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Refugees and displaced have been, by and large, absent from recent analyses of the
Arab uprisings, unless as accidental victims and consequences of violence. Analyses
and debates on the reconfiguration of rights, democracy, social justice and dignity in
the region suffer from a chronic methodological nationalism, which perpetuates the
idea that people seek and fight for rights and self-determination solely in their
national territory, seen as the natural context for achieving a full social personhood.
The implication is that those who are at the margins of nation-states or who are
displaced from their own original nations/territories, like Palestinian refugees, come
to be twice marginalised and their predicament is made even more invisible. The
idea of return as their only life project does not give justice to the complexity of their
aspirations and claims that comprise the right to have rights, alongside the right to
return to their lost land and properties, which could be conceived, more broadly, as
a return to dignity. The implications are extremely significant and point to the need
to rethink nationalism and the classic modern project of the nation-state as the only
site for self-determination. Refugees’ narratives and practices call for a critical examination
of the classic notion that access to rights should be dependent upon belonging
to territorially bound and homogenous national communities, a notion that is flawed
to start with in most Middle Eastern nation-states, where structures and opportunities
for power, rights, and resources reflect and reinforce complex hierarchies based on
ethnic, religious, gender, and class divisions.
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