ABSTRACT
The endemic informality, liminality, and exceptionalism that characterize Lebanese refugee governance have crucial strategic dimensions. This final chapter explicates the empirical contributions of this conclusion, demonstrating that connecting Lebanon’s governance of Palestinian and Syrian refugees from the perspective of strategic institutional ambiguity sheds new light on both cases and offers a unique window onto Lebanese governance in general, which is shown to be hybrid rather than weak and whose elites collaborate as much as they compete. The chapter also outlines the book’s conceptual relevance to debates in the realms of refugee studies, governance and policy studies, and ignorance studies. It places the significance and universality of the politics of uncertainty firmly at the heart of the study of forced migration. In connecting the notions of hybrid order and institutional ambiguity, it contributes to the study of politics and authority by going beyond stating that orders are hybrid to start conceptualizing how and why they are. Engaging with ignorance studies, it offers an innovative structurationist framework that encompasses various dimensions of institutional ambiguity in different domains of governance. Reflecting on these contributions, finally, the chapter ventures their political implications by critically relating them to broader European and global migration regimes.
