Navigating Confinement and Resilience: Palestinian Families across Camps in Lebanon and Urban Margins in Denmark
The 1948 establishment of Israel led to the mass displacement of Palestinians, known as al-Nakba (the Catastrophe), which marked the beginning of more than seventy years of dispossession and exile. Subsequent conflicts in the Middle East drove further migration to exile communities in the global North.
Empirical studies have traced such trajectory: from rural areas of Palestine to specific camps in Lebanon, and later to urban neighborhoods in Denmark. These sites—camps and neighborhoods alike—have become emblematic of distinct forms of confinement that Palestinian families have navigated across generations, kin relations, everyday practices, and migration histories. They are also marked by enduring inequalities and processes of marginalization that continue to shape possibilities of belonging and recognition, while at the same time giving rise to resilience, solidarity, and community life.
In Lebanon, Palestinian families have long lived under structural inequalities that constrain everyday life in the camps, characterized by exclusion from civil rights, the state system, and the formal labor market. Within these constrained conditions, spaces of identity politics, community organization, and collective voice have taken shape, allowing for forms of agency, political expression, and identity formation.
In Denmark, families with Palestinian backgrounds have for generations encountered the close gaze of state authorities, navigating ambivalent experiences of over-policing and discrimination, as well as welfare support and care. These encounters have subsequently produced hope for a better future for the next generation, but also fear due to interventions, surveillance, and exclusion. Within these enduring conditions, Palestinian youths negotiate diverse pathways—through education, work, family, and community—while also cultivating resilience, sustaining family bonds, and creating new forms of belonging that both resist and reshape how they are positioned by the state.
Ultimately, translocal kinship networks have connected Palestinian families across Lebanon and Denmark for decades, but have continually been reconfigured in relation to war and genocide, systemic discrimination, patterns of criminalization, generational change, and shifting migration politics.
Therefore, the stories of confinement, inequality, resilience, fear, and hope will be at the center of our research across camps and urban neighborhoods in Denmark and Lebanon. To explore how the Palestinian case can inform a critical and ethically grounded research agenda on confinement at the intersection of the political, cultural, and intimate dimensions of everyday life, we ask:
What are the lived experiences of restricted mobility, exclusion, and marginalization among Palestinian families in Lebanon and Denmark? How do these experiences unfold within translocal family networks? and how are these experiences met with different forms of agency, resilience, and new ways of sustaining family, belonging, and everyday life?
The team consists of researchers Mette-Louise, Tamirace, Jasmin, and Anarim.
Mette-Louise
My research seeks to conceptualize state-margin relationships in Denmark, focusing on the ways in which Palestinian families and youths negotiate welfarist policing relations in the context of state proximity, social and cultural marginality, and extra-legal criminalization in Danish deprived neighborhoods.
My research is based on long-term anthropological fieldwork with Palestinian families, the police and various welfare workers in Aarhus and Copenhagen, and centers upon questions about belonging, kinship relatedness between state and family, and how registers of confinement play out in intimate forms of relationality in everyday encounters with the state in local communities.
My research takes a relational perspective and aims at challenging biased and situated approaches by accounting for various, often contradictory and oppositional, perspectives involved in state-margin relationship. This way, I seek to establish an ethically sound approach to studying highly politicized and conflictual relations between state authorities, policed citizens and stigmatized communities. I have conducted local, regional and global comparative studies, employing collaborative fieldwork, anthropological policy studies, comparative studies across the Nordics, and global cross-cultural comparative studies.
At the center of my research in CONFINED is the question about intimate relationality, and how forms of relatedness that are thought of as just, benevolent or caring may become claustrophobic, constraining, exclusionary and confining. I am particularly interested in examining how such forms of relatedness are embedded in practices of belonging in the family and the welfare state.
My research examines the entangled, long-term, and often hidden forces that shape systems of mobility and immobility in the Middle East and the broader Mediterranean. I am particularly interested in how policy designs and asylum imaginaries draw on broader repertoires and legacies of governance. To understand these legacies, I move beyond the nation-state lens to explore patchworks of governance that straddle diverse sites of regional and international power. For instance, I have examined the European Union and Lebanon—two distinct units—as a site of polycentric governance, where the transnational diffusion of power shapes questions of territoriality, mobility, and immobility.
Drawing on my expertise in conflict in deeply divided societies and forced displacement, I study displacement in Lebanon as part of a wider ecosystem of fragility and conflictual politics. I approach displacement not merely as a consequence of conflict, but as an integral component of the conflict and conflict management cycle—one shaped by decades of repression and disengagement from the root causes of violence. My most recent research focuses on chronopolitics as a system of power that generates differentiated modes of mobility and immobility. Political decisions about who moves, who stays, and who returns are embedded in complex policy temporalities that merit further unpacking.
While grappling with these questions, I also examine how ordinary citizens and refugee-centric organizations challenge dominant mobility regimes by interrogating the north-south dynamics of knowledge production. In this project, I will explore why policy designs for different refugee populations in Lebanon diverge, despite prevailing assumptions of a reductionist and homogeneous approach to the country’s refugee policymaking.
Tamirace
Jasmin
My research explores how Palestinian refugees navigate confinement across different scales—physical, affective, political, and transnational—and how displacement is continually reconfigured by new ruptures. I focus on the ways in which Palestinians in Lebanon interpret violence, imagine asylum, and articulate belonging under conditions of protracted statelessness and abandonment. In An Affective Reordering of Asylum: Palestinian Refugee Imaginaries, Confinements and Europe’s Normative Selectivity on Gaza (under review), I trace how recent escalations in Gaza have disrupted the Palestinian imaginary of Europe. Where Europe once represented refuge and recognition, it is now increasingly narrated as a hostile geography that reinforces exclusion. I describe this shift as a “mental state of confinement”—not bound to walls or borders alone, but to the shrinking of political and moral horizons in which Palestinians see possibilities for safety and belonging. This work demonstrates how imaginaries of mobility and asylum are profoundly shaped by global alignments, and how families in Lebanon recalibrate their sense of future across transnational networks of kinship and affect.
In my second paper, The Weight of Witness: War Crimes, Extermination and the Assault on Gaza as Lived by Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon (with Anarim Chahabi), I turn to how Palestinians in Lebanon experienced the 2023-2025 assault on Gaza. Drawing on 150 interviews across five camps and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, the study documents how refugees carried the violence into their bodies, memories, and political imaginaries. Grief became a mode of political narration, memory was reactivated as resistance, and the right of return emerged as both a psychological anchor and a claim to existence. Witnessing from afar was not passive: it recalibrated notions of home, revealed a collapse of futurity, and reinforced deep disillusionment with international institutions.
Together, these projects highlight that Palestinian confinement is not only spatial, but also affective, symbolic, and transnational. Exile is lived through everyday practices, intergenerational transmissions of memory, and the embodied experience of witnessing violence—even when geographically distant. My work thus contributes to central questions in this research line by foregrounding how Palestinian families remake subjectivity, belonging, and political life across borders, and by insisting on refugee voices as the ground from which critical refugee studies must proceed.
The PhD project:
My research explores how Palestinian families navigate and negotiate different forms of confinement across Lebanon and Denmark. I examine how confinement—rooted in intersecting forms of marginalization, displacement, and statelessness—is lived relationally across gender, generations, and borders. Palestinian families encounter confinement through intersecting social, spatial, legal, political, and affective constraints that shape their lives across national borders. I explore how these experiences unfold in contexts ranging from urban marginalization in Denmark to life in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, highlighting both the constraints families face and the forms of resilience and solidarity that emerge across translocal networks.
Through ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon and Denmark, I aim to capture how confinement takes shape in everyday family life, and how resilience and solidarity are sustained across borders and generations.
Anarim
