Palestinian National Movement in Lebanon

Hosting over 30,000 inhabitants and governed by competing militias, 'Ayn al-Hilwe in the south of Lebanon is one of the most contested refugee camps in the Middle East. Known as the 'Capital of the Palestinian Diaspora', the camp has endured a long history of internal power struggles and external influence and intervention. Based on extensive ethnographic research in the camp - focused on the actors who have shaped its modern political trajectory since the rupture caused by the 1993 Oslo Accords - The Palestinian National Movement in Lebanon places the attention on the role of exile leaderships, camp-based militia commanders and shape-shifting networks of patronage in the political landscape of the Palestinian movement in Lebanon. Offering original empirical and theoretical findings, this book will be essential reading for students of the Palestinian movement and refugee politics in the Middle East and beyond.

This is a well-conceived, ethnographically rich, and remarkably detailed account of a Palestinian refugee camp’s dynamic and ever-shifting political history with a focus on the emergence of Islamists politics. Sogge’s book is a welcome contribution to the growing corpus of studies of refugee camps and political movements. This finely grained study provides a solid example of the contexts in which Islamist movements take root. The author astutely captures the enmeshment of the camp, and Palestinian refugees, in local and regional political issues. Most significantly, this study adds to the literature illuminating that refugees may be without rights, but they are hardly without the agency to shape their worlds., The tangled politics of the Palestinian national movement in Lebanon are nowhere more complex than in ‘Ayn al-Hilwe refugee camp. Erling Sogge does a masterful job of untangling these, moving beyond stereotypes to paint a rich and nuanced portrait of the forces at play, the actors involved, and the local society in which they are embedded. His book illuminates important dimensions of Palestinian and Lebanese politics alike, and also makes an important contribution to our understanding of refugee politics more broadly. I strongly recommend it.

Erling Lorentzen Sogge is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, Norway where he was also awarded his PhD in Middle East Studies. He has also been a research fellow at the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He has published in the journal "Middle East Research and Information Project" (MERIP) and also "Babylon – Nordic Journal of Middle East Studies", of which he was Editor-in-Chief.