Borderscape: Forced Syrian Migration and New Spatial Practices in Lebanon

Abstract

This article reports on my investigation of the borderscape conditions of displaced Syrians living in Lebanon, undertaken between 2015 and 2020. I conducted mapping exercises in two Lebanese districts: the Beka’a, with one of the highest percentages of persons living in informal tented settlements, recorded as up to 38 per cent of the population in 2017; and Saida, on the southern Lebanese coast, where an unfinished building was allocated as housing for close to 170 Syrian families. This article identifies, interprets, and illustrates ‘boundaries’ at these sites as a system of spaces, activities, and exchanges practiced between the inside and the outside of informal settlements in Lebanon. By acknowledging the heterogeneity and agency of research on forced migrants, this study on borders and borderscaping actions presents the finding that the displaced communities have created residential typologies in order to relate to the land, after nine years of protracted presence in Lebanon. More than 1.5 million displaced Syrians have reshaped the physical and socio-cultural organization of the land they occupy. Migration has remade the morphological organization of this land by generating new geographical patterns that are characterized by the materialities and enactments of borderscape practices.