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Marieke Schöning
3.3. Active Citizenship in a Depoliticising Climate
As the introduction states, a citizenship lens politicises all matters and processes of com-
munal life. To apply citizenship as an analytical category means to study political subjec-
tivity, as citizenship revolves around “the ways in which the kernel of any political order
– the political subject – is brought into being” (Isin & Nyers, 2014, 8). To the contrary, a
general tendency among most of the interviewees to distance themselves from all things
political was observed and thus employed as a starting point to reflect on the frictions
between theory and empirical findings.
As a first reason, the frequent omission of the label political springs from the local context
with restricted, in many ways dangerous, conditions for overt political engagement. A
lack of accountability, arbitrary modes of governance and widespread corruption have
severely harmed people’s trust in institutionalised politics. Nadia stated, “I don’t like poli-
tics; I don’t hear news – because I was raised like this.” Ismat described the omnipresent
backdrop of fear in the Syrian communities in Lebanon, which is a reason for NGOs to
emphasise to be not political: “People don’t want to talk about that because they are
afraid, either of one party in Syria, or parties here, or they’re just afraid – khalas [here
‘enough’] – we don’t want to talk about this topic.” These circumstances can explain
why many respondents positioned themselves and their respective NGOs as apolitical.
In general, ‘being political’ was equated with ‘being politically affiliated’, meaning asso-
ciation or dissociation with the existing political factions. The designation ‘political’ was
almost exclusively ascribed to what can be understood as ‘official politics’, leading to
the dilemma that being political implied to be somehow complicit in a nepotistic system,
despised by many young, educated Syrians and Lebanese. In contrast to the quarrelling
political system, respondents positioned their engagement and “humanitarian work” in
general in a distinct sphere that is “not political” and “just humanitarian”.
Nevertheless, a quote by Maha alleges political relevance to engaging with Syrian refu-
gees: “In a big way it is political but I don’t think they know it’s political. I don’t think that
most people that are working with NGOs – like me – have the intention of it being political.
Our intention is purely humanitarian.” Mahmoud similarly stated:
“People are actually not aware of the differences between saying your opinion and
working [in] the civil society, working as an activist, especially if you are working
directly with the communities. I mean, [...] you can’t be working with the community
and your political point of view is refusing part of your community, you know, so you
better keep that aside and work with the community. [...] You got to put everything
back because you’re here to build, to build this community, to fix, to fill the gaps,
and even to work on people accepting each other. If you want to work on doing
change, okay, at the end, it will lead to political change at some point, we are going
to change rules, but you can’t enforce.”
