Blog Post by Shaddin Almasri, Jasmin Lilian Diab, and Nicholas Maple.* A Blog Series on the Availability of Durable Solutions for Syrian Refugees.
In the context of protracted displacement in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the concept of “durable solutions” has reached a critical impasse. Once envisioned as a pathway to sustainable futures through resettlement, local integration, or voluntary repatriation, these solutions have become largely illusory–stalled by political stagnation, donor fatigue, and the instrumentalization of return as a default policy. Today, formal pathways to protection are not only inaccessible to the vast majority of Syrian refugees, but increasingly irrelevant to their lived realities. Where integration remains politically unpalatable, and resettlement slots are vanishingly rare, return is not merely encouraged but structurally engineered. This recalibration is reinforced by both regional governments and international actors, who have reoriented shrinking aid budgets toward return programs, leaving refugees disillusioned with institutional responses. In response, many Syrians are forging their own improvised, often precarious, paths toward stability, rejecting official integration while simultaneously generating de facto strategies of endurance and belonging. This blog series proposes a reframing of the “solutions” discourse: not as a menu of externally sanctioned end-states, but as a dynamic set of practices (often crafted from the margins) that reflect refugees’ own negotiation of protracted displacement.
Background
In February 2025, Dr. Shaddin Almasri convened a workshop titled ‘“Return” in Lieu of Durable Solutions for Syrian Refugees in Jordan? Impacts, Realities, and Unconsidered Consequences’ at the Council for British Research in the Levant’s Amman Institute. Bringing together twenty scholars, practitioners, and civil society actors, the workshop interrogated the reconfiguration of refugee responses across the region; particularly, the mounting political and humanitarian pressures driving premature return to Syria. At the heart of the discussions lay a fundamental question: What becomes of protection when the illusion of durable solutions is maintained, but the pathways themselves have withered?
The urgency of these questions has only intensified in the wake of seismic geopolitical developments. The fall of the Assad-led regime in late 2024 and the subsequent lifting of U.S. sanctions on Syria have catalyzed a rapid policy pivot across host states. Jordan and Turkey, home to millions of displaced Syrians, have swiftly repositioned themselves as key stakeholders in Syria’s reconstruction. Jordan, for instance, has resumed its role as an electricity supplier to Syria’s grid, signaling normalization and regional re-engagement. Yet for refugees, these shifts portend a more precarious reality. The rollback of legal protections, the acceleration of return agendas, and the quiet withdrawal of humanitarian aid are unfolding not in stable conditions, but amid worsening regional volatility including the ongoing war in Gaza and escalating military confrontations involving Israel, Iran, and the United States. Refugees are once again caught in the crossfire of geopolitical recalibrations, treated not as rights-bearing individuals but as demographic burdens to be resolved through repatriation.
The workshop’s deliberations revealed the need to confront not just the limitations of current policy tools, but the very premises upon which the durable solutions framework rests. As U.S. cuts to humanitarian aid and resettlement deepen the erosion of protection space, participants questioned whether durable solutions, long the cornerstone of international refugee policy, retain any practical or conceptual relevance in the context of protracted displacement. Who are these solutions truly for, and whose mobility, return, or integration are they designed to facilitate?
One of the central outcomes of the gathering was a call to reorient scholarly and policy inquiry toward the lived realities and adaptive strategies of refugees navigating “permanent temporariness.” Across the region, the suspension or failure of formal pathways has not led to paralysis but to a proliferation of ground-level responses that are fragile, improvised, and often invisible to state and humanitarian logics. It is these realities that this blog series seeks to foreground, not as anecdotal or exceptional, but as central to understanding the contemporary collapse (and possible reimagining) of “solutions” in protracted crises.
Disillusionment with Durable Solutions in the MENA Region
The once-prized architecture of the three traditional durable solutions: resettlement, local integration, and voluntary repatriation, has eroded to the point of conceptual obsolescence for most of the world’s refugees. These solutions, when offered at all, are increasingly symbolic: diluted, conditional, and often more reflective of donor fatigue and political expediency than of meaningful commitments to refugee protection. In the MENA region–home to multiple, layered protracted displacement contexts involving Palestinians, Iraqis, and Syrians–pathways to permanence have become structurally inaccessible. More critically, no substantive shift away from this mode of governance appears imminent.
Instead, what has emerged is a politics of containment disguised as solution-seeking. The regional response continues to operate within a framework that rhetorically upholds the trinity of durable solutions while practically narrowing the field to one: return. Building on a growing body of literature that critiques the rigid binaries of the durable solutions framework (Maple & Hovil 2024; Bradley 2019), this blog series interrogates the contemporary relevance of these categories within the context of the Middle East, particularly amid renewed calls for the large-scale return of Syrians both regionally and globally.
The trajectory of Syrian displacement offers a stark illustration. Since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011 and the ensuing conflict, over 13 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes, half internally and the other half across borders, predominantly into neighboring host states. The initial humanitarian response centered on emergency relief and protection, while subsequent years saw a shift toward development-oriented interventions. These included attempts, particularly in Jordan and to a more limited extent in Lebanon, to formalize refugee labor markets and expand access to education, healthcare, and municipal services for both refugees and host populations.
However, the swift collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 triggered an equally swift recalibration of policy. European countries began suspending Syrian asylum applications almost overnight.[1] Meanwhile, regional host states moved in lockstep to facilitate returns, despite the absence of guarantees around safety, justice, or reconstruction. Years of incremental support for integration were rendered moot in the face of a near-unanimous regional turn toward repatriation.
This collective response revealed a central contradiction underpinning the global refugee regime: in protracted crises where neither resettlement nor integration is pursued at scale, return becomes the presumed endpoint–not as a choice, but as a deferred inevitability. The durability of this “solution,” however, remains dubious. What it makes clear is that the politics of displacement in the region are not only shaped by the absence of options, but by the active orchestration of return as the only viable (and politically palatable) exit strategy. The implication is stark: durable solutions are no longer about resolving displacement, but about managing it in ways that align with state interests and international withdrawal.
Temporality as Policy: The Architecture of Permanent Temporariness
Temporality is not merely a backdrop to displacement in the Middle East; it is its governing logic. In both discourse and practice, temporariness has been structurally embedded into refugee policy, continually shaping the contours of refugee existence. From the outset, host states such as Jordan and Turkey have made clear that Syrian presence was never intended to be permanent. In Jordan, policies surrounding Syrian labor market access such as work permit fee waivers have been introduced, rescinded, and reintroduced multiple times since 2023, sending contradictory signals about long-term inclusion. In Turkey, the vast majority of Syrian refugees remain under “temporary protection” status, a designation that has endured since 2014 with limited prospects for permanent residency or naturalization, save for a select few. The consistency in policy inconsistency across host states betrays a shared assumption: that Syrians will eventually go home.
This preference for transience is not accidental; it reflects a broader regional and global retreat from long-term responsibility sharing. Decisions around return have often been executed with striking speed and little transparency, revealing the extent to which host states view displacement as a reversible and ultimately temporary condition. This has profound implications not only for the lives of refugees, but for the conceptual integrity of global norms surrounding protection and durable solutions.
Crucially, refugees themselves have long contested the static, state-centric notions embedded in solution frameworks. As scholars such as Malkki (1995), Bradley (2019), and Landau (2018) have shown, the lived experience of displacement resists easy categorization. Return is rarely a neat “homecoming”; rather, it is shaped by displacement’s own temporalities: uncertainty, instability, strategic movement. Many Syrians who have returned to Syria have not returned to their areas of origin but relocated to new urban centers, while others continue to move across borders in circular patterns, navigating both opportunity and risk (Mbazumutima 2023). Yet these patterns remain largely illegible to a protection system built on sedentarist assumptions: that home is fixed, that movement is exceptional, and that return marks the end of displacement.
Policies across the region reflect this sedentarism. In Turkey, for example, only one household member is permitted to conduct up to three ‘go-and-see’ visits to Syria, after which re-entry is denied. In Jordan, returnees face a blanket prohibition on re-entry, with negotiations around this still unfolding. In both cases, the act of return is configured not as part of a continuum of movement or belonging, but as a final, one-way departure. Mobility is not seen as a right, but as a threat to the state’s ability to “resolve” displacement.
What is often obscured in these policies is that for many refugees, it is not the state that offers a solution, but a set of pragmatic, informal strategies to endure and adapt. In the face of failed or inaccessible formal pathways, refugees have constructed de facto solutions: some temporary, some resilient. Despite legal and bureaucratic hurdles, Syrian refugees have continued to pursue livelihoods, often leveraging informal networks to establish businesses or find work. Others have sought out opportunities for onward mobility, particularly to the Gulf, where existing Syrian diasporas have provided entry points for education, labor, or temporary reprieve.
At the same time, emerging research, including recent survey data, reveals that Syrian return intentions in the coming year will remain low, with the majority citing safety concerns as the primary reason to remain in their host countries. This suggests that return intentions are often shaped less by desire than by constraint, uncertainty, or lack of alternatives. The framing of return as a “choice” flattens the complex calculus refugees must navigate and obscures the extent to which these decisions are shaped by structural coercion, withdrawal of aid, and policy fatigue. This is particularly important to underscore, even as this series focuses on the MENA region: return agendas are transnationally coordinated, and the international policy pivot toward return is not confined to the region alone.
It is against this backdrop that this blog series seeks to document and analyze how the dismantling (or deliberate withholding) of formal solutions has given rise to a politics of endurance and invention from below. Over the coming months, contributors from the original February workshop will explore these themes through grounded research and critical reflection. The series will open with a piece by Refugee Law Initiative Fellow Rebecca Thompson, who examines the alternative financial mechanisms currently facilitating return to Syria in the absence of formal banking and reconstruction support. These are precisely the kinds of improvised infrastructures and refugee-led responses that we aim to bring into sharper view.
To contribute to this conversation or pitch an essay for the series, please reach out to the editors: Dr Shaddin Almasri (shaddin.almasri@donau-uni.ac.at), Dr Jasmin Lilian Diab (jasminlilian.diab@lau.edu.lb), and Dr Nicholas Maple (nicholas.maple@sas.ac.uk).
*Dr Shaddin Almasri is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Migration and Globalisation Research, University for Continuing Education Krems.
Dr Jasmin Lilian Diab is the Director of the Institute for Migration Studies (IMS) and Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Migration Studies at the School of Arts and Sciences at the Lebanese American University.
Dr Nicholas Maple is a Lecturer in Refugee Studies at the University of London.
[1] This followed a call by eight European states to classify Syria as a safe country of origin earlier in 2024.
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