More than four million Palestinian refugees live in protracted exile across the Middle East. Taking a regional approach to Palestinian refugee exile and alienation across the Levant, this book proposes a new understanding of the spatial and political dimensions of refugee camps across the Middle East.

Combining critical scholarship with ethnographic insight, the essays uncover host states’ marginalisation of stateless refugees and shed light on new terminology on refugees, migration and diaspora studies. The impact on the refugee community is detailed in novel studies of refugee identity, memory and practice and new legal approaches to compensation and "right of return". The book opens a critical debate on key concepts and proposes a new understanding of the spatial and political dimensions of refugee camps, better understood as laboratories of Palestinian society and "state-in-making".

This strong collection of original essays is an essential resource for scholars and students in refugee studies, forced migration, disaster studies, legal anthropology, urban studies, international law and Middle East history.

Are Knudsen is a Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen, Norway. He has published on Islamism among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, political Islam in Palestine and political violence in post-civil war Lebanon, and he is currently involved in research on conflict and co-existence in post-civil war Lebanon, Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and the democratic turn within Hamas.

Sari Hanafi is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon. He has written extensively on economic sociology and network analysis of the Palestinian diaspora, relationships between diaspora and centre, political sociology and sociology of migration (mainly about the Palestinian refugees) and sociology of the new actors in international relations (non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international NGOs).