Debt and Refuge

Syrian Farmworkers and the Politics of Displacement in Lebanon

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, including up to 1.5 million displaced Syrians. Many are Syrian farmworkers, who for decades have sustained Lebanon’s agricultural system through their seasonal labor. Debt and Refuge traces how the lives of these farmworkers-turned-refugees were transformed by the war in Syria and Lebanon’s devastating financial collapse, revealing the slow economic violence that can push people off their land, into waged work, and into cycles of debt.

Drawing on fieldwork centered in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, China Sajadian documents how Syrian farmworkers’ debts to labor brokers, landlords, and relativesbound them to networks that exploited their labor and also sustained them in the face of profound uncertainty. In contrast to humanitarian portrayals of refugees as uprooted victims awaiting asylum or return, S