China Sajadian

“Reproductive Binds: The Gendered Economy of Debt in a Syrian Refugee Farmworker Camp”

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Lebanese-Syrian border, this article analyses the gendered economy of debt among Syrian farmworkers in shawish camps, which have for decades supplied the largest and lowest paid seasonal labour force within Lebanon's food system. In turn, it traces how debt relations in these camps expanded as hundreds of thousands of Syrians sought long-term refuge in Lebanon throughout the war in Syria (2011 to present). Revisiting classic and contemporary agrarian questions of debt from a feminist social reproduction perspective, the article charts how this debt system ultimately deepened the burdens of feminized work in the fields and in the home. Emblematic of debt's “reproductive binds,” these camps offer broader insights into how debt reconfigures gendered and generational divisions of labour within displaced agricultural families—and how these conditions are negotiated, contested and reproduced in daily life.

“The Drowned and the Displaced: Afterlives of Agrarian Developmentalism across the Lebanese-Syrian Border”

This article traces the layered significance of displacement for Syrians whose parents’ and grandparents’ villages were flooded after the Euphrates Dam in Tabqa was completed in 1973. Known as al-maghmurin (the drowned), many of the dam’s displaced descendants are now living as refugee farmworkers in Lebanon. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Lebanese-Syrian border, the article analyzes how these refugees grappled with the struggles, promises, and losses associated with Syria’s high modern era of agrarian reform against the backdrop of Syria’s ongoing war. Facing the uncertainty of long-term displacement, their vernacular narratives about the dam resurrected Baʿthist ideals of state-led agrarian development and expressed a yearning for stability. Such expectations of material improvement, however, sat in tension with an intergenerational history of economic insecurity, decades of rural outmigration, and their everyday predicaments as refugee farmworkers. This article shows how these histories took form in the maghmurin’s everyday talk about the dam: the servile agrarian past that Syria’s land reforms were meant to overcome, the many unintended displacements these reforms unleashed, and the ways they contended with these past displacements in the present. In doing so, it argues that the displacement of these refugees was not a singular event triggered by war but rather a fractured inheritance and ongoing afterlife of agrarian developmentalism and Syria’s long post-socialist transition.

Debt and Refuge: Syrian Farmworkers and the Politics of Displacement in Lebanon

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, including up to 1.5 million displaced Syrians. Many are Syrian farmworkers, who for decades have sustained Lebanon's agricultural system through their seasonal labor. Debt and Refuge traces how the lives of these farmworkers-turned-refugees were transformed by the war in Syria and Lebanon's devastating financial collapse, revealing the slow economic violence that can push people off their land, into waged work, and into cycles of debt. Drawing on fieldwork centered in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, China Sajadian documents how Syrian farmworkers' debts—to labor brokers, landlords, and relatives—bound them to networks that exploited their labor and also sustained them in the face of profound uncertainty. In contrast to humanitarian portrayals of refugees as uprooted victims awaiting asylum or return, Sajadian locates their predicaments within a longer history of rural migration and familial division across the Lebanese–Syrian border. Linking together the politics of mass displacement, mass indebtedness, and our global food system, she makes a case for radically rethinking forced migration as an agrarian question of labor and feminist question of social reproduction. Written with both ethnographic intimacy and analytical depth, Debt and Refuge offers a deeply human portrait of the gendered politics of displacement and why they matter to the future of our agricultural systems and human mobility—in Lebanon, Syria, and beyond.