form of the state ‘idea’ (Chabal and Daloz, 1999). From a hybridity perspective, this ‘capture’ is a more iterative process, where various forms of authority compete and negotiate over who can wield political power when and where and over whom. Rather than ‘traditional’ or ‘communal’ authorities that take over the state, which suggests an endpoint, twilight authorities that operate simultaneously inside and outside the state system constantly redefine and reallocate the power of the state agencies making up this state system.

In hybrid orders, to be able to govern, the state system is made up by more or less implicit partnerships and arrangements with a diverse range of local intermediaries and rival sources of authority that it partially subsumes. It requires and nurtures this assembled and multi-layered institutional power among social, political, and economic authorities. Where the idea of competition between ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ that is central to notions of fragility suggests its own form of predictability, the reality in which the state system – simultaneously or alternatingly – governs through as well as against other political authorities makes for a more complicated governance landscape in which ambiguity is a built-in feature. ‘Rules of the game’ or ‘social contracts’ will be more elusive in such settings, where governance will be subject to constant change and reinterpretation that are part of the mediation or negotiation of political authority.

Crucially, this is a matter of scale and degree. The analytical value of focusing on the hybridity of sovereignty and political order does not lie in pointing out that such hybridity exists – because it does everywhere and at all times – but in the analytical space it opens up to explore how it functions and what its effects are. My conceptualization of institutional ambiguity should be situated in this analytical space. In studying the institutionalization and the political use of ambiguity, bringing to the fore the hybridity of specific political orders is helpful because it reveals the structural and systemic aspects of uncertainty. It reveals how the inherently undefined nature of the interfaces between the ‘twilight’ actors operating in the assembled and shifting configurations of power underpins institutional ambiguity. These systemic drivers of ambiguity provide the context in which the agential aspects of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: institutional ambiguity and the politics of uncertainty: a new perspective on refugee governance
• 1 The Lebanese state: twilight institutions and the making of hybrid order
• 2 The governance of Syrian refugees in Lebanon: no-policy-policy and formal informality
• 3 Governing Syrian ‘informal tented settlements’ in Lebanon: co-opted shawishes, elusive permissions, and the specter of eviction
• 4 The governance of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon: permanent temporariness and the state of exception
• 5 Governing Lebanon’s Palestinian ‘gatherings’: forsaken settlements, disowned committees, and looming displacement
• 6 Knowledge and power revisited: the politics of uncertainty as maintaining, feigning, and imposing ‘ignorance’
• Reflections and contributions: critically studying refugeeness, governance, and strategic ambiguity in Lebanon and beyond
• Index