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Julie Peteet situates this monograph about Palestinians in Lebanon within the theoretical literature on place and displacement. Based on years of fieldwork and extensive interviews, her work analyzes how place and identity are mutually constitutive and mediated over time by violence, resistance, and power among Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon from the 1950s through the 1990s. The innovative work of this volume lies in two analytical themes that Peteet uses throughout: place and agency.
The first analytical trope of the book is the importance of place to Palestinians' lives: the author focuses on the ways Palestinians use and recreate places in exile to establish social and spatial stability and meaningful identities. She adeptly discusses how Palestinians relied on the village structures of pre-1948 to settle in camps together with members of the same village, thus replicating social and familial structures and networks through spatial proximity. Peteet shows that, by recreating familiar place relations associated with their natal villages, Palestinians engendered a familial and social stability that stood in contrast to the daily humiliations they endured as refugees constantly monitored and disciplined by the Lebanese state and economically dependent on United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) rations.
The rise of the resistance movements in the late 1960s and the signing of the Cairo accords in 1969 (which allowed Palestinians in Lebanon the right to work, form organizations in the camps, and participate in armed struggle) provided Palestinians a newfound stability through their own administration of the camps. Affiliation with...