Examining the Intersection of UN Policy Dilemmas with Lebanon's Incoherent Policy Landscape

Abstract

The thesis problematizes the role of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in International Relations and studies how the organization interacts with refugee hosting states facing protracted refugee challenges. To that end, it integrates the analysis of UNHCR’s humanitarian and development programming as well as its refugee policies in Lebanon between 2012 and 2019 into the wider literature on international organizations and the international refugee regime. The thesis controls for Lebanon’s registration and border policy, return policy, and its securitization of the displacement influx and argues that UNHCR had to reinvent its “norm entrepreneurship” role in Lebanon and to adapt its humanitarian and development policies to a continuously changing and ambiguous policy landscape. It therefore takes UNHCR’s humanitarian programing and refugee policies as the dependent variables and, concomitantly, Lebanon’s policy landscape as the independent variable. In so doing, it advances the hypothesis that UNHCR would not have likely been able to navigate Lebanon’s complex refugee policy cycles without adopting an often-criticized pragmatic role