Pittsburgh Social Movements Forum, Department of Sociology, Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, Faculty Research and Scholarship Program
In the absence of formal protection, how do communities living in refugee camps protect assets and buffer against outsider predation? Using interviews with 200 Palestinian refugees in camps across Lebanon and Jordan, memoirs, and United Nations Relief Works Agency archives, Nadya Haj, an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Middle East Studies at Wellesley College, traces the evolution of property rights from informal understandings of ownership to formal legal claims of assets and resources.