This article examines the practices of humanitarian aid distribution from the perspective of aid recipients rather than providers through an immersion in the daily home life of Palestinian residents of Nahr al-Barid refugee camp (north Lebanon) in 2011. It argues that in the name of distributing aid fairly, humanitarian aid providers put in place a pervasive system of surveillance to monitor, evaluate, and compare residents' misery levels by relying on locally recruited aid workers. This regime of visibility was designed to be one directional; NGOs never disclosed how much aid they had available, nor when or how it would be distributed. The inclusion of local aid workers in this opaque framework turned a process that relied on community and neighborhood ties into an impersonal machine that fostered doubt and suspicion and ultimately hindered the community's ability to engage in collective political action.
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Spring 2019
Research Article|
May 01 2019
Fracturing Communities: Aid Distribution in a Palestinian Refugee Camp
Perla Issa
Perla Issa
Perla Issa is a research fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, Lebanon. Her PhD dissertation, “Palestinian Political Factions: An Everyday Perspective,” was the 2015 joint winner of the Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for the best UK doctoral dissertation on the Middle East. Additionally, she has codirected and coproduced a six-part independent documentary film series, Refugee Chronicles, that looks at the global Palestinian refugee experience since 1948.
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Journal of Palestine Studies (2019) 48 (3): 7–20.
Citation
Perla Issa; Fracturing Communities: Aid Distribution in a Palestinian Refugee Camp. Journal of Palestine Studies 1 May 2019; 48 (3): 7–20. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2019.48.3.7
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