ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the young Syrian and Iraqi refugees make their ways as racialised Others in Beirut's schools, streets, humanitarian organisations, refugee camps and football pitches. Using their own words as conceptual guide, we offer an account of the ordinariness of the everyday racism they experience in these spaces and what navigating it demands. We try to understand how they make sense of the fears and exclusions they experience, and how they give meaning to their everyday encounters by situating them within the wider political struggles and ethical commitments in which their lives as refugees are also tangled up. We pay particular attention, then, to what it means to experience racism structurally situated within refugeedom's relationships of political (sub)alterity and constraint. The young refugees emerge as political and moral subjects in core and defining struggles within – and against – refugeedom's politicising constraints. We interpret their navigations as responses to the subjectivations of racism and discrimination. And yet, sometimes, in attempts to redefine the terms of their own forced displacement, they are also able to eclipse those subjectivities manufactured both by humanitarianism and everyday racism. In these moments, the young refugees seemed to us to briefly claim a re-politicised subjecthood, one unconnected to humanitarianism's categories and not contained within the normal politics of refugeedom.
