Blog Post by Jasmin Lilian Diab and Hossein Cheaito*
The 2023-2025 war across Lebanon marked one of the most devastating chapters in the country’s recent history, leaving behind widespread destruction, internal displacement, and a ceasefire that—despite its formal declaration—remains fragile and frequently violated. In its aftermath, Lebanon has experienced what some describe as a political transformation, marked by the appointment of a new president and prime minister. While heralded by a few as a rupture from the past, this political rebranding appears to be more accurately described as a recalibration—an alliance of entrenched sectarian forces with technocratic elites closely tied to international financial institutions and investment firms.
Rather than dismantling the architectures of crisis, this emerging regime seems poised to manage them—often reproducing austerity policies and shielding elite accumulation. Against this backdrop, the politics of identity—especially around gender, sexuality, and displacement—become potent battlegrounds. In this volatile terrain, the queer Syrian refugee emerges not merely as a subject of humanitarian concern but as a charged site of fantasy, repression, and state performance.
In the wake of war, as the Lebanese state oscillates between institutional collapse and authoritarian resurgence, a strange convergence unfolds. On one hand, state institutions appear hollowed out—unable or unwilling to provide basic services. On the other, the state reasserts itself through targeted displays of discipline: policing morality, criminalizing dissent, and enforcing social norms through legal ambiguity and delegated authority. The figure of the queer Syrian refugee becomes a volatile surface onto which a host of state and societal anxieties are projected—moral, demographic, and geopolitical.
Post-2024 Lebanon offers a vivid illustration. The collapse of governance in regions such as South Lebanon intersects with renewed calls for refugee return following the fall of the Assad regime. Within this discourse, queer refugees, particularly those from Syria, are caught in fantasies of demographic restoration, cultural purification, and moral reordering. Their bodies are not only displaced but actively politicized and surveilled, narrated into being through logics of both absence and excess.
To be queer in Lebanon has long required a careful choreography of visibility. Beirut’s relative liberalism has always been precarious—a tolerance that is conditional, provisional, and easily revoked. To be both queer and a refugee is to occupy a compounded space of vulnerability where sexuality, nationality, legal precarity, and socio-economic marginalization intersect. In this sense, the queer refugee becomes hypervisible: not merely present, but legible—that is, made readable and interpretable by the state and society in terms that render them governable. This legibility is constructed through dominant moral and political narratives that position them as a problem to be managed, a threat to be neutralized, and a vessel for collective anxiety and projection.
This legibility is not spontaneous; it is deliberately produced. The figure of the queer Syrian refugee emerges within a regional grammar of monstrosity and securitization. As Jasbir Puar reminds us, certain bodies are constructed precisely to absorb and reflect collective anxieties, enabling the state to perform sovereignty through repression. In Lebanon, these scripts authorize the policing of queer refugee life, casting their bodies as symbols of foreign contamination, sexual deviance, and national disorder.
Importantly, this repression is uneven and selective. The state performs sovereignty through strategic crackdowns—on queer gatherings, refugee neighborhoods, activist networks—while outsourcing enforcement to security agencies, religious authorities, and even paramilitary actors like “Soldiers of God.” These performances are not about restoring public order; they are about signaling the reassertion of authority in the absence of substantive reform.
In this postwar economy of governance, the queer refugee is not simply marginalized, they are mobilized. Their visibility in moments of moral panic is instrumental. They become ideal scapegoats for a collapsing system: a way to reassert moral and national coherence amidst political and economic failure. Their bodies become collateral in the performance of state power.
This is not new. Lebanon’s post-civil war political settlement offers historical precedent. In the 1990s, Prime Minister Rafik Hariri famously declared that “civil peace had been bought through public debt.” This logic underwrote the financialization of the state, where reconstruction and sectarian reconciliation were financed through borrowing, speculation, and austerity. Respectability was securitized through property and education, and queer life was rendered either invisible or expendable. Those unable to attach themselves to the economic and familial infrastructures of the postwar state—queer, working-class, migrant—were tolerated until no longer useful, then erased from public life or summoned as evidence of moral decline.
Today, that consensus lies in ruins. The debt that once sustained peace has metastasized into total collapse. The technocrats now tasked with managing Lebanon’s postwar future, many linked to institutions like the IMF, offer no real rupture from the past. Instead, they extend the logic of austerity, securitization, and privatized recovery. Within this framework, queer refugees are again rendered surplus: their lives incongruent with metrics of productivity, human capital, or market-based recovery. Their repression becomes a kind of shadow accounting, absorbing the contradictions of a failing neoliberal state and translating them into spectacles of moral clarity.
This convergence of sexual governance and neoliberal reconstruction has profound implications. Queer refugees are disciplined not only through state violence but through the soft coercions of humanitarianism. Too often, they are flattened into familiar tropes: tragic victims or triumphant survivors. Humanitarian and advocacy frameworks curate their visibility, rewarding narratives of legible suffering and manageable resistance. Rarely are they acknowledged as complex political actors—resisting, negotiating, and refusing the terms of their legibility.
Lebanon’s middle-class imagination continues to play a powerful role in shaping societal responses to queerness and displacement. Within this imagination, queer refugees are often positioned as failures—of tradition, of discipline, of nationhood. As the infrastructures that once upheld these exclusionary hierarchies dissolve, one might expect space for liberation to emerge. Yet more often, this erosion has led to abandonment: queer refugees find themselves excluded not only from humanitarian protection, but from familial, communal, and societal forms of care.
And still, they resist. Through fugitive forms of care and solidarity, queer Syrian refugees carve out spaces of survival and meaning that exist beyond the gaze of both state repression and humanitarian scripting. They construct alternative kinship networks—chosen families, intimate collectives, queer housing arrangements—that offer emotional sustenance, protection, and a sense of home in otherwise hostile environments. They engage in underground economies that blur the lines between survival and autonomy, reclaiming agency in spaces where formal inclusion is denied. Through art, mutual aid, social media, and informal support systems, they imagine modes of belonging that defy the binaries of citizen/refugee, legal/illegal, male/female. These practices do not merely compensate for the failures of institutional support—they actively reimagine what safety, care, and futurity can look like in a context of abandonment.
Their everyday acts of survival are not just reactive; they are creative, political, and deeply resistant. They disrupt the very scripts written to contain them, refusing to conform to narratives of victimhood or deviance. While the state may deploy the queer refugee as a symbol of disorder, it is queer life itself—improvised, collective, and defiantly hopeful—that most powerfully reveals the incoherence and fragility of the state. In these lived practices, we glimpse not only survival, but the possibility of another kind of social order—one grounded in care rather than control, intimacy rather than erasure, and presence rather than invisibility.
What the queer refugee represents in Lebanon today is not simply the intersection of multiple marginalizations. They embody the breakdown of the very narratives that once held the postwar order together. Their bodies are not only targets of repression but stages upon which sovereignty is simultaneously asserted and unraveled.
As researchers, advocates, and policymakers, we must resist the impulse to solely protect, or to pity. We must interrogate the systems that render certain bodies disposable, and challenge the fantasies of order, morality, and coherence that drive repression. Queer refugees must not be framed merely as symbols of crisis, but as agents of disruption and imagination.
Because in the ruins of postwar Lebanon, it is not fantasies of order that point us forward—but the presence of those who defy legibility, refuse containment, and offer glimpses of a more just political horizon.
*Dr Jasmin Lilian Diab is the Director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University, where she also serves as Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Migration Studies.
Hossein Cheaito is a Development Economist and a PhD student in Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute, where he researches the intersections between debt/finance more broadly and queer subjectivities in Lebanon.
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