Professeur
Professor
Lebanese American University, Institute for Migration Studies
Biography
Paul Tabar is the director of the Institute for Migration Studies and a Professor in Sociology/Anthropology at the Lebanese American University, Beirut campus. He is the author of Arab Communities in Australia (Arab Centre for Arab Unity Studies, 2013) and the co-author of On Being Lebanese in Australia: Identity, Racism and the Ethnic Field (Institute for Migration Studies, LAU, 2010), Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other (Institute of Criminology, 2004) and Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime: Youth, Ethnicity and Crime (Pluto Australia, 2000). He is currently working on Lebanese diasporic communities and their diasporic public activities. He is also working jointly with Greg Noble on a book on migrant habitus focusing on Lebanese Australians as a case study. Dr. Tabar has published many articles on Lebanese and Arab migrants in international journals. he is the editor of a book series on Migrant Studies in collaboration with Professor Anton Escher, Johannes Guttenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and a member of the editorial board on the Arab Journal of Sociology, Idafaat.
Research project 1
“Political Remittances and Syrian Refugees”
This study will focus on what I call ‘political remittances’ that are transferred by Syrian refugees from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. This will involve investigating and analysing forms of political engagement by Syrian refugees in their home politics and in the country of ‘settlement’ as long as these engagements will affect their ‘home’ politics.
In addressing this topic, I will examine how these ‘political remittances’ are formed and through what channels they are transferred back ‘home’? Last, I will show the extent of their impact on the political conflict in Syria.
In short, it’s a study of the political engagement of Syrian refugees in “home” politics taking Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey as case studies from a comparative perspective. This research focuses on “political remittances” transferred by Syrian refugees to their home country (Paul Tabar)
Field Focus: Lebanon
Key words of research: refugee political activities, political remittances, impact of “host” countries on refugee political activities
Research project 2
“On the process of ‘refugee-isation’: the case of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey”
How and under what conditions a person becomes a refugee? I argue that this process is shaped by factors relating to the sending and receiving countries as well as by the UN conventions concerning refugees. More importantly, these factors, which are on the surface politico-legal, are implicated with other broader processes that are grounded in nation-building, creating and transcending national borders and identity politics. We intend to examine Syrian refugees in three receiving countries to show the differentiating impact of the politics of the receiving country in ‘constructing’ refugeeness and ultimately determining the terms for the integration of the Syrian refugees in the country of settlement or lack thereof.
The period preceding becoming a ‘refugee’, a person forced to leave his country is referred to as an illegal or irregular migrant. The first question then is how a person is transformed from being an illegal or iregular migrant to become a ‘refugee’? What about the stage in which a person is neither a refugee nor a citizen in his country of origin? How do we define this liminal stage that exist in-between and may last for years to come (e.g. detention centres)? Last, once the status of being a refugee is terminated, what is the new identity that the ex-refugee will take? Does he/she become a regular resident and eventually a citizen of the new society he/she finds itself in? Above all, how is it that all these questions are implicated in what we call the process of nation-building, identity and border politics?
Keywords: illegal migrants, stateless forced migration, refugisation, nation building and refugee crisis