ESTELLA CARPI
I have a background in social, political and linguistic anthropology, sociology, and Arabic and Islamic Studies. I love working in interdisciplinary environments.
I am primarily interested in how societies respond to human-made crisis and crisis management. I have predominantly worked in/on Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. My academic work has examined the impacts of humanitarian aid provision on identity and group belonging, the role of the state in humanitarian governance, and the overlapping of welfare and emergency relief. In the past, as a postdoctoral researcher, I have worked on South-South humanitarianism (especially faith-inspired forms of assistance) and the urban-humanitarian nexus. I have been a Safeguarding consultant for Arabic and Portuguese speaking NGOs, and I have provided research consultancies on war-caused displacement and aid programming for UN agencies, NGOs, and the Dutch government.
I am primarily interested in how societies respond to human-made crisis and crisis management. I have predominantly worked in/on Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. My academic work has examined the impacts of humanitarian aid provision on identity and group belonging, the role of the state in humanitarian governance, and the overlapping of welfare and emergency relief. In the past, as a postdoctoral researcher, I have worked on South-South humanitarianism (especially faith-inspired forms of assistance) and the urban-humanitarian nexus. I have been a Safeguarding consultant for Arabic and Portuguese speaking NGOs, and I have provided research consultancies on war-caused displacement and aid programming for UN agencies, NGOs, and the Dutch government.
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (32)
Uploads
Essays by ESTELLA CARPI
Book Reviews by ESTELLA CARPI
Analytical Commentaries by ESTELLA CARPI
Abstract. In this article, I discuss the tendency of the humanitarian system in areas affected by crisis to provide services to people in need on a national basis, by using Lebanon as a case study. Through the research I conducted with Syrian, Iraqi, Sudanese and Palestinian refugees between 2011 and 2019 in Lebanon, I will illustrate, first, how hospitality can be employed both as a practice and as a discourse. In the latter case, I will explain how it can problematically turn into an “ethnicization” force in humanitarian aid provision. As a result of a conservative use of the hospitality discourse, second, I will introduce the concept of “compensatory humanitarianism” that caters for the locals as a consequence of the refugee presence. Against this backdrop, I will finally show how the current humanitarian system is far from being inter-group despite its efforts to make programs nationally mixed. Indeed, it simply proposes mixed programs to presumably dissipate inter-group tensions, therefore revealing an actual neo-ethnicization of care.
Despite domestic instability, Lebanon not only is one of the few countries where conducting research is still possible in a crisis-affected region, but it also emerges as a “comfort zone” for international researchers: a place where to observe regional conflicts while enjoying a consumeristic lifestyle and a privileged position within Lebanese society. We provide a critical inquiry of how, first, the confessional narrative has been abused and reproduced in international research. Second, we focus on how scholars have changed the way of thinking Lebanon’s statehood and political order. Finally, we discuss how the forced migration scholarship has built on the widespread securitization and ethnicization of migration.
Résumé : Partant de la guerre israélo-libanaise de juillet 2006 dans la banlieue sud de Beyrouth et de l'afflux de réfugiés syriens dans les villages du Akkar au nord du Liban, j'émets l'hypothèse que l'État libanais cherche à s'affirmer officielle-ment comme espace liminaire afin de survivre aux crises et de préserver son capital politique, faisant ainsi échec aux efforts de citoyens et de réfugiés pour quitter cette liminarité. J'exa-mine l'intersection de la liminarité étatique proclamée et de la neutralité humanitaire, ce dernier principe étant mis en avant par de nombreuses agences humanitaires internationales qui ont assisté les déplacés internes en 2006 et qui accompagnent les réfugiés syriens au Liban depuis 2011. Si en anthropologie la liminarité est généralement abordée comme un phénomène anti-structurel et comme une incarnation des marges, je m'ap-puie sur la perception qu'ont les gens de l'inimitié étatique et de leurs aspirations frustrées à se rapprocher de l'État pour avancer que la liminarité étatique permet plutôt d'appréhender la particularité structurelle de l'agencéité et de la présence violente propres à l'État libanais, lesquelles sont marquées par une politique conjointe de répression et d'abandon.
Problematizing this common belief is particularly important for defining the ways in which social solidarity either develops or contracts across faith-based communities during conflict-induced displacement. In this context, aid provision and local accountability remain fundamental litmus papers. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in Dahiye from 2011 to 2013 with Lebanese Shiite faith-based organizations and private initiatives, a secular local organization, and their respective beneficiaries, this paper advances reflections on how social membership and acts of solidarity and charity interact within the Lebanese philanthropic scenario.
Lebanon is well known as a country of rich migration history: the major flows of migrants left for Australia, Canada, West Africa and Europe in the 19th and 20th century, where they mostly followed the settlement and housing patterns of their community members. On the other side, migration flows also occurred within the country, predominantly from the South to Beirut’s southern suburbs and its surrounding areas, since the Israeli Occupation (1978-2000) and the chronic state neglect since the years of the French Mandate (1920-1943) had caused further impoverishment. The migration towards other countries is named hijra, which means “migration” in Arabic, whereas it is called nuzuh in the case of migration within the same country.
Lebanon has mostly been home to Iraqi, Sudanese and Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Palestinian Nakba onwards, despite its refusal to become signatory to the 1951 Geneva Convention for Refugees, which classifies Lebanon just as a transit country for forced migrants. Armenians and Kurds are also largely present in today’s Lebanon. The historical legacies of Lebanese transnationality have been engendering throughout the years interesting linguistic phenomena that are worth being delved into. The linguistic superstructure characterizing Lebanon, as a result, turns out extremely layered, hybrid and articulated, insofar as it reflects the wandering dimensionality of Lebanese society. The methodology used to unravel the way local trilingualism plays out draws on ethnographic data that have been collected by the author throughout four stays in Lebanon –periodically from 2005 to 2012.
While aiming at analyzing the role of the performative Lebanese speaker in communicative phenomena of code switching and code mixing, the present research sheds light on the wandering essence of language itself, as a mirror of its inhabitants’ mobility. The ungraspable essence of migration gives birth to a highly complex formation of local languages and begs the question for still unexplored dynamics of linguistic affiliations to community, social class and ideological stance. By using an anthropological lens, an attempt to analyze Lebanon’s identity performances and the mobility stories of local speakers will be carried out.
crisis in urban and peri-urban settings in Lebanon. It outlines existing mechanisms of collaboration, analyses their potential strengths and weaknesses, and derives lessons and recommendations for improving refugee responses in Lebanon, and potentially in other national settings. The report focuses on two case studies: the largely hybrid urban district of Bourj Hammoud, one of the main commercial hubs of Greater Beirut, and the peri-urban coastal region of Sahel El Zahrani, located between Saida and Tyre in South Lebanon. The response to the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon, which broke out in 2011, faced many challenges initially; namely the lack of a solid national response strategy and weak local governance capacities, which were needed to respond to a large-scale crisis. International non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and United Nations (UN) agencies took the initial lead in responding to the crisis. Local authorities, who were at the forefront of the response, lacked the adequate capacities to respond and thus were involved in a less organised manner. The humanitarian response suffered overall from weak coordination between international actors, the central government, and (in)formal local authorities, resulting in unequal and scattered aid distribution. As the crisis prolonged, the government of Lebanon (GoL) became increasingly involved and eventually, in 2015, led the development of the Lebanon Crisis
Response Plan (LCRP) jointly with UN agencies. Various ministries took a more proactive role in the response, in particular the Ministry of Social Affairs (MoSA), which was designated by the Council of Ministers to take on an official role in the response. At the local level, municipalities and unions of municipalities, despite lacking an official responsibility, made serious efforts to respond to the refugees due to increasing pressures in their localities and based on moral imperatives. International and UN agencies initially targeted Syrian refugees on the basis of the humanitarian principle of immediate alleviation of suffering following displacement. Local host communities, who were impacted by the crisis due to the increase in the local population and a higher demand on limited basic services, were initially less involved and addressed in the response. This working paper explores the various formal and informal levels of collaboration, or lack thereof, between international and local organisations, UN agencies and local authorities. In Lebanon, establishing successful coordination mechanisms between national and local authorities and aid agencies is politically and logistically challenging. Due to funding constraints and limited programme timeframes, humanitarian organisations find it difficult to maintain a continuous long-term relationship with local municipalities and unions of municipalities. Moreover, aid agencies often opt to bypass local authorities in project implementation in order to avoid local bureaucracy. Internal politics also create another challenge for coordination with local authorities, as this can interfere with the orientation of aid.
UN agencies and INGOs are now mostly turning short-term relief programmes into longer- term projects for development, and have shown serious efforts to adapt their responses to address local contexts more adequately. However, clearly defining roles among international and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and UN agencies and establishing solid coordination mechanisms remains a challenge and is
important to enhancing overall public management in urban crisis contexts.
The research concludes that complementing sectoral approaches by adopting area-based approaches to respond to emergency crises allows humanitarian and development programmes to address the needs of different vulnerable groups, including refugees and local communities, in a more efficient and sustainable manner.
This allows the implementation of more inclusive needs-based responses, whilst also preventing unequal aid distribution and the ‘compartmentalisation’ of society.
Moreover, this working paper highlights the weakness in focusing and adapting responses to respond to urban settings which host the majority of refugees. As such, it is important to raise awareness and develop the necessary tools and coordination mechanisms to optimally address refugees in urban contexts, especially
with more refugees settling in urban areas worldwide. Finally, coordination efforts and mutual aid agreements for emergency service provision can provide a solid ground for local actors to know: first, how to turn international aid into an opportunity rather than financial and political dependency or reason for domestic marginalisation, and, second, to learn the advantages of domestic coordination, internal agreement, and develop the capacities to manage foreign aid. Overall, reinforcing the role of local authorities and actors has proven to be more efficient and manageable in the short-term; however, over time, it also faces political limitations thus challenging the ability to reach a broader consensus on the management of domestic issues. This paper proposes a multi-scalar coordination approach to respond to crises and address diverse social vulnerabilities.
by actors from the Global South.
Against this backdrop, and based on long-standing research vis-à-vis local, national and international responses to displacement from Syria within Lebanon, this chapter examines the diverse roles that faith and secularism play in the initiatives developed by Syrian diaspora organisations based in Lebanon, exploring how and with what effect faith, religion, secularism (and secularist frameworks) relate to Syrian DOs’ relationships with different local, national and international actors, including Syrian refugees, members of host populations and diverse UN Agencies, NGOs and INGOs.
Syrian DOs in Lebanon include organisations established and led by activists, ex-protesters, established Syrian migrant workers, and religious leaders who have ‘become’ relief providers since the crisis broke out. On the one hand, by drawing on interviews with members of a range of Syrian DOs in Lebanon, this chapter explores the personal and collective reasons behind the act of establishing these organisations. On the other hand, it will investigate the social roles played by secular and faith-based DO members who engage in relief work, and their contextual relationship with their international and secular counterparts. This is particularly important in light of the strong financial and political support that a core group of popular secular(ist) Syrian DOs have received from international donors/agencies. In contrast, faith-based diaspora organisations have often been viewed by members of the international community (both in the context of Syria and more broadly) as exiled communities that do not fulfil key international humanitarian principles such as neutrality, impartiality or universality as they are assumed to prioritise political or sectarian dimensions through providing assistance (only or primarily) to their co-nationals/co-ethnics. This secular-centric interpretation of the partialist nature of faith-motivated assistance remains particularly biased towards diaspora groups that mobilise within the global South, where the source of crisis supposedly lies.
By providing examples from Beirut and from northern Lebanon, this chapter will show how DOs’ configuration and engagement with specific international and local communities have been changing since the outbreak of the crisis in Syria in 2011. By analysing the organisational configuration (including partnership models) and the forms of provision of these secular and faith-based DOs, we are particularly interested in examining how intra-community solidarity is (or is not) built within southern host societies through Syrian DOs’ initiatives – this is a dynamic that has received hardly any attention from scholars examining diaspora transnational endeavours.
With the purpose of investigating the human and social geographies of such secular and faith-based DOs, our chapter aims to draw on lessons from anthropological, sociological, and IR studies, in a bid to construct a deeper understanding of secular and faith-based DO-led aid provision and their social impacts in settings of the global South which geographically (and geopolitically) neighbour new and ongoing crises.
In this framework, play and sports, which do not necessarily complement each other, are deployed as vehicles to address broad societal issues, such as marginalisation, war recruitment and economic or political vulnerabilities.
Drawing on the experiences of (un)forced migrations and development or humanitarian practices, this panel seeks to contribute to those debates that maintain play activities and sport are an end per se or to frame them as catalysts for political, cultural or religious formation processes.
The panel is particularly interested in contributions tackling the intersection between development/humanitarian action, migration flows and play/sports activities in Middle Eastern and other societies that have become home to Arab background diasporas.
Lastly, it seeks to provide a terrain of discussion regarding what ludic and physical activities do to the agency of children and youth, particularly in light of the economic and existential uncertainties and opportunities that human mobility entails. In an attempt to move beyond the definition of development and humanitarian agendas, how do children and youth on the move make sense of ludic and sports activities?
Individuals who wish to contribute can send a 200-word abstract to estella.carpi@gmail.com and dianachiara3@gmail.com.
Panel convenors: Dr Estella Carpi, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University College London; and Dr Chiara Diana, Research Associate at IREMAM-CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université.
Abstracts will be accepted until 20 November 2017. The selected contributors will participate in the WOCMES 2018 conference which will take place in Sevilla (Spain) from July 16 to July 20.
The convenors are planning to edit an anthology of articles focusing on play and sports that are meant as development and humanitarian tools in migration, to be published in 2019.
In The Politics of Crisis-Making, by shedding light on how humanitarian practice becomes enmeshed with diverse forms of welfare and development, Estella Carpi exposes how the politics of defining crises affect the social identity and membership of the displaced. Her ethnographic research in Lebanon brings to light interactions among aid workers, government officials, internally displaced citizens, migrants, and refugees after the 2006 war in Beirut's southern suburbs and during the 2011-2013 arrival of refugees from Syria to the Akkar District (northern Lebanon). By documenting different cultures, modalities, and traditions of assistance, Carpi offers a full account of how the politics of crisis-making play out in Lebanon.
An important read, The Politics of Crisis-Making shows that it is not crisis per se, but rather the crisis as official discourse and management that are able to reshuffle societies, while engendering unequal political, moral, and nationality-based economies.