Protection amid chaos
Subtitle: the creation of property rights in Palestinian refugee camps
By: Nadya Hajj
Series: Columbia studies in Middle East politics; Columbia studies in Middle East politics
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng; ara
Number of pages: 214
ISBN-13: 9780231180627
Subjects: Palestinian Refugee property; Right of property; Refugee camps; Palestinian Arabs; Claims
Description: "How do communities find protection in chaotic political economic settings? This book endeavors to show how normal people placed in extraordinarily difficult conditions created protections for their assets and buffered against outsider predation through property rights. The research project focuses on Palestinians living in seven refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. Using interviews with 200 Palestinian refugees, legal title documents, memoirs, and United Nations Relief Works Agency archives the author traces the evolution of property rights from informal understandings of ownership to formal legal claims of assets and resources to shed light on how communities thrive in challenging political economic spaces. Initially, Palestinians deployed bits and pieces of their pre-refugee life to craft property rights that met the challenges of living in refugee camps. Later, as the camps increased in complexity with expanding markets and new outsiders entering the political fray, then Palestinians strategically melded their informal institutional practices with the formal rules of political outsiders. Palestinian refugees, to varying degrees of success, managed to protect their assets and community from predation and state incorporation"--Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-203) and index.

In English and Arabic.
Table of contents: title: A theory of property rights formation in Palestinian refugee camps; title: Crafting informal property rights in Fawdah; title: Formal property rights in refugee camps in Jordan; title: Formal property rights in refugee camps in Lebanon; title: Renegotiating property rights in Nahr al-Bared camp; title: Conclusion; title: Appendix A. Titles from NBC and Beddawi in Arabic with English translations; title: Appendix B. Research methods.