Please see corrigendum

48(5) 877–890, April 2011

Squatting in Camps: Building and

Insurgency in Spaces of Refuge
Romola Sanyal
[Paper first received, May 2009; in final form, December 2009]

Abstract
Refugee camps are cast as spaces of exception where the body of the refugee is reduced
to bare life. Camps exist at the intersections of multiple layers of governance and
legality and remain in a liminal state for generations. The focus on them as spaces of
humanitarian intervention often renders them voiceless. Yet, refugees have agency—as
is evident through a study of their built environments. The development of refugee
camps shows the ways in which identity, politics and construction are intertwined.
The process of squatting, largely seen as a technique of the urban poor to address their
housing needs, can also be recast in the camps. Here, squatting not only produces shelter
but is also an act of rebellion. This article will interrogate the Palestinian refugee camps
of Beirut to show how squatting in camps is an attempt at constructing a nationalist
identity through an act of insurgent nationalism.

The Shatila refugee camp is located in west
Beirut, near the stadium. In many ways, the
camp blends in with its congested surround-
ings. It is difficult to know, particularly when
leaving the adjoining Sabra market, when one
is within the camp space. Yet, in other ways,
it is obvious that this is a camp. The build-
ings are tall, each floor precariously balanc-
ing on the one below. They were clearly an
afterthought because the foundations are not
wide enough to hold a building of that height.
The lanes through the camp are narrow, often
confusing to those who come in as outsid-
ers. The most dangerous parts of the camp
environment are the water pipes and electric-
ity wires that hang in bunches, crisscrossing
each other, lying like webs over every part of
the camp and causing accidents.1 In many
ways, Shatila is like an urban slum where pov-
erty is endemic. Many Palestinian refugees for
whom this has been home for generations live
as ‘hardship cases’. In other words, they are so
poor that the United Nations Refugee Works
Agency (UNRWA) provides them with basic
rations and minimum income every three
months. Lebanon has the largest number of
hardship cases of any UNRWA operations
area in the Middle East.

Romola Sanyal is in the Department of Geography at the Open University, Faculty of Social Sciences,
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK. E-mail: r.sanyal@open.ac.uk.

0042-0980 Print/1360-063X  Online

© 2010 Urban Studies Journal Limited
DOI: 10.1177/0042098010363494
878  romola sanyal
Despite the amount of help UNRWA
gives them, it is still not enough. There are
more people who deserve to be categorised
as ‘hardship cases’, but there are strict rules
that disqualify many families. Those who
have young men over the age of 18 who are
not working, for example, are not eligible
for aid because the argument is that the men
should be out working and contributing to
the family’s finances. However, Lebanese laws
ban Palestinian refugees from engaging in
a variety of different professions, especially
white-collar ones, and jobs are hard to come
by. This is even more exaggerated as Lebanese
laws have, since the end of the civil war, been
deeply biased against the Palestinians. Thus
while economic migrants from other coun-
tries have received work permits for Lebanon
in large numbers, Palestinians have not ben-
efited as they are seen as ‘stateless’ individuals
who lack any social or political rights in the
country (Knudsen, 2009). The 15-year civil
war has been blamed on the Palestinians
by the broad spectrum of Lebanese society,
making it one of the few issues that is used
to unify the nation. Only Hizbollah has been
a Palestinian ally in Lebanese politics, pub-
licly supporting their civil rights. However,
Hizbollah also has a complex relationship
with Palestinians due to its multiple and
overlapping identities and this can sometimes
undermine its solidarity with the Palestinian
cause (Khalili, 2007). Thus, Palestinians have
very little voice the in the Lebanese economy
or society.
Shatila is now a very mixed camp, made up
not only of Palestinian refugees, but also poor
migrant workers from countries such as Syria,
Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. In fact, the influx
of non-Palestinian migrants is so high that
some estimates have placed the Palestinian
population in Shatila at approximately 50 per
cent. This has made Palestinians in the camps
resentful as they have felt marginalised and
minoritised within their own spaces (Halabi,
2004). However, like the Palestinian camps in
Lebanon and other Arab countries, refugee
camps remain symbolically Palestinian spaces.
Markers placed before entry ways into the
camp note the distance from the campsite
to Palestine. The development of Palestinian
camps has been long and tenuous, ravaged by
a history of poverty, war and internal rivalry.
Shatila camp itself holds a special place
in the memory of Palestinian exiles. This
camp has been the site of some of the more
unfortunate events of recent Palestinian his-
tory. This includes the ‘War of the Camps’
that took place between the Shiite Amal
militia and the Palestinians between 1985
and 1987. This episode that was part of the
longer Lebanese civil war left the most of the
camp in ruins. Perhaps even more infamous
is the massacre of Sabra and Shatila of 1982
in which Christian Phalangist militias killed
thousands of men, women and children of all
ages with alleged co-operation by the Israelis
who had established control over the area (Al
Hout, 2004). These various violent episodes
had an especially deleterious effect on Shatila
in particular, where the connections between
physical and social spaces of memory were
often severed (Allan, 2007).
In other ways, Shatila’s specific geography
has made it the centrepiece of the Palestinian
iconography of suffering in Lebanon. As
Khalili points out, since the onset of the
Oslo negotiations in 1993 which excluded
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon amongst oth-
ers from the political processes that affected
them, places of mourning and memory have
become important
where the suffering itself, on the one hand,
legitimates their claim to membership in
the Palestinian national polity and, on the
other hand, appeals to the international
community for recognition and justice
(Khalili, 2005, p. 32).
Noted among Shatila’s memorials, is the
Shatila Martyrs’ cemetery located near the
camp in the midst of what is now a traffic
 squatting in camps   879
roundabout that infringes on the burial site.
The cemetery has been the site of Palestinian
community mobilisation. Shatila camp also
hosts the most well-known memory space—
the mosque which was used as a burial ground
for hundreds of Palestinians during the long
siege of the War of the Camps in the mid
1980s (Khalili, 2005, p. 40). In many ways, the
appropriation of the mosque—in this case,
turning a space of worship into a space of
burial—shows the shifting uses and meanings
of spaces in Palestinian camps as a result of
outside pressures and limitations.
While much of the literature on Palestinians
and Palestinian camps has focused on politi-
cal and economic issues, questions of gender,
health, trauma, children’s experiences and
so forth, little analysis has been done on the
spatiality of the camps themselves. Usually,
these analyses are embedded within larger
anthropological literature concerned with
the socio-political conditions of Palestinian
refugees.2 Yet, it is precisely the space of the
camp and the history of its urbanisation that
raises important questions about identity and
belonging and helps to unsettle the theories
of refugees and refugee camps.
Views on the Camp: Theories and
Methods in Unsettling Refugees
The discourse on refugee camps has cast
them largely as geographies of violent neo-
liberalism. Earlier theorisations, such as those
by Hannah Arendt in 1966, saw the refugee as
a living, foundational challenge to the truisms
and reifications of the nation-state system, as
an interruption to or aberration of
the proper and enduring form of political iden­
tity and community—that is, the citizen and the
sovereign nation-state (Nyers, 2006 p. 9).
This has been coupled with Agamben’s for-
mulation of the camp as a space of exception
that is of legal suspension, to fuel new rounds
of debates and theorisations about the camp.
These debates often juxtapose the camp
(as exception) and the city (as norm) in
contradiction with one another. Camps are
thought of as mimetic spaces that appropriate
city characteristics to become camp-villes or
city-camps where a unique form of enduring
organisation of space, social life and system of
power is created that exists nowhere else. Here,
refugees are often seen as perpetually voice-
less victims (Agier, 2002). Conversely, due
to the socio-spatial organisation of camps,
they are viewed as precisely the opposite—as
spaces of hardened ethno-nationalism in
contradiction to urban cosmopolitanism
making them specifically un-urban places or
not-cities (Malkki, 1995a, 2002; Alsayyad and
Roy, 2006, p. 15). Other theorists have posited
refugee camps as non-places: irrational and
structurally invisible or absent (Auge, 1995).
Their closed or open characters have also
been measured relative to how closely they
mimic, resemble or blend into their urban
hinterlands (Hanafi, 2008).
The problem with creating these dichoto-
mies of space, particularly in relation to
refugee camps, is that they are unable to
recognise when the condition of liminality
can subvert itself. In being stuck in this dual-
istic understanding of camp versus nation-
state or city, a rigid hierarchy is constructed
in which the agency of displaced people is
not taken into account, nor is the possibility
of fluidity of relationships, spatial or politi-
cal, recognised. Refugee camps are highly
politicised spaces. Richard Black in his article
on refugee camps argues that, all too often,
host nations do not put refugees in camps to
make aid delivery easier (as is generally argued
by policy-makers). Rather, it is to avoid the
possibility of cross-border conflict or use of
their territory by militant groups linked to
refugees for attacks on neighbouring states
(Black, 1998). Reports by NGOs have shown,
in many instances, the ability of refugees to
manipulate humanitarian aid and refugee
spaces to their advantage. Camp spaces are
880  romola sanyal
thus used as training grounds for militant
activities and cross-border warfare with states
that have caused the displacement. Host
states are sometimes implicated in encourag-
ing refugees by allowing them to engage in
employment alongside their militant activi-
ties (Lischer, 2005). Space thus needs also to
be understood in political terms and not just
in physicality. The politicisation of space has
various possibilities, including in refugee
camps, where even if it is a temporal space, it
allows for a reinterpretation of identity and
politics that can be militant or covert.3
In fact, refugees can and do play with
the liminality of their position, using the
‘thing against itself ’ in ways (militant and
otherwise) that allow them to resist while
being enclosed by the physical and cogni-
tive boundaries of camps. Palestinian camps
in particular, whether in the West Bank or
Lebanon, have been able to transgress success-
fully the boundaries between active political
agents and refugees. Even when they have not
engaged in overt politics, the engagement with
spatial practices themselves has not only been
subtle critiques of humanitarian assistance
and states of exception, but also discreet ways
of subverting the condition of liminality. The
urbanity that thus emerges within camps can-
not easily be dismissed, but rather needs to be
interrogated as possibilities of refugee spaces
as being in fluid relationships with the cities
and nations of which they are part.
This paper then looks at the historical
development of refugee camps in Lebanon
to analyse how the process of consolidation
has created hybrid spaces in which refugee-
ness and agency have worked simultaneously
to create ‘spaces of exception’ that are able to
transgress the boundaries of place and non-
place. The empirical data for this paper were
obtained through fieldwork conducted in
Lebanon in 2006. The focus of the research
was on the four Palestinian camps in and
around Beirut—namely, Shatila, Burj el
Barajneh, Mar Elias and Dbayyeh. The Beirut
camps were chosen as the city is not only the
capital of Lebanon, but also the largest and
most important city. Refugees have migrated
here at various points over the past 60 years
in search of shelter and employment. This has
in turn led to competition not only between
Palestinian refugees and the Lebanese, but also
among the refugees themselves for resources.
The aim of the project was to investigate
the development of housing in the camps.
It therefore traced how the spatiality of the
camps had evolved over time and how that
had been affected by, and in turn had influ-
enced, the politics of the camps. Although
the research began as structured interviews
with surviving initial refugees and first-
generation refugees in the camps, the method
soon evolved into open-ended discussions in
which more intimate details of living in camps
could emerge.
Spatial Beginnings in Exile:
Refugee Migration and
Settlement in Lebanon
In 1948, when the Palestinians came from
Northern Palestine into southern Lebanon,
they had hoped that the fighting between
Palestinians and the Jews during the establish-
ment of the state of Israel would stop soon
and they would be able to go back to their
villages. Thus, many families settled near the
border with Palestine either in villages or
in the camps set up by the Red Cross. This
arrangement often allowed them to go across
the border to their former homes if they were
fairly close by. This practice continued until
the border was sealed between Israel and
Lebanon. As the conflict dragged on, their
hopes also began to diminish and more and
more refugees began to enter camps as their
money began to run out. The Red Cross
and later the United Nations Refugee Works
Agency set up 16 camps in Lebanon scattered
from Tripoli in the north to Tyre in the south
of the country.
 squatting in camps   881
The camps are dispersed throughout the
country not only as a reflection of the move-
ment of people from the south to the north
in search of economic opportunities, but also
possibly because, as Julie Peteet has pointed
out, it was meant to prevent “the emergence
of a geographically contiguous, cohesive
Palestinian sociopolitical entity” (Peteet, 1991,
p. 24). Of these, 12 official camps remain, all
under the administration of the UNRWA. In
the metropolitan area of Beirut, there are four
camps, Mar Elias (the smallest), Shatila, Burj
el Barajneh (the largest) and Dbayyeh. Many
of these camps were built on land donated
by either the church (as in the case of Mar
Elias and Dbayyeh) or by private families
(such as the Shatila family for Shatila camp).
The demographics of the camps also indicate
this as the camps sitting on donated church
grounds are predominantly Christian while
the camps on other properties are largely
Muslim.4 Camps allowed rations to be more
easily provided but, as Peteet notes, it also
meant being subjected to forms of control
and bio power that reduced them to subjects
of intervention.5
Tents and rations soon became central
to the existence of Palestinian refugees—a
reflection perhaps of their growing economic
marginalisation within their host countries.
Residents were provided with tents according
to family size. Large extended families lived
together in the same structure. Many activities
took place inside the tent, including bath-
ing and sleeping and, often, toilet activities
at night. Cooking and washing took place
outside the tent usually in the open areas
adjoining the camp. Public toilets were later
erected in the camps with separate stalls for
women and men.
The tents were uncomfortable because they
were overcrowded and, in winter when it
rained heavily in Lebanon, the tents provided
minimal shelter for families. Winds would
often make their tents collapse or fly away.
Lanes that ran between rows of tents would
turn muddy with rivulets of water making
movement difficult. Even inside the tents, the
ground would get muddy and people would
struggle to keep their things dry. Attempts to
address the problems included placing heavy
objects on the tents to hold them down and
cutting channels in the ground to let the water
out. Yet this constant negotiation with envi-
ronmental conditions made the need for more
substantive shelters all the more pressing.
Refugees were also provided with rations by
the United Nations. Julie Peteet, in her work
on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon,
discusses the ways in which the collection of
rations and access to health care became ways
in which the refugee body was disciplined and
controlled by aid organisations. Refugees were
taught how to stand in orderly lines for their
rations. Children were made to drink milk
and subjected to other forms of health and
wellbeing practices that were humiliating.
Providing rations like other aspects of the
aid apparatus arguably construct a dehis-
toricising universalism. Universalising the
particular refugee into a humanitarian subject
involves abstracting his or her predicaments
from specific political, historical and cultural
contexts and tends to silence them (Malkki,
1996, p. 378). However, as Peteet amongst
others has noted, rations, like Palestinian
camps are linked to the political projects
of containment (Peteet, 2005, p. 82) Here,
the provision of aid does not neatly ‘silence’
refugees. Rather, it becomes one of the ways in
which refugees ensure that their predicament
is not marginalised in the global humanitar-
ian/political system. Hence, any cuts in aid,
particularly in the post-civil-war era are met
with protests, not only because large numbers
of families are now ever more dependent on
rations, but because rations themselves have
a deeply political connotation.
Yet rations were not always consumed by
families. Instead, they were often sold to buy
other things that were more useful or appro-
priate. This act of selling rations evoked the
882  romola sanyal
stereotype of the cheating refugee6 but was
interestingly subversive. Similarly then, the
acts of changing dwelling structures to suit
one’s needs were equally subversive. The pro-
longed existence in exile made living in tents
difficult. Not only were there environmental
conditions to contend with, but also growing
demographic pressure on camps, both due to
natural increase (due to births) and because of
in-migration of other families, particularly in
the camps in Beirut. Tents therefore became
increasingly unsuitable for longer-term settle-
ment of refugees.
Families began to look for ways to make
more permanent structures. However, this
became a thorny issue with the Lebanese
government. Lebanon posed a unique prob-
lem for the refugees entering the country.
Although it had initially been welcoming to
the Palestinians, the sentiment soon waned as
it became evident that the refugee population
was going to remain within the country for a
while (Sayigh, 1978, p. 108). Lebanon’s deli-
cate sectarian balance between the Maronite
Christians, the Sunni Muslims and the Shiites
was set up by the French before they left their
mandate (Makdisi, 1996, p. 25). Other con-
fessionalist groups such as the Druz and the
Greek Orthodox Christians also received their
specific political offices based on the strength
of their populations. Hence, in Lebanon,
the fear that the Maronite ruling élite had
of shaking the delicate sectarian balance of
the country was adequate to bar government
action from providing the nearly 100 000
refugees the option of Lebanese citizenship
(Smith, 2004, p. 221).
Clandestine Constructions: Building as
Acts of Contestation.  To ensure that
the Palestinian presence within Lebanon
remained temporary, the Lebanese authori-
ties insisted on keeping the structures of the
camps temporary. In other words, no con-
struction was allowed in the camps. Thus,
while the refugees were authorised to acquire
more tents from the UN to shelter their
growing families, they could not build larger
structures themselves. The growing popula-
tion pressure initiated a form of squatting in
the camps, where the new tents of extended
families would be placed next to or near the
older tents thus allowing relatives to live near
each other. The result of course was that the
encroachment on land reduced the size of the
lanes or took over parts of areas belonging to
other refugees. Regulations in some ways thus
led to the disintegration of the planned camp
into a growing squatter camp.
It should be noted here that it was not only
the Lebanese that were keen on maintaining
the characteristics of transience and refugee-
ness in the camps. The Palestinians themselves
were adamant about their right to return to
their homes and were therefore supportive of
a temporary existence as well. However, the
hardships of living in such liminal conditions
also compelled them to seek alternatives to
living in flimsy tents leading precisely to the
kinds of transgressions that unsettle dichoto-
mies of camp and city. Engaging in building
activity, the alternative to living in tents, was
not made easy. The Lebanese government had
put in place a security apparatus to oversee
the activities of the Palestinians and to curtail
them at any cost. The dreaded Maktab Thani
or Deuxième Bureau (Lebanese Internal
Security) maintained a close surveillance on
Palestinian activities. Together with the darak
(police), they engaged in a daily harassment
of refugees that took many forms including
arrests, fines and bribery. Of course, these
fines essentially amounted to extortion as
Rosemary Sayigh points out. Further she
contends that
a possibly exaggerated estimate of the monthly
take of a police officer in charge of a camp was
LL 5,000 ... around 10 times his normal pay
(Sayigh, 1978, p. 135).
Sayigh also points out that permits were
required to visit other camps and even visiting
 squatting in camps   883
neighbours after 9pm could lead to trouble.
She further notes that the presence of merely
two armed police was enough to control a
camp of thousands (Sayigh, 1978 pp. 133–134).
The Lebanese authorities intervened not
only in the maintenance of the camps, but also
in the construction activities. Interviews with
camp residents reveal a clandestine build-
ing operation which takes on very unique
gendered forms. Since the refugees were not
allowed to build with solid materials, they
would cut the food tins (such as cheese tins)
that they received in their rations and beat
them into sheets which they would then use
for walls and ceilings. Or, they used stones
they collected (which they hid under their
clothes and brought into their tents), or made
adobe bricks out of sand mixed with water,
wheatgrass and sheep hair (for reinforce-
ment). Sometimes these bricks would be
made out of clay instead of sand. The mixture
would be poured into a mould that would dry
and be transferred (covertly) into the tent and
used to build walls. Many respondents talked
about how they would build in such a way
so that, from the outside, all that could be
seen was the tent, yet on the inside there was
a solid structure being constructed. Often, if
the authorities discovered what was going on
in the early phases, the construction would
be dismantled. Quite often, they would be
bribed away. On other occasions, by the time
they discovered there was a structure inside
the tent it was too late as the structure itself
was too far completed to be torn down easily.
It is particularly interesting to note the very
specific ways in which Palestinian refugees
refer to the early structures in which they lived
in the camps. There is a significant distinc-
tion between shelter (tent) and house—i.e.
between chadar and beit. In Arabic, chadar is
translated into something akin to a cover (the
full veil for women is also, for example, called
a chadar). Its definition is thus extended to
the point of becoming a roof over one’s head.
Defined architecturally, it can be a shack, a
tent, or a roof. In one interview, the woman
was emphatic that what they were subjected
to living in was a chadar not a beit. The beit in
Arabic alludes to not only the solid structure
that is the house, but also the conceptualisa-
tion of it as a home. Thus the distinction
is particularly important because it signals
both the impermanence of a structure and
the inability to consider it a proper house
or home.
From another perspective, the covert build-
ing processes of the Palestinian refugees
could in fact be seen as forms of feminised
resistance. Earlier, the distinction between a
chadar and a beit was teased out. It is perhaps
poignant that the chadar or tent is the same
word as that for the full veil worn by many
women in conservative Islamic societies. In
Algeria, this chadar had become a particu-
larly useful tool during the Algerian War of
Independence as men disguised themselves
as women by wearing them to get past the
French guards in what Ananya Roy calls a
creative deployment of the veil (Roy, 2001).
The act of concealing the concrete built form
under the veil of the temporary tent was also
a means of escaping the penetrating, colo-
nising gaze of the Lebanese state. Thus, the
Palestinians engaged in an equally paradoxical
making and unmaking of self and space, by
camouflaging their resistance and rescripting
their identity in response to state power.
In the camps, the structures that were a
mixture of tin and adobe were both flimsy
and subject to battering by winter rains.
Repairs were apparently forbidden at that
time and any attempts at undertaking them
required the usual covert means or the bribing
of officials. UNRWA was eventually allowed
to distribute zinc roofs once the tents gave
way to solid structures, but these made life
uncomfortable for people. In the summer, it
became unbearably hot and in the winter they
could get damaged by wind and rain. Cement
roofs were not allowed because some people
claimed that the government feared that as a
884  romola sanyal
sign of permanency. The zinc roofs also made
the addition of floors to the existing struc-
tures impossible. Thus camps such as Burj al
Barajneh had only one-storey houses in their
early phase. As a population that was in many
ways marginalised in Lebanese society, the
Palestinians attempted to find creative ways
to address their acute housing crises.
Spatial marginalisation parallelled economic
and political marginalisation of Palestinians
in Lebanon as well. They faced not only a
poverty of shelter, but also economic poverty
and political repression. Most refugee camp
residents were employed as manual labour-
ers and for very little remuneration. Most
respondents worked in construction or ran
small businesses such as garages or shops. In
several of the camps in southern Lebanon,
people worked in agriculture as well helping
in harvesting crops and so forth. According to
Rex Brynen, a 1971 survey found that
camp workers were primarily employed in
the service sector (35.8 per cent), followed by
industry (25.4 per cent, mainly in construction)
and agriculture (21.1 per cent). Over half
(58.4 per cent) of camp workers were day-
labourers; fewer than one-third enjoyed either
long-term employment (14.2 per cent) or
were self-employed (18.8 per cent) (Sirhan
1975,101). Lacking work permits and
generally employed in small enterprises, most
Palestinians laboured for low wages under
poor working conditions and without access
to Lebanon’s underdeveloped social security
system (Brynen, 1990, p. 206).
Similarly, Palestinian refugees were discour-
aged from engaging in any sort of political
activity. As mentioned earlier, the camps were
dispersed throughout the country, possibly
in an effort to control the population more
effectively. In the schools in Lebanon, the
Maktab Thani kept a close surveillance on
the education of Palestinians by UNRWA, so
much so that teachers whose roles were often
ambiguous were afraid to step outside the
curricula even during memorial days to talk
about Palestine lest they were caught by the
dreaded spies (Bowker, 2003, p. 133).
Although Palestinians engaged in subtle
and everyday forms of resistance against
the surveillance and control of their camp
spaces and communities, the harassment
of refugees and their overall marginality in
many ways made the conditions ripe for the
intervention of the Palestinian Liberation
Organisation (PLO). Here was an organisa-
tion that promised emancipation not only
from exile but also liberation from the control
of the Lebanese state.
It was not until the PLO came into Lebanon
that the refugees were able to consolidate their
dwellings into solid houses and build three-
or four-storey buildings. The PLO presence
affected Palestinian–Lebanese relations for
the refugees as well as the middle classes.
However, their most marked spatial impact
was clearly felt on the fabric of the camp
itself where their presence essentially ended
the surveillance of the Lebanese internal
security forces and their tactics of harassing
the camp residents. The PLO took over the
internal security of the camps, contesting
and liberating the camps from the control
of the Lebanese army forces both before and
after the signing of the Cairo Accords (Sayigh,
1978, pp. 156–163).
Linking Refuge and Squatting:
Urban Theory and
Humanitarian Space
The early years of the Palestinian camps are
particularly interesting in a variety of ways.
This period allows an important insight into
the ways in which Palestinian refugee space
and community consolidated. From a spatial
perspective, the practices the refugees engaged
in are an important way of linking theories
of urbanisation to issues of refugee migra-
tion. Until now, the discussion of refugee
camps has cast them as spaces of exception
(Agamben, 2005) and refugees as victims of
 squatting in camps   885
violence, unable to overcome their trauma
and becoming passive recipients of aid and
charity (Malkki, 1995b). The Palestinian
case shows that refugees are active agents in
the creation and consolidation of their com-
munity even under conditions of duress.
A longitudinal study of Palestinian refugees
in Lebanon shows how camps have become
important symbolic spaces for Palestinian
nationalism and these spaces, their construc-
tion, defence and rebuilding are testaments to
the agency of refugees. Although the popula-
tion continues to remain in a political limbo,
this does not curtail their ability to engage
actively in the process of space-making and
identity formation.
Consider, for example, the process of con-
solidating solid structures under tents in the
early years of exile. The refugees engaged in
a covert spatial practice even when they were
under state surveillance. Often, their neigh-
bours would inform the police or the Maktab
Thani about the construction taking place
under the tent cover. In other cases, people
who were caught building were compelled
to collaborate with the police so that their
own structures would not be torn down.
These situations indicate, in many ways, the
fragmented nature of Palestinian refugees. It
would be naïve to assume that, because they
were a displaced people, there was a natural
cohesion between all of them.
In many ways, the assumptions made about
refugee communities like the Palestinians
reflect the broader assumptions about other
marginal groups such as urban squatters. As
urban marginals, they too, like refugees, are
subject to various forms of intervention that
attempt to control and discipline their spaces
(preferably eradicate them). They have been
seen as aberrations to the rational order of
cities, as cancers that need to be removed.
Over the years, an equally vast literature
on squatting has emerged from various
regional contexts that have at different times
demonised them, marginalised them or seen
them as heroic entrepreneurs that survive
despite the various structural constraints
against them.7 Squatters are often also seen
as a homogeneous category of individuals
living under conditions of poverty and unable
to afford proper housing. This is a wrong
assumption: as Jorge Hardoy and David
Sattherwaite point out, housing is only an
aspect of poverty, not the cause of it. Thus,
the poor are more concerned with improving
their overall economic condition than paying
full attention to their form of shelter (Hardoy
and Sattherwaite, 1986).
In fact, much of the practice of building
in camps also reflects squatting practices in
ordinary urban environments. Like urban
squatters, Palestinian refugees also live in
a liminal state. Here, however, the state of
being is somewhat different. Urban squatters
also build their settlements covertly, often
engaging in mobilised squats that take place
overnight, or through what is seen as ‘the quiet
encroachment of the poor’ (Bayat, 2000).
Their spaces are subject to various forms
of government intervention, particularly
demolition. In certain cases, when the squat-
ter community has become consolidated, the
government can give up the plans of demoli-
tion as it would be likely to come at a heavy
cost. It is the same kind of logic that pervades
the making of solid structures inside the tents
of Palestinian camps in Lebanon. The build-
ing activity, both within the camp and the
growth of the camp, its eventual overcrowding
into its centre, can also be seen as forms of
‘quiet encroachments of the poor’. The refu-
gees, like their urban squatter counterparts,
expanded and improved their homes as and
when their economic conditions improved.
However, what is unusual here is that, in the
camps, the encroachment takes place within
an environment that is protected and organ-
ised in very peculiar ways.
In 1990, Paul Baross talked about the
sequencing of land development at the for-
mal and informal levels in cities. He argued
886  romola sanyal
that planning interventions, particularly
in developing countries, make it difficult
for low-income families to acquire much-
needed land to develop their homesteads.
Baross argued that this is because the con-
ventional planning practice follows a plan-
ning, servicing, building and occupation or
PSBO model. In contrast, illegal and infor-
mal occupation and development of urban
land follow the reverse order—occupation,
building, servicing and planning or OBSP.
The latter allows residents to exercise not
only flexibility in terms of building and
developing their homes, but also allows
them to do so in a cost-effective manner,
as they can allocate resources towards
the upgrading of their homes as finances
improve. In many ways, Baross’ work is
problematic because it does not take into
account the variety of planning practices
that are undertaken in different parts of
the world that do not follow his specific
patterns. Nevertheless, his argument puts
forward an important way in which to con-
ceptualise not only the patterns of squatting,
but how the state plays a role in the diversity
of these patterns.
The Palestinian camps serve as an example
that diverges from Baross’ pattern of infor-
mal housing. Rather than falling into an
OBSP pattern, the squatting in the camps
follows a planning, occupation, servic-
ing and building or POSB pattern. Due
to internationalisation of the Palestinian
refugee problem from its onset, the camps
were created as planned spaces. They were
meant to guarantee shelter to refugees,
but were also meant to be temporary. This
places the refugees in a peculiar situation of
being given access to shelter (unlike urban
squatters) but at the same time having their
shelter conditions paralysed due to the fact
that they do not ‘belong’ to the Lebanese
state and are only temporary guests in the
country. Thus, the spaces are planned and
then occupied by the refugees. As time
goes on, more services are provided to the
refugees for a longer-term stay. Finally, the
building process begins whereby the refu-
gees engage in squatting inside their spaces
to ease their demographic pressure and
physical discomfort.
The modification to the urban squatting
model does not end there, however, and this
is largely due to the peculiar political circum-
stances of the Palestinian refugee problem.
The camps in Lebanon have been subject to
various phases of violence and upgrading.
From 1948 until the arrival of the PLO, the
camp residents lived in what amounted to
shacks. From there, with the political libera-
tion they enjoyed under the PLO’s presence
they were able to build concrete buildings.
However, the PLO’s ‘golden era’ was short-
lived and, in 1975, the civil war in Lebanon
began and lasted for 15 years. Through the
war, the camps’ infrastructures were destroyed
and rebuilt many times. Today, nearly 20 years
after the civil war ended, the camps remain
in a state of disrepair. They are caught in a
cycle of building, occupation and servicing,
creating what can only be described as urban
slums, poorly built, precariously serviced and
largely overcrowded.
Urbanity plays an important role in the
development of these camps in the cities of
Lebanon. Being close to the city and now
being part of its fabric, the camps stand
out as enclosed spaces in what has been
referred to as a ‘state within a state’. Despite
the fact that the PLO departed many years
ago, the Lebanese government does not
enter the camps or monitor what goes on
inside.8 Lebanese legislation also banned the
Palestinians from owning land or inherit-
ing property outside the camps and from
engaging in over 72 different professions.9
This created a situation in which unemploy-
ment among Palestinian refugees reached
approximately 95 per cent, with 11 per cent
of all refugees registered as ‘hardship cases’
(Halabi, 2004).10 The slum-like nature of the
 squatting in camps   887
camp has been greatly exaggerated with an
influx of displaced refugees and a growing
population pressure from the birth rate and
an inflow of non-Palestinian immigrants.
The growth and development of the camps
themselves are directly linked to the expan-
sion of Beirut’s urban area. As the city grew,
it swallowed the camps in many cases so that,
in time, what were considered camps on the
edges of the city have become very centrally
located spaces today. The urban environment
served as a pull factor for many refugees who
came from the rural areas in search of better
employment opportunities in the capital.
Today, the camp provides cheap rental space
to immigrant labourers who need to be close
to their work, yet need to be able to conserve
their income. It is also the only space within
which the Palestinians can own land and
exercise any form of autonomy.
Symbolic Spaces of Insurgency:
Some Concluding Thoughts
One cannot talk about Palestinian camps
without discussing the right of return that
refugees have insisted on from the time of
their displacement. However, most analyses
of Palestinian refugees have focused on their
political and economic dilemmas and not on
their spatial conditions. Most references to
their spaces are in passing and usually con-
nected to their poverty. However, it is impera-
tive to recognise the importance of space in
the creation and sustenance of the Palestinian
identity and Palestinian nationalism.
Although there are many facets to the issue
of space and nationalism in the context of
Palestinian camps, here, I will only address
those that can be examined based on what
has been presented in the article. It is evident
that Palestinians have over time in Lebanon
become unwelcome guests. They themselves
have also wanted to maintain a temporary
existence as a symbolic gesture towards
the international community that their
problem has not simply ‘gone away’. The
most concrete manifestation of these
demands then become the camps, the very
spaces and slums in which Palestinian
refugees have languished for generations.
Although camps are deeply impoverished
and are often seen by large parts of Lebanese
society as dangerous spaces, it is by virtue of
this particular marginality that Palestinians
are able to maintain their demand for return.
Camps have thus played a central role in the
creation of an insurgent Palestinian nation-
alism, one that has over and over again flown
in the face of UN budget cuts, Lebanese
government hostility, Israeli assaults, civil
wars and internal fighting.
Maintaining the camp as a fundamentally
Palestinian space has been an important
part of Palestinian identity. Bowker argues
that, although the refugees have a tenuous
relationship with UNRWA, they demand
support from the organisation because the
continuation of UN services also means that
the Palestinians hopes of returning are kept
alive. Similarly, maintaining the space of
the camp, despite its endemic poverty and
unsanitary conditions, is critical because the
space itself becomes a tangible expression
of Palestinian nationalism (Bowker, 2003).
Thus, squatting in the camps is not only
about survival under difficult economic con-
ditions, it is also about the politics of identity.
The squats take place within the space of
the camp, because it is within this demar-
cated space that the Palestinian identity has
laid its political roots. This understanding
of the importance of space-making to the
Palestinian identity unsettles theories of ref-
ugee camps as well as squatting that generally
cast it as a practice of urban informality and
urban marginality. Here, squatting which can
be seen as a claim to citizenship is cast instead
as a claim to non-citizenship. It is instead a
claim to a national identity and belonging
to a space that lies outside the domain of
the host state. Ironically, it is the very act
888  romola sanyal
of squatting that empowers the refugees to  
stake claims to land in the same ways their
urban poor counterparts do in cities of the
developing world every day.
It is therefore possible to move beyond the
dichotomies of camp and city, place and non-
place to recognise that refugee camps can, in  
fact, be hybrid spaces in which the limits of
exception can be simultaneously transgressed
and maintained. Squatting within camps, the
act of building within them, while simulta-
neously maintaining the exclusive status of a
refugee space, do not fit into the neat binaries
that many theorists have constructed about
the refugee camp and the city/nation-state at
large. In fact, it shows that the state of excep-
tion itself can be used as a tool that is powerful
to demand the rights of those who are seen  
as outcasts of human society. Indeed, space-
making in such places stands as a powerful
critique of on-going debates about the current
human condition.
 
Notes  
  1. There have been a number of studies conducted  
by organisations such as Fafo on the housing
and economic conditions of Palestinian
refugees in Lebanon and other parts of the
Middle East. Fafo in several reports (for
example, Ugland, 2003) have shown the
poor environmental conditions of camps
in Lebanon, the inconsistency of providing
basic services such as drinking water and  
garbage collection, the high levels of poverty
and unemployment. Other Fafo reports
(such as Jacobsen, 2003) have shown how
the housing conditions in refugee camps in
Lebanon are worse than anywhere else in the
Middle East. The reports also, however, point
to the variations in infrastructure amenities,
employment and other indicators between the
north and south of the country and rural and
urban areas.
  2. See, for example the excellent work done on
Palestinians in Lebanon by Julie Peteet (1991,
2005) and Rosemary Sayigh (1978).
3. Sari Hanafi (2008) discusses the Palestinian
camps in Lebanon and how they are subjected
to control and surveillance by multiple
sovereigns involved in different modes of
governance. These include host authorities
and, to a lesser extent, the PLO, UNRWA and
Islamist organisations.
4. Interviews with refugees indicate that there
has been a demographic shift in Mar Elias
refugee camp. The camp was largely Christian,
but many Christians were given Lebanese
citizenship when they first arrived. Over the
years, many of these families have migrated
and have been replaced by Muslim Palestinian
families or other ethnic groups. Mar Elias also
sits on prime property as it is fairly centrally
located in Beirut which makes it a magnet for
those families looking for cheap rents close
to town.
5. Bio power according to Foucault is the
technology of power used to manage and
control people. It encompasses the various
techniques of achieving subjugations of
bodies and control of populations.
6. For a more detailed discussion see Julie Peteet
(2005).
7. See, for example, the work of Oscar Lewis and
John F. C. Turner for further discussions.
8. The Palestinian camps in Lebanon were
liberated from Lebanese government control
and surveillance under the Cairo Accords
signed in 1969 between the PLO and the
Lebanese Army (under General Emile Bustani).
The Accords were repealed in 1987 but, despite
that, the refugee camps retained their semi-
autonomous status.
9. The Property Decree no. 1164 of 1969
allowed Palestinians (by virtue of their Arab
citizenship) to acquire immovable property
on a limited scale up to 3000 square metres
in Beirut and up to 5000 square metres in
the rest of Lebanon. The amendment no. 296
(dated 3 April 2001) prohibited anyone not
having “nationality of a recognized state”
or anyone whose ownership of property
is contrary to the constitution’s ban on
naturalisation “to possess any real rights
of any nature”. This effectively excludes
Palestinians from owning, inheriting or even
registering any property in the country as
 squatting in camps   889
they are essentially the only group in Lebanon
who do not have a “recognized state” (see
Knudsen, 2009).
10. The figure presented by Halabi is a
guesstimate. Other sources show different
unemployment figures. For example,
Tiltnes (2005, Fig. 6) shows approximately
70 per cent participation in the labour
force by men and 18 per cent by women in
camps in Lebanon and reports that, among
refugees aged 15–24, more than 40 per cent
are u n em p l oye d , u n derem p l oye d or
discouraged workers (p. 24). Tiltnes uses
an expanded definition of unemploy­-
ment compared with that used by the ILO
(which shows a lower rate of unemployment
among refugees).
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