Precarious Places: Social Cohesion, Wellbeing and Place Attachment in Refugee-Host interactions, 2017

This collection contains English transcripts of twenty semi-structured interviews carried out in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon during July 2017. Four different groups of people were approached for interview: Syrian refugees, Palestinian Refugees from Syria, Lebanese host communities and Palestinian Refugees from Lebanon. The interviews took place with households living in informal tented settlements and privately-rented accommodation. We asked questions about sense of place, mobility and meaningful locations. We wanted to know whether and how respondents formed attachments to meaningful places, the characteristics of those places, and the feelings they evoked.

Lebanon has absorbed over a million people fleeing the conflict in Syria. Weak governance and limited resources threaten the wellbeing of newly arrived populations and exacerbate tensions with host populations. The protracted nature of the Syrian conflict requires consideration of long term solutions to the refugee crisis. This project uses place attachment to understand: a) wellbeing in precarious mobile populations; and b) root causes of social tensions between newly-arrived and host populations. The research does this by testing hypotheses on the role of place attachment in building resilience and the role of place identity in causing social tensions. Thus the project can inform interventions to build positive resilience and social cohesion in displaced and host populations. Ultimately, the viability and relative merits of long term solutions will depend on the nature of the place attachments of those affected.

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