NADYA HAJJ
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATIONS: PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMPS IN LEBANON, JORDAN, AND SYRIA
During my graduate school methodological training with the late, great Americanist Randall Strahan, I encountered David Collier’s APSA-Comparative Politics newsletter on “Data, Field Work, and Extracting New Ideas at Close Range.”1 I was struck by Collier’s attention to the role of data-rich country studies that could serve as a source of new ideas and hypotheses. Collier’s insights built on sociologist Alejandro Portes’s insistence that researchers who are experts in one case can play an influential role in “extracting new ideas at close range.”2 These scholars are deeply engaged with both theory and the close analysis of cases. This combination of traits gave some field researchers a superpower I coveted because they had “an unusual capacity to see the general in the particular.”3 However, reading about the existence of the superpower is not the same as possessing it. In this short piece, I describe how my research project shifted from close analysis of a refugee community to a broader comparative assessment of how institutions form in anarchic settings. Reading scholarship extensively before beginning field research, listening carefully to interviewees, and letting go of tightly controlling the interview process helped me acquire the superpower of extracting general ideas from specific cases.
By 2012, I had spent almost eight years living in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The genesis of the Palestinian refugee condition began in 1948 when approximately 750,000 Palestinians fled to Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, where refugee camps were established to house them. In Lebanon, 53 percent of the Palestinian population still live in these camps.4 Since 1948, camps have transformed from tented spaces to landscapes filled with cement apartment homes and a hive of entrepreneurial endeavors. Much of my research was centered in Nahr al Bared refugee camp (NBC), located near the port city of Tripoli in northern Lebanon. NBC was built in 1951, but it was destroyed in 2007 during a battle between Lebanese military forces and a non-Palestinian group known as Fatah al-Islam. Shortly after its destruction, the international aid community and Lebanese government agreed to reconstruct it. For a time, displaced NBC residents lived in temporary dwellings in the nearby Beddawi refugee camp.
Over the years, I traced the shifting political and economic conditions for NBC residents. I had conducted hundreds of interviews using methodologically reliable and valid questions that the institutional review board (IRB) deemed ethical. I was the foremost expert on entrepreneurial activity and business growth in the construction sectors of Palestinian refugee camps. However, moving beyond my rich descriptive study to contribute to a new idea or general theory in comparative politics seemed far out of reach. On May 18, 2012, I had concluded my seventieth interview with yet another NBC refugee business owner who had temporarily relocated to Beddawi refugee camp following the 2007 conflict that destroyed his original business and home. He was awaiting approval on a business grant application and the reconstruction of his home in the new NBC. Out of sheer frustration with the stalled direction of my research project, I went rogue. I put down my IRB approved script, took a big gulp of cardamom coffee, and asked Ali, “Is there anything else I should have asked you but didn’t?” Over the course of eight years we had developed a rapport, and his next comment revealed that he felt he could candidly challenge me. He looked me in the eye and said,
You know, you have interviewed me more than four times since 2004. You know so much about my business and even my family history. I know you care. But every time you ask the same questions, and I say the same things. But lately things have changed in NBC. After the 2007 conflict there, I feel differently about things, but your questions don’t get at that change I feel. You need to loosen up and just listen to me. I wonder why you didn’t ask me how I feel about the upcoming move to the newly rebuilt Nahr al Bared 2.0?
He went on to say,
Of course, I want to return to the new 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 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 part of our new home.
I was puzzled and asked myself, “What did he mean he owned his home in the refugee camp?” Ali rummaged around in a box and produced a tattered property title. It was a formal legal title that established the owner’s right to use, sell, protect, and benefit from the ownership of his home. Probing him 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 existing scholarship on institutional formation did not anticipate that a refugee community would undertake the risk and cost associated with property right creation. As a student of political science, I was well versed in the predictions of Spontaneous Order folks and New Institutional Economics regarding the necessary conditions for property rights formation. The former presumed that informal property rights were the only likely outcome in nonstate settings, and the latter required the presence of a state for the creation of formal property rights. I had held tightly to their assumptions that refugees would have neither the motive, means, nor long time horizon to incentivize the formation of property rights. In turn, I constrained my field research and never asked refugees about property rights. However, Ali’s comment sparked a “first principles” way of thinking. A first principle is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”5 I began to ask the more basic question of how refugees construe order in the absence of a state apparatus such that they could facilitate stability and growth. For the first time, I was able to see how the rich particulars of refugee camp industry and growth might connect to a general theory of institutional formation in comparative politics. “Let go and let Ali” became my new motto for releasing control of the research process with my carefully crafted questions and opening myself to the unexpected lessons that Ali and other refugees could teach me.
I thanked Ali and hopped in a taxicab back to NBC’s committee office. The CC office might have looked like a boring meeting room to an unwitting observer, but it was, in fact, filled with proof positive 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 economic spaces: a refugee camp. The file clerk at the CC permitted me closer inspection of the titles. His cigarette burning down to a nub and the hazy smoke filling the room only added to the moment, pregnant with the drama of field research.
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 across Lebanon and Jordan. It was as if an unknown historical artifact had been unearthed. Property rights are not supposed to exist in Palestinian refugee camps. At least, the existing scholarly record did 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 my unscripted routine interview with a Palestinian refugee led to the discovery of formal legal titles inside refugee camps strewn across Lebanon and Jordan. This discovery triggered a new understanding of the potential for institutional innovation and evolution in transitional political space, places that lack a stable sovereign state with the legal jurisdiction to define and enforce institutions. This new idea of communal resilience and institutional innovation in challenging political spaces became the driving force behind my research agenda.
By “letting go and letting Ali,” I was able to develop the superpower I had always coveted. Although I had prepared well for field research by letting the existing scholarship inform my first round of questions, future iterations of research questions evolved to respond to the dynamic nature of the interview process. I also shifted to thinking about the first principles motivating the creation of order in anarchic spaces. After years of developing trust and rapport with refugees, I learned to lean on their expertise to inform the questions I asked. After all, they are the experts on the ground and are most aware of real-time shifts in political economic conditions. In fact, releasing firm control of the interview process led me to discover a trove of property titles that were crafted and enforced by Palestinian refugees. This was a totally unexpected finding based on my careful reading of the literature on institutions. The mantra of “letting go and letting Ali” helped connect my specific knowledge of businesses and growth in Palestinian refugee camps to a general comparative political theory of institutional formation in transitional spaces.
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Nadya Hajj is associate professor of Peace and Justice Studies at Wellesley College.
PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Hajj, Nadya. Protection Amid Chaos: The Creation of Property Rights in Palestinian Refugee Camps. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
• ——. “Institutional Formation in Transitional Settings,” Comparative Politics 46, no. 4 (July 2014): 399–418.
NOTES
4. “UNRWA | United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees,” UNRWA, accessed April 10, 2019, https://www.unrwa.org/.
5. Aristotle, The Metaphysics (Mineola, N.Y.: Courier Corporation, 2013), 1013a14–15.