Humanitarian Governance and Palestinian Refugees

This paper will explore the dynamics of humanitarian governance, considering this question from the perspective not of the international humanitarian system and its planners – a system often looked at from the centers of New York, Geneva, and Washington – but rather from the vantage point of those who are its subjects (who can be thought of as at once its beneficiaries and its victims) and its field workers. My case is the Palestinian refugee experience with humanitarian assistance, a regime that began in 1948 and now extends across a broad region of the Middle East (principally Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, and Gaza). In my analysis I use both archival records (including from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees [UNRWA]) and oral histories. In thinking about the consequences of humanitarian governance for populations such as the Palestinians, I will look particularly at the issues of representation (especially political representation), protection (a key humanitarian right which is particularly fraught in the Palestinian context), and regulation (of access to resources, of categories of belonging, and of lifestyle and living conditions). That governance does not simply manage but produces subjects is, by now, fairly self evident. In each of these areas of governance, I will explore tensions in this production of refugee subjects between particularity (both the national distinction of being Palestinian and the experiential distinction of being displaced and dispossessed) and generality (that it is in part as generic human subjects that refugees enter into humanitarian regimes and claim humanitarian rights).