ABSTRACT
This chapter connects the explanatory power of the hybrid political order, central to Chapter 1, and the politics of uncertainty, developed in the Introduction, to analyze how and why institutional ambiguity operates in Lebanon’s refugee governance. It does so by drawing on the emerging field of ignorance studies. Reconsidering the cases presented in the empirical chapters from the perspective of epistemic politics construes inaction and ambiguous action as ways to maintain, feign, and impose ignorance. Such a reading of informality, liminality, and exceptionalism reveals the agency at work in reproducing institutional ambiguity while doing justice to its structural dimensions. Lebanese authorities involved in refugee governance feign and maintain their own not-knowing by hiding behind informal, temporary, and exceptional measures in the realm of status, shelter, and representation. These same practices impose ignorance on refugees by excluding them from legal frameworks and subjecting them to vague policies and directives, incomplete and arbitrary implementation, and disputed representation structures. This destabilizes the knowledge economies in which refugees operate and enables their control, exploitation, and expulsion.
