Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey have admitted hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and provided them with temporary protection. “Often, the Islamic umma was invoked to justify this ‘open-door policy,” writes CHRISTIANE FRÖHLICH in a paper for the German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
The swift success of similar uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen can doubtlessly be considered a decisive factor for the three governments’ willingness to initially tolerate the inflow of Syrians, she adds in the GIGA Focus titled ‘Shrinking Spaces of Humanitarian Protection’.
However, the spaces of humanitarian protection provided by each of the three states began to shrink from 2014 onwards, when it became clear that the Syrian war was not going to be over any time soon, that the refugees were more likely to stay than to return, and that the international community was unwilling to share the burden – as was illustrated by both the severe underfunding of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and a strong focus on immigration deterrence.
Internal dynamics – the escalation of the Kurdish issue and an attempted coup in Turkey, progressing political fragmentation in Lebanon, economic troubles in Jordan – also contributed to a decrease in support for hospitality towards Syrians, she states.
Clearly, the policies all three states started out with provided fast and relatively non-bureaucratic refuge for Syrians fleeing the civil war, while excluding them from the special protection that comes with the official refugee status – de facto freezing them in legal limbo. “All three states have experienced the shocking disinterest of the international community in the Syrian crisis, which became most apparent in the enduring and severe underfunding of aid efforts in the region,” FRÖHLICH states.
Turkey, as a rising economy, has been able to provide quite a bit more protection than Jordan or Lebanon have, but could still use these efforts for its own political advantage, she adds.
With the civil war raging on much longer than expected, both hosting states and Syrians hoping for a return home have adjusted to the increasingly protracted situation. Syrians who could afford it attempted to find refuge in Europe, with thousands dying on the perilous journey. Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey almost completely reversed their initial policies in late 2014/early 2015, meanwhile, after years of receiving and caring for Syrian refugees. All three states began to emulate the long-standing migration-deterrence policies of the Global North, with border closings, migrant criminalizations, and deportations becoming regular practices. In consequence, the spaces of humanitarian protection available to Syrians shrank markedly in all three states.
“Even though this development is another instance of shrinking spaces of civilian agency, with refugees becoming mere pawns in national, regional, and international politics,” FRÖHLICH writes, “it is also one that has not been sufficiently reflected in the debates on this issue.”
An important point to consider for actors trying to solve the Syrian refugee issue is how efforts to ‘reconstruct’ the Syrian state will impact their situation both in the very states in which actors from the Global North are advocating they should stay, and as potential returnees. As the spaces of protection for refugees continue to shrink both within the region and beyond, return is increasingly presented as the most viable option for Syrians. “At the same time, it is entirely unclear how they will fare if reconstruction is happening in cooperation with the very actors that drove them out of the country in the first place,” FRÖHLICH states.
Fröhlich, Christiane (2018), Shrinking Spaces of Humanitarian Protection, GIGA Focus Middle East, 06, December, urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-61075-9
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