ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to local case-studies of governance in informal Palestinian settlements in South Lebanon to explore the dynamics, effects, and functionalities of institutionalized informality, liminality, and exceptionalism. The undetermined status of these ‘gatherings’ reinstates the temporariness of refugees’ presence and allows authorities to shirk responsibility. Lebanese authorities routinely engage with the local governance committees that function as the main representative organization in the gatherings and use them to retain order, but the same committees are withheld formal recognition by state agencies so that Palestinians become entirely dependent on the arbitrary brokerage by Lebanese political parties for accessing services. Such ambiguity also plays out spatially. Refugees are prohibited from owning the land they built on, which exposes them to constant eviction threats that can only be mitigated by calling on the conditional goodwill of the authorities that have imposed this legal exclusion in the first place. Illustrating the logics of a politics of uncertainty, these dynamics reveal how the existential insecurity that administrative, representational, and spatial ambiguity generates for refugees undermines their agency and entrenches the power of the political authorities on which they are forced to rely.
