 So, welcome, everyone, to this virtual book launch event of North Dales Newark Hybrid Political Order and the Governance of Uncertainty, published by Rutledge. My name is Stefan Engelkamp. I'm a lecturer in international relations education at the Department of War Studies and I'm currently convening the research center in international relations with my colleague Kieran Fohl, who's also moderating this event with me. And we are really delighted to welcome all of you on this occasion and a particular warm welcome to our three panelists, Nora Steele, Claudia Arado and Craig Larkin. Before I introduce our panelists and the format of today's event, let me remind you to keep your microphones off while a presenter is speaking and please put your questions or comments in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen or if you have a question we will have plenty of time for Q&A, just unmute yourself or use the virtual hand function. We have now, without further ado, Dr. Nora Steele, who is an assistant professor in international relations at Rutbold University. And Nora's research focuses on the analysis of governance and politics in conflict-affected settings. She specializes in political authority in conflict situations when Nora studies the organization of services, security and representation by hybrid governance arrangements during and after violent conflict. She also analyses the governance of forced displacement, in particular the governmentalities and watering practices that emerge through the politics and policies directed at refugee communities in so called regional post-countries such as Lebanon. Nora engages with these themes through qualitative fieldwork and mostly in the Middle East and critical policy analysis. And then we are delighted that two of our colleagues from the Department of War Studies are with us to discuss Nora's book, Claudia Arado and Craig Larkin. So Claudia is a professor in international politics at War Studies and she's currently principal investigator of an EU-funded research project on security flaws. Claudia's research explores the implications of global security practices. She looks into how problems and people become objects and subjects of security and what this does to democratic politics. And her current research focuses on how digital technologies reconfigure security and surveillance practices as well as the relations between security, democracy and equity. And then finally we have our second discussant Dr. Craig Larkin and we are really happy to have him here. You just came back from Lebanon. Craig is a senior lecturer in comparative politics of the Middle East and he's director of the Center for the Study of Divided Societies at King's College London. Craig holds a PhD in Middle East studies and he studied Arabic at the Masters University and has worked in community development projects in Lebanon, Jordan and in Iraq. Craig's research focuses on memory and conflict in the Middle East. The relationship between war, faith and politics and he has written extensively on urban geopolitics, Islamist movements and post-conflict politics. And his current book project is examining the Islamic movement inside Israel. And now, without further ado, I'm very much looking forward to Nora's presentation. Nora, the floor is yours. Thanks. Thanks so much for these introductions and for the invite, of course. A bit of a disclaimer. It's definitely in some ways about international relations, what I'm going to tell you. But the empirics are mostly related to local and national skills of governance. So bear with me there. I do hope we can get to talk a bit more on these international dynamics of sort of the hybridity and the politics of uncertainty that I'll describe. So maybe you can bring in some some new food for thought for me there as well. Yes. So the book, yeah. It was released last year and there's a paperback out just now. It's here. Which is very exciting because it means it's finally sort of affordable. However, and I'm not allowed to say this if there are people who won't be able to afford the book. I'm happy to share a PDF, of course. So much for the PR. But what my book was about, why I was kidding on writing it, is the attempt to rethink the political dimensions of chaos of unpredictability of uncertainty that we often find. Especially in my field of studies, my background is in conflict studies. And there we really look at sort of situations where different crises and violent crises come together. And in my case, or the case that's central to this book that I'm talking about today, that's the unprecedented displacement of people produced by war. On the one hand, and state fragility, which is a horrible term, but I'll use it as a shorthand. Nonetheless, I'll talk a bit more about that in a second. On the other hand, so more concretely, the presence and the governance of Palestinian and Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon. And what struck me in doing research on this, and I'll talk a bit more about how that research looked in a second, is that that situation was often presented as being chaotic in the sense of lacking policy frameworks, incomplete implementation, fragmented coordination, and that this resulted in confusion on mandates, on responsibilities, that it resulted in unpredictability of rules and regulations, and uncertainty about prospects and projects. But what struck me is that this is hardly ever questioned. This was not surprising. We take it actually for granted. There was often this undertone of, well, what can we expect when an enormous number of people seeks refuge in the country that's already infamous for its deadlock, for its paralysis, for its conflict, for its institutional fragility. But at the same time, I increasingly felt that that's not the whole story. So I started looking at institutional ambiguity, and I'll define that a bit more precisely later, in refugee crisis situations, as being perhaps mostly, but not only, the result of lacking host country capacity, which was sort of the default explanation for all of these things. Rather, it also follows from a lack of political will to make coherent decisions and policies about refugee governance, which is often captured by dynamics of non-policy or ambiguous policy. So that's what I, in this book, try to empirically explore and then conceptualize. Let me, how do the absence and the ambiguity of policies to address refugee presences emerge? How are they reproduced? And what interests do they serve? And I explore that through two case studies, which were basically two different projects. My PhD research, which was based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two Palestinian informal refugee communities in South Lebanon. And then later, a postdoc project, which revolved around long-distance fieldwork and expert interviews on Syrian informal settlements in the Bakar Valley and the national policy dynamics on Lebanon's response to the Syrian refugee crisis. And what I try to do, based on these empirical studies, is bring together various literatures on critical refugee studies, critical policy studies and ignorant studies, to make sense of these dynamics. From that, and you will notice in this presentation, there's a lot of disclaimers because it's pretty challenging to summarize a book project in 10, 15 minutes. But from that, my main argument emerged that the absence of coherent policy, which I've conceptualized as institutional ambiguity, on how to deal with refugees stems from a particular political system, but is also kept in place to serve political interests. It works to maximize discretionary power of Lebanese authorities and to undermine the mobilization of refugee communities, which I've termed the politics or apolitics of uncertainty. So I really want to show that this chaos, this uncertainty, this insecurity is both contingent on displacement and host country fragility, but also strategically reproduced. So, okay, let's zoom in a bit because I've often heard in presenting this that this seems very counterintuitive, right? Why would you want to do this? Why would there be some sort of masterminded chaos? Well, the literature gives us two different sets of reasons. Generically, of course, policy is always ambiguous because it's reactive. It's always trailing behind fast-changing realities because it's always a compromise. So there has to be room for flexibility and maneuverability. That's what diplomacy is all about, right? So that's also not necessarily negative. That can be very important and productive and constructive. And there's a more specific set of reasons of why uncertainty might be strategically reproduced, which is that ambiguous policy can serve stated and uncertain, stated objectives and interests of authorities in dealing with unwanted refugee populations. And that's really what I focus on most in the book, which is about Lebanon specifically. It helps to go beyond Lebanon a bit, but its base is written in Lebanon where it explores, as I said before, the interconnection of, on the one hand, the presence of a large number of refugees, the highest number of refugees per capita in the world in Lebanon, approximately 1.5 million Syrian refugees that fled the Syrian war since 2011, and then some 50,000 Palestinian refugees that have been there much longer since the 1948 Nekba. And these refugee presences need to be understood in the context of Lebanon's sort of complex hybrid sectarian political system, which bears a lecture on its own, of course. But what's important to sort of stress is that the system of colonial and post-sectarianism and the demographic sensitivity that has institutionalized, in addition to its legacy of violent conflict, has resulted in sort of an oligopolous kleptocracy where a lot of sectarian parties have, well, basically in many ways and forms, captured the state. Again, something that's addressed a bit with a bit more nuance in the book, but let's keep it in this presentation. So I've tried to understand how, when these things come together, how we should best understand refugee governance. And one of the points of departure was that after doing my fieldwork, one of the common conclusions I often got on refugee regulation, on refugee governance was, it's a mess. We really don't understand. That came from refugee communities, from activists, from policymakers, from international humanitarians, from many different angles. And as I said, so the citations that you're reading now sort of testify to that. And as said, in a way, it's logical. But for me, the interesting thing was that refugees and other interlocutors also understood this not as just a contingency of host state capacity or large-scale displacement, but as a disciplinary strategy of host country authorities. And this is this first citation that you're reading here really got me thinking and is something that I explored more systematically than throughout the book, to what extent that's actually the case. What is not just contingent on capacity, but strategically pursued or reproduced. And I realize, so this thesis that I'll present in a bit more schematically in the next slide is based on case studies with Palestinian and Syrian refugees. And of course, the dynamics between these communities, the historicity, the context is very different. And also the dynamics of what I've called institutional ambiguity or the politics of uncertainty, they play out different for both groups. But one of the conclusions of the book or the suggestion that the book makes is that actually there's also a lot of often unrecognized parallels between the ways in which Lebanon has dealt with these two different refugee communities. And that the constant reproduction of uncertainty is actually one of those parallels. In the remainder of this presentation, I'll focus mostly on examples from the Syrian refugee currencies because I had to make choices, but I'm hopeful we can talk about the parallels a bit more later on as well. So what I contend in the book is that Lebanon's governance of refugees is determined by informality, liminality and exceptionality. I'm going to just throw some quick definitions at you here rather than all the complex problematizations that I offer in the book. But with informality, I basically mean anything done without the formal regulation of state authorities, which doesn't mean that state authorities don't regulate refugee presences, but that they don't do so through formal laws and policies, right? So the second component, liminality sort of gets at the temporal uncertainty that refugees face and constantly reproduce temporariness and conditionality of any form of regulation of refugee presences, which is focused on the short term on the ad hoc measures. And then thirdly, the exceptionality, which is obviously a term very familiar with anyone in sort of migration and refugee studies, that any decisions or any agreements or any regulations are beyond the law and beyond the normal. So I looked at these dynamics, informality, liminality and exceptionality, specifically in three domains of refugee governance at status. So basically questions of to what extent are refugees recognized as refugees? To what extent do they have formal residency status? And second, shelter. So it really revolves more about questions of encampment, how are refugees hosted, sheltered? And thirdly, representation, getting at the basic question of who speaks for refugee communities, who represents them both locally and internationally. So all these three domains, status, shelter and representation are characterized by informality, liminality and exceptionality, which creates a situation of institutional ambiguity. Rules and regulations and mandates are unclear. What is allowed, who is responsible, what refugees are supposed to do is often very hard, if not impossible to determine, not only by refugees, but also by the people whose profession it is to figure these things out. And that follows, as I said before, from, that just doesn't just emerge, but it follows from particular forms of policy inaction, on the one hand, a policy ambivalence on the other hand. So not making policy or making vaguely formulated and partially or arbitrarily implemented policies. And as I said before, usually this is taken at base value, right? The enormity and the unpredictability of a refugee crisis and then the fragility of a whole state, of course, is going to be a lack of capacity to make a coherent, restrictive policy. And I really want to stress that I don't dispute this at all in the book, but I argue that this reading, this focus on capacity, does obscure important things. And institutional ambiguity is continued, but it's also the result of strategic political considerations, a lack of political will to make a coherent, constructive policy. So I'm going to throw in an example from a Syrian case study to show you a bit more of how that works, what that means. Overall, although of course, in the last decade, there have been important shifts, but overall Lebanon has governed the presence of Syrian refugees through what government officials have actually called a set of notes. No refugees, no camps, and no representation. So there's been a tendency in policy to not recognize the refugee status of displaced Syrians, to not grant them residency status, and to not count official numbers of Syrian refugees. They're not registered to some extent. Again, this is a bit more complicated, but let's delve into the nuances later. Similarly, there has been a no camp policy. That doesn't mean that no camps, no Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon, but that mostly Syrian refugees have been forced to self settle, as it's called in humanitarian terms, and that the refugee camps that are there are informal and not regulated by either the state or UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. And then thirdly, there has been a sort of policy of no representation, the idea that there should be no formal representatives, no committees, no spokesperson for Syrian refugees. And I've construed this in the book as a choice for sort of denial and abandonment. And I say choice and that's contentious, because I want to highlight that these decisions to govern the Syrian refugee crisis through this idea of a set of notes has been, to some extent, deliberate. When it comes to the no refugees perspective, there's a liberal choice not to sign a refugee convention. There's the liberal choice not to accept large scale illegality of refugees. And there's a liberal choice not to register refugees. This is not just related to capacity, but also to political will as the Lebanese state has prohibited UNHCR to further register refugees. When it comes to shelter, the remainder of shelter, we've seen a similar informality, liminality, and exceptionalism in the no camp policy. And I definitely would not want to promote sort of the old fashioned, large scale refugee camp policy as a solution to displacement. But I want to make the point here that the choice of Lebanese authorities to not organize or allow for the organization of refugee camps is not just a capacity issue, but also a choice. And thirdly, when it comes to no representation here, I want to highlight or the book highlights in detail how this is a deliberate choice to undermine grassroots organizations, for instance, the the forming of committees by CSOs and NGOs in refugee settlements, and rather to create a system of interaction between imposed camp commanders and security agencies. So here too, it's not just a capacity not to want to have representation on behalf of refugees, but a preference for an informal and securitized form of representation, which I should really put between quotation marks. So as a result of this informality, liminality, and exceptionalism in the realms of status, shelter, and representation, we see a very partial piecemeal inconsistent framework of engagement with refugee presences in the country, which makes every decision informal and temporary. The lack of refugee status and residency status results in huge protection gaps and allows for extreme exploitation of refugees. The absence of camps is one of the reasons why there has been so much economic marginalization. Basically, refugees have been forced to pay for their own settlement and have often been extorted by landlords on whom they are dependent. And the lack of formal representation and the undermining of representative grassroots structures by Lebanese authorities means that there's no collective organization to demand a change to this misery. So the overall consequences, as many others have also recognized, of course, our legal precarity, economic vulnerability, and political marginalization, basically complete dependency on the goodwill of Lebanese authorities in many ways and forms, which makes human rights abuses and poverty endemic. So this is not new, but what my book tries to do is give us a new perspective on how that situation has been able to emerge and endure. And to understand that, it's really important to understand why this informality, liminality, and exceptionalism would be beneficial. And here we can look at two sort of levels of analysis, I would say. First, not having clear decisions, mandates, and procedures allows authorities to avoid responsibility, accountability, and liability. To have deniability, because there are no formal rules or regulations, is in that sense very convenient. And that's a universal thing, right? It's not just Lebanon, it's not just refugees. We see the exact same thing happening in our own policies and countries. A second level of analysis, and this is often what's found a bit more provocative about my argument, is that the consequences of this institutional ambiguity in terms of status, shelter, and representation serve political authorities, stated and unstated goals and interests. It helps allow Lebanese authorities to control, exploit, and expel refugee communities. It helps them to control refugee communities, because, well, we need to take a step back there, and this is also where the Palestinian case that comes in, politically and militarily mobilized refugee communities are basically Lebanon's worst nightmare, due to its sectarian sensitivities, due to its sort of trauma of the Palestinian liberation organization's military presence in the country. And creating existential uncertainty and precarity undermines the material, the social, the cognitive ability of refugees, and those that seek to help them to collectively mobilize. It fragments them and undercuts them legally, spatially, and politically. Because basically, all energy of these refugee communities goes to surviving, to figuring out where they need to go, how they need to behave rather than to strategize or to collectively organize. And this is clearly not sort of absolute, and I'd love to go into sort of also the instances where refugees have actually appropriated informality or uncertainty to work for them. But this would be my overarching perspective here. This existential uncertainty has also allowed authorities to exploit refugee communities. Due to lack of status, lack of shelter, and lack of representation, refugees, as I said, are really dependent on local authorities, mayors, mohtars, on security agencies who actually do most of the governing of refugees on a local level. Lebanese landlords, Lebanese sponsors, kafis, which have resulted in exploitation and abuse that are systematic. And that is not just sort of beneficial for the very, for the different Lebanese that are benefiting from what has been called refugee economies on a local level, but it's also in the interest of national political elites through sort of the complex patronage networks that operate in Lebanon, where the people that make money out of refugees locally are sort of protected and enabled by national politicians who rely on them to protect their local electoral interests. And thirdly, and I think this becomes ever more relevant and important, it also this politics of uncertainty that results in institutional ambiguity also allows Lebanon's authorities to expel refugees. So Lebanon's official policies to encourage return of Syrian refugees by all possible means. And pressure to return is really increasing tremendously, but it was always really the priority or the only thing that Lebanese usually disagreeing governing elites actually agreed on. An existential uncertainty and the marginalization of this uncertainty are clear push factors for return of refugees, sometimes directly because of the evictions that informal housing made abundant, but also sometimes indirectly. I've had interviews with refugees, Syrian refugees said that really we prefer the evil we know in Syria than the sort of more elusive repression that we face in Lebanon. So to wrap up, one book has mostly tried to show through various case studies and vignettes is that the plight of refugees in Lebanon is not just outright repression, but often it's also materializes through strategic connection or vagueness that allows for disciplining of refugee population because it creates vulnerability, it creates uncertainty, and this undermines the ability of refugee communities to resist, to contest that vulnerability through collective action. And this is not sort of masterminded chaos, it's partly built into the Lebanese system and it's reproduced because it serves direct and indirect interest. It helps Lebanese authorities to avoid accountability and it helps them to control exploit and expel refugee communities. And I've thought long and hard on how to call this right. Many people will ask me that is this deliberate? Do they do this on purpose? Is it intentional? I don't know. I can't prove that I can't look into the heads of policymakers and authorities. So I've opted for the term strategic because I can show that this particular form of governance or non-governance actually shows interest as I just try to convey here. So as a final thought, I really want to stress that this phenomenon, strategic institutional ambiguity, is definitely not limited to matters of refugees and not limited to Lebanon or fragile states if that's how we want to call them. I have a paper out in political geography that says that the demonstrate that European refugee governance actually uses a lot of the same strategies through its hotspots and deals. It also uses institutional ambiguity as a disciplinary strategy for the refugee communities. So on that note, on that disclaimer, I think I've talked already way longer than I should and I'm really looking forward to open up the conversation with everyone here. Thanks for bearing with me. Well, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much for summarizing concisely your key argument and a lot of the practices that you described resonate a lot with the research that's been carried out at our department. And I'm very glad that we have two experts with us today who will share their thoughts about your book. And I'm going to hand over to my colleague Claudia for her comments. Thank you very much, Stefan. I hope you can hear me okay. Okay, excellent. And I think we just lost you somehow. Claudia, it might be the microphone. It's better now. That's better. My headphones might be playing. Okay, so I'm going to repeat this because I think it's important that it has been a pleasure to read and reread Nora's book. Both when it was published, as I also endorsed the book, but also long since it's been published along the COVID pandemic in workshops, all of them online so far. And also I've engaged with Nora's book in my own work. And what I want to do today is actually offer a series of questions for discussion rather than lengthy reflections, although they will be mixed with some reflections on theoretical, methodological and political aspects of the book. I have read the book as an interdisciplinary dialogue with ignorant studies. And for some of you who are wondering indeed, you might have seen some of the quotes or some of the references on Nora's slides. The book is also part of a relatively recent new series on research in ignorant studies with Brautlich. So you might want to have a look at the series as well. So theoretically, the book shifts from the production of knowledge to the production and productivity of ignorance and not knowing by state and non-state actors. So for much of the research, both on refugee governance, but also more generally on state and non-state actors, the state is seen as supposedly knowing the state makes populations legible so that they become governable. The state fixes and holds still. And you can think here, for instance, of the role that statistical knowledge has played in the government of populations, of demographic knowledge, of psychological knowledge that draws the lines between who counts as normal and who counts as abnormal. And more recently, for instance, what I'm thinking about is algorithmic knowledge that again proposes to recast how individuals and populations are being governed. And to bring international relations, my own discipline to the table, research on security and insecurity in particular has unpacked heterogeneous modes of governing unknowns and taming uncertainty, whether through risk, resilience, preemption, or imagination. So non-knowledge or ignorance here becomes an imperative for the production of more knowledge. But what we see in Nora's book is actually turning this the other way around. So rather than ignorance leading to more knowledge, it's in a sense the opposite. We have the production of different modes of not knowing of ignorance. So despite official discourses of, for instance, producing data producing statistics, producing knowledge about vulnerability, for instance, or migration flows and so on, migration management, discourses and practices generate ignorance. So it is this productive generative aspect of ignorance that is key here. So Nora concludes the empirical investigation in the final chapter of the book by speaking about the politics of uncertainty as I quote, maintaining, feigning, and imposing ignorance. And my first theoretical question is in fact about the relation between the concepts that play out both in the empirical analysis but also theoretically closing the book between the concept of ambiguity, uncertainty, and ignorance. So Nora, if I may offer another quote again from the final chapter, you know that institutional ambiguity is not the same as ignorance, but it is a way to simultaneously profess and dictate ignorance and speak about anthropological power. And I wanted to ask you to unpack this distinction and I was wondering whether you would extend it to uncertainty as well. For instance along the lines that Jacqueline Best has suggested about differentiating between ambiguity and uncertainty. Now this question of differentiation takes me to a second point which is more about the state and Lebanon and your analysis of its hybrid political order. And I'm sure Craig will tell us much more and many of you here probably know more about the state in Lebanon than I do, but bear with me. So I really like how at many points through the book institutional ambiguity is placed in relation to state illegibility more generally. And I was thinking here in particular about how you referenced the work in anthropology done by Vina Das and Deborah Pool exactly on state illegibility, but also on work in migration and border studies focusing on Europe highlighting similar dynamics of illegibility, opacity, obfuscation, and uncertainty. And I think this is something you also pointed towards in your introduction today. So in my reading there is an analysis of ignorance in the book as characteristic of state illegibility more broadly, but at the same time again as you're highlighting the specificity of hybrid political order in Lebanon is an important part of the analysis. And I was wondering here how you navigate these questions or whether there is a tension between the specificity of the analysis and this kind of more general analysis. So how do you navigate attention between the specific politics of the state in Lebanon and this more general politics of state illegibility and bureaucratic or institutional ambiguity, right, of which you can see the traces in analysis of border and migration control more broadly. But I'm also thinking quite specifically about what I would say is an international aspect of the analysis. Okay, my life just went off after my mic went off, my headphones went off, my life went off, but I'm sure we are fine. So I'm thinking in particular about the context of the Geneva Convention to which, 1951 Convention to which Lebanon is not a signatory. And again, this is something that is really important in terms of your analysis of informality. And I was going to have a recent article by Rika Krause in the Journal of International Relations and Development, where she analyzes the colonial entanglements and exclusions of the Geneva Conventions, both who participated and had a say in the development of the convention, but also many of the colonial assumptions, the colonial clause, the kind of ignorance of the anti-colonial objections to the definition of the refugees, right, and their kind of effect on the present and again on the map of who is today's signatory and who is not a signatory to the Geneva Convention. And again, I think how do we think in this context about the specificity of Lebanon in relation to this general dynamics both historical dynamics of colonial legacies, but also dynamics of the of the international? This question also leads me, I guess, to methodology. And you have addressed probably you have answered my question, but I I will try to raise it again. Because in the book, you move from the analysis of the facts to the analysis of actors agency, maybe strategy, you mentioned strategic rather than ignorance. And so one of my questions was exactly about the relation between what counts as strategic ignorance of strategy and intentional or intentional ignorance and how you see this difference. And part of this question is is methodological, exactly because of the difficulties of analyzing intentions and what is intentional, right, and it takes us also to strategy how does one analyze what is then strategic. So in my own work, I have focused more mostly on the facts, exactly because of the difficulties, I think, of, you know, tracing this willful intentional kind of strategic types of type of production of ignorance. So again, do you see this as different as my question, you see strategy will intention as different and how are they different from effects. And thirdly, and finally, I'll turn to a political element or political aspect of the work, partly because this is something that I am grappling with in my own work. So my question is about the analysis or rather the political implication of the analysis of institutional ambiguity for political action. So in the literature that has focused on, you know, making legible on the production of knowledge, be often distorted knowledge, not knowing being illegible, being opaque in some way, have been seen as tools of resistance and struggle. Yet what happens, right, when the state and other actors become themselves, make themselves illegible, opaque, unknown and in movement, and your reference to the, you know, your court from your exchange with the Syrian refugee was really interesting kind of preferring the knowledge in Syria to the kind of ambiguities in Lebanon. But I'm wondering what this effectively means in terms of political action, right, how I tend to think about resistance, does resistance need knowledge and what kind of knowledge would clarity be needed to fight the ambiguities of governance in Lebanon? Or could we still think conversely that ignorance and ambiguity nonetheless can open spaces for agency and resistance, right. And again, this might sound, you mentioned counterintuitive or could sound counterintuitive. But I was thinking earlier today that, for instance, clarity and transparency of oppression can be worse than ambiguity and uncertainty of oppression in the sense in which ambiguity can also open room for maneuver and mobilization. So how do we think about, you know, again, distinctions or how do you think about this distinctions? And do you effectively call them for more transparency, clarity, lack of ambiguity, in a sense, in these processes and in relation to the state that Lebanon. Thank you. I'll stop here. Thank you so much, Claudia. I can't wait to hear Nora's responses. But before we go to give the plot to Nora again, we have Craig Lacken, who is also giving some comments on Nora's book, Craig, Nora's Yours. Right. I'll try to keep these very brief. But firstly, I'd just like to thank Nora for this excellent contribution to literature on Lebanon and refugee studies. The book, I think, is fantastically researched. It's very evident. It's taken 10 years of research, theoretically and empirically rich. And it will definitely be going on my class reading list on Lebanon. For a number of years, I've been grappling to try to understand and articulate Lebanese governance. And I think Nora's research provides a really helpful frame to not only look at refugee governance, but also wider Lebanese politics. Just last week, I was in Tripoli, Lebanon, doing interviews with Islamist ex-prisoners, also picked up COVID on the way back home. So I'm currently isolating in this room. I've seen far too much of this room. But Nora's book was such a joy to read alongside those interviews. It was like an intellectual refresher on Lebanon's hybrid political order. And I think in Lebanon, what we're witnessing in the multiple crisis of Lebanon, where the refrain is, where is the state? Nora's book made me think, perhaps the question is, what is the state? Indeed, the problem is perhaps not Lebanon's state's absence, but the multiple shifting forms, actors, mediators that it governs through, and the state's hybridity and diversity makes it only present, but nebulous, pervasive, yet unaccountable. And it indeed perpetuates strategic institutional ambiguity as a means of governing through mechanisms to discipline, exploit, and expel specific populations. Some may argue, in fact, Lebanon as a state is founded on institutional ambiguity. It's unwritten national pact was the basis for power sharing. And then post-civil war, we have the Taif Accord, which consolidates sectarian elite system, but it has a future aspirational dream of a secular demilitarized politics. But in reality, it's just amalgamated assemblages of power dependent on each other, but not accountable to the people. So I just wanted to pick up and highlight a few key contributions and questions that, you know, perhaps Nora could pick up on. And I think empirically, this is a really rich and interesting argument, because it's quite easy and it's been done to reflect comparatively on the Syrian refugee crisis and the Palestinian refugee crisis in Lebanon. It's easy to argue that Lebanon has been guided by its historic mistakes and the sort of bogeyman of its approach to Palestinians pre-civil war, because indeed the fear was overstatus camps and representation, the political mobilization of Palestinian refugees in the loss of sovereign control of the camps, undoubtedly contributed to the Lebanese civil war. But what's interesting is that Nora highlights we see similar and parallel Lebanese policies of informality, liminality, and exceptionalism in both cases. So it's not the contradiction, but it's the actual continuation of this concerted policy towards refugee governance. And I think that is really quite powerful. And an original contribution in looking at the non-status of Palestinian gatherings and similarly Syrian settlements, also the non-status of their mediators, whether that's a Syrian shawesh or a mediator who deals with authorities in the camp, or the Palestinian popular committees, which can also be exploited and co-opted. There's also a very important comparison in the flawed censuses that have taken place, the fact that the UNHCR were told to stop counting Syrian refugees and the most recent Palestinian census is also very flawed and open for manipulation. So there's this continuation of Lebanese refugee policy, which I think allows us to speak to both of the cases, but to see a similarity of Lebanese approach. Second point and concept, which I find quite interesting and Nora didn't mention it in the lecture was the idea of potenza or this notion of discretionary par. And I think that is a very powerful way of not only understanding the Lebanese approach to governance of Syrian refugees, but in fact to the broader governance approach. So potenza is the creation of a situation in which everything is simultaneously prohibited and allowed, renounced, yet encouraged, deniable and enforceable. So it's a discretionary par to act or not act. So within Lebanon this becomes everything is possible. But whether everything is permissible is another question. So potenza denotes a situation where the institutional environment is ambiguous enough to open up multiple interpretations that governance implementation is almost entirely dependent on the discretionary par of the authority at hand, which can opt towards repression, abandonment, compassion, seemingly it will. I think this is a really important frame for understanding how both Syrians and Palestinians have been subject to the whim of general security, mayors, intelligence services, political parties, landlords, even in my own work on Syrian urban refugees, very few of them ever had written contracts. And I think that's the interesting way things trickle down from institutional ambiguity to everyday ambiguity in a contract. There is no contracts because they remain vague and ambiguous and it allows the landlord to be able to adapt to the situation. There's one great quote in the book and I think it confirmed one. Lebanese interlocker said I don't think we have a system. We just need to know everyone. And this is this is very true that the system does not seem so formulated, but personal was that remains a key feature. Thirdly, I think there's a great potential for the wider application of this theory to Lebanese politics as Nora outlines the manner in which the Lebanese state consolidate power is similar over all Lebanese inhabitants, you know, whether it's veto power, the politics of evasion, we can see even with the most recent port explosion and attempts to bring accountability to MPs and judges also being involved in that, to the vagueness of numbers and census, the utility of ignorance and unknowing and mediated hybrid governance. In my own research just this week dealing with Lebanese justice and prison system, what you find is that prisoners are arrested and often left for years without trials. They remain in a limbo of the discretion of judges, politicians and intelligence agencies. So in fact, very much a replication of the features of institutional ambiguity. And although Nora highlights that this could be a similar approach to Syrian refugee governance, if we look to Jordan and Turkey and perhaps even within Europe, I believe it's this Lebanese system of power which helped shape the refugee policy. So institutional ambiguity and the politics of uncertainty are effects and manifestations of the hybrid political Lebanese order. So the fact that that is shaped from a top-down institutional political system, a hybrid system, allows for ambiguity to filter through many levels of Lebanese society. So just finally to sum up, the book brought me back to a very simple question. Could Lebanon actually have handled the influx of Syrian refugees differently or more successfully? Was it the only viable covering mechanism of a mediated state? Resistance also does remain a part of the politics of uncertainty. And despite attempts to control, exploit and marginalize Syrian refugees, I believe, will remain and become informally integrated into the Lebanese system. Because the politics of uncertainty does provide space for agency. It provides spaces to exploit the system, to live within the margins and the gray spaces. And I think so much of Lebanese life sadly at the minute is within those margins and gray spaces. So the Palestinian experience is also testament to that. So I think a question is what would the longer term impact be for Syrian refugee population and what impact would it have in the Lebanese future? So I'll just end it there and hand over to Nora. Yeah, exactly what Frank said. Well thanks so much for these reflections and invitations for further comment and thinking. I'm just thinking of how to best pick this up while also leaving some time maybe for further discussion. But let's just take things in turn because I'm really inspired by all these comments. So yeah thanks Gladi for addressing on these different levels sort of the potential implications of thinking this through further. And with your first point sort of trying to unpack a bit more theoretically the difference between ambiguity and uncertainty. For me, I've also really been grappling with this and also since publishing the book may have already some different conceptualizations and might maps coming out there. But the way of trying to do this in the book is see really ambiguity as sort of a characteristic of governance behavior. So a characteristic of governance and uncertainty much more to denote sort of the outcome of that the lived experience of refugees. And I think this is also where specifically in the field of refugee studies this work has been really exciting for me because not just me but like a whole a host of scholars has now sort of has first started to look towards ignorant studies. I think to find tools to go beyond sort of noting this uncertainty and insecurity and exhaustion as a lived experience of refugees and try to link that to the government authorities behind that. And I think yeah that's how I've also tried to try to relate these things. And with your second point which is really I think also relates to a lot of what Craig was bringing in this sort of what is specific to Lebanon's hybrid political order and what is more sort of generically applicable I might my attempt to resolve this was to sort of a post facto differ sell this as an extreme case study. But I do I do think there's some merit in that in this is that yeah Lebanon is very extreme in the way sort of this ambiguity has historically been institutionalized. But I think a lot of the logics and convenience yeah is actually universal both as sort of a contingency just on complexity right and trying to have compromises and that the universal convenience of you know avoiding accountability and liability and the flexibility in the maneuvering space that that this all allows for an year in Lindsay McGui's work on sort of unknowing has been really inspiring to me. But yeah your other point that you brought up here was really also very important to me and specifically you address the Geneva Convention and sort of the yeah the colonial context of this and repercussions of that but I think that addresses a broader point that that has been very sort of uncomfortable for me in writing this this book where where I do think the focus on Lebanon has been beneficial and important and and if the conclusion is that Lebanon is doing a lot of things in problematic ways when it comes to governing refugees I I stand by that but it also of course obscures a lot which is the geopolitics of all this the ways in which this particular mode of governing is not just a function of Lebanon's political system but also the the the universe of the the externalization of the hosting of refugees that the containment policies of Europe and these while I bring in a few disclaimers but these remain a bit out of the out of the picture inevitably in in in focusing on this this one country so this is I think for me an important one important tool to reflect on that where I do think it's really important to also see these these non-governments this this strategic inaction in a domestic setting if it's directed vis-a-vis refugees then it's very disciplinary but if you would see this in more of a geopolitical arena I would I would also and and I know that many Lebanese observers would see this also as as a form of resistance as a form of contention against this external externalization of refugee politics but broader against sort of neo-colonial or dynamics of transnational governance I'm going on way too much but one thing on this Geneva convention that I thought was very interesting is that it's that exactly what you said and what Ulrike also argued but one of the articles by Amaya Yanmeir also makes a really important point here is that when asked why not sign this refugee convention right often here again Lebanese authorities sort of revert to playing the ignorance card they say well that brings all kinds of obligations that are unclear to us where she shows in our article well these obligations are actually very clear and Lebanese authorities know very well what that does and does not entail but it's their excuse for not signing it as well you know then you open Pandora's box whereas in closed-door meetings it's very obvious that Lebanese officials are very well informed and know exactly what it wouldn't tell wouldn't entail so there's there's again this unknowing and ignorance dimension the methods yes well the methods of studying strategic ambiguity are really I haven't figured them out even after writing a book on them but yeah one of my solutions he was to focus on strategy and I think the work of Lisa Wedeen has been really inspirational where sort of her take on the complexities of domination through ambiguity where she's where you can't look into people's heads so intentions are too hard are impossible to prove you can you can trace the interest so I've tried to do that also maybe looking back very naively I just I just didn't want to settle for for not going into sort of the politics that I that I thought I saw behind that but it's it's still a challenge the interesting thing is that I have also sometimes very direct attributions right where you speak to consultants or advisors to ministries or even previous ministers who would just literally say well yeah of course we didn't want to register we could have done it but we didn't for this reason so these very few very open reflections have also given me sort of the encouragement to to keep seeing this as also not only but also strategically yeah and your last point which also links to one of Craig's points I'm trying to combine things is is really important yeah I do definitely think that this this sort of the politics of uncertainties and and and and institutional ambiguity leave a lot of room for tension for creative reappropriation for gray spaces that you know I won't I don't often know if I would call it resistance but at least for survival for coping in ways that maybe straight out repression or very clear cut unambiguous disciplinary strategies don't leave so yeah I'm always very grateful I'm not a policymaker I don't have to give recommendations but I wouldn't I would I've never meant my book to be sort of as a call for formalization and clarification because first of all I don't think it's possible but also if it's if I would not say it's necessarily desirable and I think this is also the the sentiment that many refugees and refugee representatives that I spoke with share that they say well it's very important to recognize sort of the detrimental effects of all this informality but it's it's simultaneously important to say that that if the Lebanese state would formalize things that would probably not improve matches so yeah I've tried to go move away a bit from the sort of the romanticization of informality and sort of refugee agency within that I think that's problematic but definitely didn't want to go to the entire other side of the spectrum and and for for Craig's comes I think I addressed a couple of things already and I'm definitely going to take up the the move from Wayne Aldaul to Shualdaul that's a really great one and I think your reflections also make me further think on yeah one of the central challenges in doing this research is that you always always wonder if it's just me as a researcher that doesn't get it I mean I don't understand all of what was going on but there was always the existential question is that just me or and do actually Lebanese and Palestinians and Syrians very well understand how this works or indeed is a more sort of broader thing that goes beyond my ignorance into sort of a governmentality of ignorance and I think there's degrees I think many Lebanese would say well we we we understand how this works even if it's informal and and and ambiguous but if and if also um yeah I'm also thinking about how to take this further beyond so the refugee populations because yeah many Lebanese friends have also sort of told people this is the life that that we live as well it's not it's not refugees per se and here I think the sort of the recent developments in Lebanon the protests sort of the and also the the the crackdowns against that but also the sort of the the afterplay of the bereaved explosions are really fascinating as to read again from this perspective of ignorant studies it was also for instance in the Human Rights Watch reports on the bereaved explosions and the centrality of the notion of criminal neglect in that for me that really resonated again with sort of the the the disciplinary effects of of inaction of not governing and then what that can do yeah and I think your your last point I hope I sort of already addressed that a little bit you know that indeed I do believe that there's a lot of room for contention well I don't know resistance but at least contention and survival within this sort of gray space and if Lebanon could have handled it differently well I like to think so but then it would have been it should have been a different Lebanon right a different Lebanon could have handled with refugee crisis very differently yeah I'll stop talking thanks so much for all this food for thought thank you Nora we do have a few um questions and comments in the chat and I'm trying to summarize them or like to relate them a little bit and I think that that the the theme of ambiguity is quite interesting here again to make sense of it so one there is the empirical methodological question is like how to distinguish between an actual strategic element within not knowing or not applying knowledge or is it really a lack of of implementing certain rules that might be in in the background and and then a related question from from Hassan is like you mentioned at some point it's a bit provocative to assume strategic ambiguity why is that why is it provocative for whom is it is it provocative to to assume that there could be something else going on then a weak state failing to provide order or is that provocative and then maybe to to to extend the provocation is strategic ambiguity also in the way on the western like discourse about refugees I remember in the German context when this this self-congratulatory stand of like we've accepted so many Syrian refugees when the the real proportions of of of course totally different and the majority of of of refugees end up in the region or are internally displaced so is there also an element of ambiguity and ambiguity here in terms of the the broader public discourse about refugee politics yeah thanks great I think yeah with with yeah this is exactly the challenge right with with what you're first saying that when is it strategic when is it a lack of implementing and and and the the the trick is of course like how do you know because the whole point is that even when it is strategic it looks like a contingency or capacity or lack of implementation that's always the default answer of any authority not just a momentum that would say well you know we would have wanted to do that but we couldn't because of this so yeah I think for me what was really helpful in trying to think that through was the notion of non-performativity by Sarah Ahmad in a very different context she's used that but I think for me I've I've I've also found that really insightful so the idea that that particular policies or decisions are sort of made not with the aim to actually be implemented or to actually have an effect but you sort of to to maintain the status quo or to get critics to wage critics and if and through that lens I've I've I've sort of interpreted many policies and there's a risk right because there's also this tunnel vision that once you see strategic ambiguity everything is strategic ambiguity and any sort of well-intentioned initiative to actually formalize something or regulate something is then again sort of repackage from that perspective but I but I do think that that's in many cases what is going on and I give some some concrete examples in the book where even when decisions are being made if you trace them back and if you have sort of a critical lens on them it's very clear that that that they were never that that there wasn't an attention this is sometimes actually explicitly admitted by the people who were involved in making that there was never an intention to actually implement them to actually do that so yeah that's been for me an important concept to think that through and but I think that also gets to that second point of why is it provocative to assume and well because the default answer is always well we would have done it if we could right we just don't have the capacity into many some that's a fair point to make right because remember again in the context of this European externalization and the completely disproportionate numbers that of refugees at Lebanon has been forced to to welcome that is a really relevant point and I don't want to sort of skip that but that makes it provocative to say well it's not only that it's not only capacity it's also political will it's also convenient to state and unstate of interest to not deal with this in sort of more formal ways and and here yeah thanks for bringing that up because I think I've never formulated in this way but it's absolutely spot on here's also where the EU Western ignorance comes in right because its approach towards the containment of refugees in the Middle East is completely dependent on the idea that this is a capacity problem that as as long as we sort of train and fund enough and build states and institutions and resilience then it'll work out and and there's no room in that logic for sort of a lack of political will which is something of course that any diplomat and European official in Lebanon that I've spoken with and many and probably all the others as well are very well aware of they know very well sort of these political dynamics they know much more about it than I do but they can't admit that so they also have to be have to be ignorant on the political unwilling to address this because their entire policy depends on this being a pure capacity issue so I think there's there's the provocation and then I also in humanitarian studies there's been really interesting conceptualizations of sort of the ignorance that that's a term that I've read about the ignorance of the international communities that have the willful ignorance towards the politics of these things because it doesn't fit with our policies yeah okay thank you so much Nora thank you everyone for your contributions we have actually extended or maybe let's put it put it differently we have used the ambiguity of the liminal ambiguity of this meeting to the point that we could have extended it by 15 minutes by now I think it was fantastic insightful conversation thank you so much for joining us today for the book launch thank you to Claudia and to Craig for your comments I think it was really really interesting to see like the different perspectives and how like the conversation I think demonstrates that your argument is really sparking conversations and can't wait to follow Craig's lead and assign your book to some of our core modules I think that will be fantastic reading thank you everyone for attending for joining us this afternoon and thank you also to Leonie Ansams-DeFries from the Migration Studies Network at Kings and our communications team Alyssa Allen and so with that thank you so much everyone and yes thanks so much for having me and for these wonderfully inspiring discussions and and yeah if anyone wants to discuss things further or has any questions ideas just be in touch I would love that and thanks fantastic they're recording what we made available via our social media channels okay thank you so much all right it's really been a pleasure to hear you discuss the book again and engage with the questions and yeah thanks for having me sort of reread and rethink my own book that's that's amazing I really appreciate it