Project Summary
Refugees are often considered to be among the world’s most powerless groups; they face significant structural barriers to political mobilization, including often extreme poverty and exposure to repression. Yet despite these odds refugee groups do occasionally mobilize to demand better services and greater rights. This paper examines varying levels of mobilization among Syrian refugees living in camps and informal settlements in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan in order to explain how marginalized and dispossessed groups manage to develop autonomous political strength. I explain the surprisingly high levels of mobilization in Jordan’s Za’atari Camp, compared to the relative quiescence of refugees in Turkish camps and Lebanese informal settlements, as the product of a set of strong informal leadership networks. These networks emerged due to two unique facets of the refugee management regime in Jordan: 1) the concentration of refugees in the camp, and 2) a fragmented governance system. In Turkey and Lebanon, where these two conditions were absent, refugees did not develop the strong leadership networks necessary to support mobilization. I develop this argument through structured comparison of three cases and within-case process tracing, using primary source documents from humanitarian agencies, contentious event data, and 87 original interviews conducted in the summer of 2015.
Data Abstract
The data in this deposit comprise part of the empirical material behind the 2018 Perspectives on Politics article "When Do the Dispossessed Protest? Informal Leadership and Mobilization in Syrian Refugee Camps." The article examines why Syrian refugees living in some refugee camps in the Middle East, but not others, engage in contentious mobilization against humanitarian authorities. I am sharing two types of data, both of which were compiled from web-based sources. First, I collected humanitarian documents from the data-sharing portal of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Specifically, I collected meeting minutes, governance plans, security reports, maps, and statistical reports used for the management of the Zaatari refugee camp in northern Jordan. I used these documents to study governance dynamics and contention patterns in the camp. The documents are mostly comprehensive within a given category. For example, I include all the Camp Management Committee meeting minutes and all the community mobilization meeting minutes that I was able to access through the portal. Similarly, both of the two safety and security reports available have been included, and the governance plan is the only one that was produced. I only include maps that I used to inform the analysis in the paper, as UNHCR produces hundreds of maps of different types to facilitate its governance of the camp. In the camp overview and population camps folder, I included the earliest statistical factsheet that I could find (April 2015), as that was closest to the period I was writing about (2012-2014), and the only REACH population survey that I was able to identify. Second, I worked with a data analytics company in Lebanon to web-scrape Internet content on Syrian refugee protests in Lebanon in order to build a catalog of protest events in that country. The web-scraping technique delivered a catchment of web content (mostly links to news articles and social media posts) referring to specific protest events. I then individually examined each of these events, using the web material, to confirm its validity and relevance to the project. Through this method I was able to identify eighteen events from February 2014 to January 2017. In an appendix to the article each event is enumerated in a table and the corroborating sources and original links are listed next to each event. In the depository the content of each corroborating source is also included (where possible), as is an archived url to the original source.
Files Description
The data are of two types: humanitarian documents and web-scraped material on protest events. The humanitarian documents are organized by topic. First are two documents with statistical information on the camp. Following these are files with the meeting minutes for the weekly Camp Coordinating Meeting in Zaatari (50 total). Then come meeting minutes for the community mobilization initiative. Next come two security reports and the camp governance plan. Finally, there are four maps. A full list of these files, including their original URL, generated by QDR curators, is also included as documentation. Most of these documents are in PDF format.
Second, the catalog of protest events in Lebanon are included as a spreadsheet. Each event listed includes the details of the event as well as links to web content (usually news articles or social media posts) corroborating the occurrence of the event. These links were also archived using perma.cc by QDR, and the perma.cc links are included as well. This list is included in its original Excel (.xlsx) format as well as tab-separated values (.tsv)
