INTRODUCTION

Property rights are not supposed to exist in Palestinian refugee camps. At least the existing scholarly record does not predict their presence. After all, why would a marginalized community living in uncertain political economic conditions go to all the trouble and effort of crafting institutions that lay claim to assets in a refugee camp? Yet a routine interview with a Palestinian refugee led to the discovery of formal legal titles inside refugee camps strewn across Lebanon and Jordan. The discovery triggered a new understanding of the potential for institutional innovation and evolution in transitional political landscapes, places that lack a stable sovereign state with the legal jurisdiction to define and enforce institutions.

This routine interview with a Palestinian refugee was bookended by an extraordinary political event. On September 2, 2007, the Lebanese government declared that Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp (NBC) was completely destroyed. The destruction was caused by a conflict between the Lebanese government and Fatah al-Islam, a clandestine militia group. Initially, it was unclear if the camp would be rebuilt. However, on June 23, 2008, donors, Lebanese government officials, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) representatives voted unanimously to rebuild NBC and developed a “Master Plan” for reconstruction (I-92L).¹ Reconstruction officially began on April 1, 2010. The new camp would better attend to health and sanitation considerations, provide better infrastructure, accommodate all previous residences and businesses, and maintain the traditional social fabric of the old camp (I-90L, I-92L). After years of research in the old NBC, I re-interviewed the respondents post-conflict.

In interviews with Palestinians from Nahr al-Bared, refugees that had lived in the old camp since its inception in 1951 maintained serious misgivings about living in the new NBC. One man explained,

Of course, I want to return to NBC. But it will be very different there and most of all I will feel dispossessed for a second time. Do you know why? It is because I hear that I won’t own my new place there, like I did before! I used to own a home in the camp that I was proud of—we worked for sixty years to scrape together a life. Now, we can’t own, rent, or sell parts of our new home. (I-70L)

What did he mean he owned his home in the refugee camp? When asked what he meant by “ownership” of his former home, the refugee produced a tattered property title that looked like the one shown in appendix A. It was a formal legal property title establishing the owner’s right to use, sell, protect, and benefit from the ownership of his home. After probing further, he said there were repositories of file cabinets stuffed with property titles lining the walls of camp committee (CC) offices in refugee camps throughout Lebanon.

The camp committee office might have looked like a boring meeting room to an unwitting observer, but it was, in fact, filled with proof that legal titles establishing ownership of the right to use, sell, and protect an investment or asset had developed in the most unlikely of political spaces. The file clerk at the CC permitted closer inspection of the titles. His cigarette was burning down to a nub and the hazy smoke filling the room only added to the moment, pregnant with drama.

Like Indiana Jones tearing through cobwebs and finding the Holy Grail, I squeaked open a metal file cabinet drawer and discovered hard-copy evidence of property titles in refugee camps all over Lebanon and Jordan. It was as if an unknown historical treasure had been unearthed. The NBC title dated back to 2004 and the Beddawi title was a blank copy from 2012, but both are generally reflective of the property title template used in camps across Lebanon and Jordan since 1969. Subsequent research trips to Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan confirmed the presence of formal titles housed in camp services improvement committees (CSIC) too. A certified Arabic-English translator translated the documents for easy understanding.

The NBC document reveals that one seller and two buyers (brothers) transferred a title to an apartment in the camp. The stamp in the bottom right corner identifies that the CC witnessed the contract and collected payment for the service. The blank title from Beddawi camp echoes the findings in NBC. The new owner of the apartment was given the sole right to reap the benefits of the property and to sell or trade it if desired. The text of this title transfer reveals that refugees clearly delineated property in the camps by specifying the location and the size of the space that was owned. In addition, title transfers reveal that property was in fact alienable, meaning that resources could be bought or sold inside the camps. While transitional landscapes like refugee camps are challenging places where war and destruction may happen, they are also places where political imagination and economic opportunity may develop. As a result, transitional landscapes need to be theoretically recast as much more than places of hopelessness and despair.

The evidence of property rights in Palestinian refugee camps across the Middle East encouraged a central research question: How and why did property rights develop in transitional settings? Using the data from hundreds of interviews, I traced the evolution of property rights from informal understandings of ownership to formal legal institutions that define and enforce claims to assets and resources inside the camps. The Palestinian refugees’ central narrative is that they tried to create order out of chaos in a transitional space. Property rights, both informal and formal, were one tool that Palestinians used to protect their assets and their community from outside domination and state incorporation.

After their arrival in the camps, Palestinians devised their own systems of protection through property rights by strategically drawing upon shared experiences from life before the camps. In the absence of a state, refugees deployed bits and pieces of their pre-1948 life like village codes of honor and shame that could easily work in the challenging realities of camp life. These malleable informal practices protected assets and insulated community affairs from outsiders that sought to dominate and control the camps. Over time, as the camps became more economically complex and new outside political groups wrestled to control the community, refugees struggled to craft property rights that protected their community assets while buffering them from outsider predation. In these conditions, refugees melded parts of their own informal property practices with those of more powerful outsiders. This strategy protected assets and permitted them to find some autonomy from state incorporation. The formal property rights Palestinian refugees built in concert with outsiders were imperfect institutions, but they are testament to the resilience of a community navigating the precarious politics of a transitional landscape and finding some measure of protection.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

This book maps how Palestinians found protection through property rights in refugee camps. In chapter 1, I develop the central argument, define key terms, specify cases, and describe data sources. In chapter 2, I trace the formation of informal property rights in camps across Lebanon and Jordan. In the early years, Palestinians confronted a significant degree of communal tension when they were thrust into unfamiliar refugee camps. In Lebanon and Jordan, an informal system of property rights evolved organically. This pattern of property rights formation was consistent with a spontaneous order approach because it was based on easily replicable pre-1948 experiences in property ownership. Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Cairo Accords in 1969, and Black September in 1970, the camps in Jordan and Lebanon took divergent pathways to protection through property rights.

In chapter 3, I examine how Palestinians brokered agreements with the Jordanian government to create a formal system of rules. Jordanians hoped to control and co-opt the refugee camps after Black September. Though Palestinians enjoyed limited citizenship benefits in Jordan, they still resisted incorporation and pushed for protection through informal Palestinian practices of title adjudication and enforcement. A compromise was reached whereby Palestinian and Jordanian titling and enforcement practices were melded to protect assets from predation and to resist total state incorporation. In working with outsiders, refugees gave up a significant portion of Palestinian political freedom by submitting to the will of Jordanians in some areas of property enforcement.

In chapter 4, I discuss the Palestinians’ negotiations of property rights with Fatah, a revolutionary Palestinian political organization founded by Yasser Arafat and other key Palestinian leaders, in camps across Lebanon. Fatah’s arrival in 1969 created a new ruling coalition inside the camps that forced Palestinian refugees to renegotiate the system of property rights. Fatah pushed for the formalization of titles whereas the community hoped to preserve their existing informal system of protection. Despite Fatah’s revolutionary appeal, Palestinian refugees hoped to protect assets from predation and Fatah dominance. They injected the formal system of property rights with informal community practices in adjudication. Even though the community managed to insulate itself from parts of Fatah’s dominance, the new system of formal property rights gave Fatah inordinate control in the realm of enforcement. In the case of shared resources like water and electricity, Fatah often plundered the system for political purposes. The friction between protection of assets and submission to Fatah’s power was an unresolved tension in the transitional landscape. Moreover, the tension highlights the limits of locally contrived property rights.

In chapter 5, I further test the limits of locally developed institutions. Palestinian refugees in Northern Lebanon brokered a new system of property rules with the Lebanese military following the destruction and reconstruction of NBC in 2007. Again the resilience of Palestinian refugees in finding protection after another dispossession from their property is underscored. But the new system of protection came at the price of Lebanese military domination and enforcement. The book concludes with a summary of major findings and the exportability of lessons to other communities living in transitional landscapes around the world.