Blog post by Marwan Issa
Engaging in politics from above or, ‘Bird’s Eye View Politics’, has been a particular feature in Western states’ approach to migration politics in the Middle East and North Africa region.
Discussions on grandiose political resolutions and the simplistic usage of the three traditional durable solutions (resettlement, local integration, and voluntary repatriation) serve a reductive purpose which invisibilizes local refugee realities, and provides a demographic solution entrenched in colonial legacies.
Particularly, it is rooted in colonial usages of cartography, maps, and major demographic solutions as sources of power. It reminds us of what James C. Scott describes in “Seeing Like a State”, whereby modern states often attempt to simplify, standardize, and render populations legible to exert control.
Durable solutions, in that sense, distort lived realities into abstract, measurable terms that miss the very purpose that policies should serve. They fail the population groups they concern the most, and invisibilize the complexities of major decisions that refugees have to take, particularly in a region that is so unstable that long-term – and even short- and mid-term – planning is unthinkable.
Through this invisibilization, the concept of a rights-based approach is all but practically obsolete, in favor of economistic pragmatism, despite such pragmatism failing to deliver on the economic prosperities leaders promise. A rights-based approach, one that empowers individuals to claim their rights and holds policymakers accountable for fulfilling their obligations, is far from being achieved under current policy pathways.
The recent developments in the MENA region have made clear how bird’s eye view politics dominate international policymaking vis-à-vis Syrian refugees and the detrimental impact such policymaking has had on the lives of millions of displaced persons. From a focus on security over daily wellbeing, to evidence bases and tools that capture broad perspectives rather than intricate realities, all within a global ethos of diminishing regard for international law and human rights, the current approaches to refugee policy remain far from suitable to respond to people’s unique and complex realities.
Focus on Security as Bird’s Eye View Politics
After the fall of the Assad Regime in Syria, European states quickly rushed to suspend Syrian asylum applications almost overnight. Discourses in neighboring countries such as Lebanon and Jordan immediately escalated in their calls for return.
Such steps have resulted in a discursive double impact on the situation in Syria. On one hand, it reduced the complex realities and power interests in Syria solely to the old regime, disregarding the continued plurality of factions, militias, and political groups.
On the other hand, and more importantly, it reduced the decision-making of Syrian refugees to the question of whether or not major warfare or security dynamics are taking place. The recent developments in Suweida and the Sahel have proven that the security situation remains far from stable. Beyond the security situation, however, states have continued to adopt an approach based on the safety of the return itself and an analysis from a geopolitical perspective, as opposed to the on-the-ground realities of a shattered and deeply fragmented country, even when international organizations have flagged the importance of recognizing such local fluidity and complexities. Reducing Syrians’ decision-making to major geopolitics obscures the very human concern of daily responsibilities and the question of “how will I get by”?
The toll of destruction and the loss of property throughout the war were too great for discussions of return to ignore. The United Nations estimates the total GDP lost between 2011 and 2024 to be a whopping US$800 billion. For context, Syria’s annual GDP is US$29 billion. Per capita, the economic loss is estimated that at a staggering US$35,000 per person, equivalent to 35 years of GDP per capita (at today’s annual level of US$850). Notably, these are only general estimates by the Syrian government and UNDP; these do not take into consideration either social inequalities nor the disproportionate impact such losses had on the poorest population groups and the accompanying property, livelihood, familial, and mental damages that have impacted Syrians’ daily decision-making choices.
Conceptions of asylum-seeking decisions and refugee choices in these discussions are reduced to the likelihood of a refugee to face direct death upon return. This obscures the importance of quality and decency of everyday life, as well as the ability to access basic needs and livelihood opportunities. For the last several years, and even before the recent changes in Syria, politicians globally have pushed the narrative that Syria is “safe for return”, but rarely did we see any post-security discourses on the livelihood prospects of returning Syrians and whether they have the capacity to tend for themselves and their families in a dignified way.
This is apparent in the broad, intentional labeling of Syrians in Lebanon as economic migrants, rather than refugees, which aims to shift the responsibility of care away from the state (alongside its international obligations) and push for return agendas. Importantly, however, is that dominant discourses applied a broad, negative connotation to economic migration, linking the concept to greedy profit-making instead of the complex and often extreme realities of poverty and humanitarian need. Taking the latter definition, one would be critical of efforts to privilege people labeled as “refugees” over “migrants”, let alone accept these categorizations and reductive dichotomies in the first place.
Trend Monitoring vs Local Realities
While state narratives have been the biggest factor responsible for invisibilizing daily refugee realities amid discussions of return, the international aid system has also played a role in pushing a reductive narrative vis-à-vis current conditions, particularly regarding general trends or perceptions of return.
Importantly, a major tool that policymakers often adopt to inform decisions is refugee perception surveys. Critically, such tools are usually quantitative in nature. While definitely needed to better inform policy decisions and provide an overview of general tendencies, these “evidence-based” tools are often too dependent on one form of evidence (numbers), and lacking in others, namely quality and depth.
While resources such as flash surveys are very useful in analyzing dominant trends and perspectives, they often lack the in-depth representativeness of more qualitative studies, especially when such surveys come immediately after major geopolitical events and times where perceptions are often distorted by optimistic or pessimistic imagined futures. It is part of a general politics of knowledge production in humanitarian contexts where interests in quantifiable data and metrics (often in relation to donors) could obfuscate lived, unstable realities.
Acknowledging such nuances is critical to building genuine, lasting peace processes and understanding the failed attempts at technocratizing conflict realities in Syria. It can also help understand the shortcomings of responses to major changes that were undertaken under broad organizational incentives and bureaucratic imperatives, which “leaves little room for local responsiveness” and foregoes a “sensitivity to the local political, social, and economic dynamics that shape individuals’ and groups’ interactions with the peace process.”
As such, through the current architecture of the aid system and the matrix of reporting lines between donor states, international organizations, and local communities, bird’s eye view approaches have trickled down throughout and have influenced approaches across the cycle.
Reactions to Syria as Part of a General Ethos of Geopolitics
The knee-jerk reactions to crack down on Syrian refugees upon news of the fall of the Assad-led regime, as well as the complacency of actors regarding discussions on durable solutions and the perpetuation of temporality, is not isolated from the general state of international stagnation vis-à-vis human rights violations and matters of international law.
It has become easy to be left unaccountable, a behaviorism we have already seen in the global inaction (and complicity) regarding Gaza, Sudan, and other catastrophes. Today, people of the MENA region are paying the price of such global ethos, one of carelessness toward human rights, international law, sober discourse, and accountability.
Syrian refugees and the populations of the MENA region are on the receiving end of a cruel “runaway world,” to use the words of British sociologist Anthony Giddens. It is a world where economism has become the standard and where reductive demographic readings have become a preferred analytical preference at the expense of the lived realities of population groups.
Moving Forward: Human Rights Over Growth and Economistic Pragmatism
Adopting a bird’s eye view with quick-fix, macroscopic, and appealing narratives might seem like the easiest choice for international leaders. From a populist perspective, it gives the illusion of efficiency and military-like “hard yet necessary” choices. In reality, however, such perspectives often fail to account for the complexities on the ground—realities that decision-makers remain largely detached from—ultimately exacerbating the very crises they seek to resolve. This failure has manifested both beyond their borders and within them: internationally, global policymaking continues to fall short in offering sustainable, rights-based solutions to protracted crises like that of Syria; domestically, populist agendas centered on refugee deportation and growth-at-all-costs economic policies have proven ineffective, as seen in declining GDPs and the erosion of the foundations that growth is supposed to strengthen.
Today, adopting a rights-based approach that acknowledges the nuances of local realities is not only an imperative to build long-lasting peace processes and transitional justice mechanisms, but also for states to acknowledge the fact that such economistic policymaking has failed to achieve the purported goal of economic growth, and to understand that maybe it’s time to adapt to a post-growth world where resilience, wellbeing and sustainability are valued over metrics.
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Marwan Issa is a human rights practitioner and researcher focused on issues of political economy, social movements, and humanitarian crises. He currently serves as the Research and Policy Advisor at Oxfam in Lebanon and a Non-Resident Fellow at Badil – The Alternative Policy Institute.
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