This book asks what might be obscured by analyses that present long-term refugee camps in the Global South as spaces of containment where refugees are reduced to “bare life”.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with multiple generations of Palestinian refugees inhabiting a camp located in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the book proposes a critical political economic framework that foregrounds the precarious labour of refugee women and men.

The book argues that a focus on refugee labour problematizes the distinction between forced and voluntary migration that came to be institutionalized in the post-World War Two era. It also facilitates analysis of the particular ways in which a given refugee camp is integrated into the global capitalist economy.

The oral histories of multiple generations are analyzed in order to reach a better understanding of how the experiences of this particular group of Palestinian camp refugee women and men have been shaped by:

• Informal urbanization
• The historic intertwining of sectarianism and capitalism in Lebanon
• The international and local provision of humanitarian aid
• Palestinian camp refugees’ circular migrations to other countries in the region 

The final chapter of the book analyses the ways in which these refugees’ production and consumption of social media is bound up with their thwarted political and economic aspirations, couched in the discourse of progress and its moral consequences.

Nadia Latif's scholarship focuses on statelessness, migration, and human rights. She has written on questions of international law and migration, urban ethnography, statelessness and gendered experiences of violence, imperialism and development, conceptions of race in Enlightenment thought. She is a co-coordinator of the European Labour History Network working group on labour migration history. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. She has been conducting fieldwork in Burj al-Barajneh camp located in Beirut, Lebanon since 2003.