Safe for Whom? Rethinking Return Through Marginalised Refugee Voices

About the talk

Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, the question of Syrian refugee return has surged to the forefront of public and policy debates. While international frameworks continue to emphasise safety, dignity, and voluntariness as core principles, such standards often fail to reflect the complex lived realities of return. Return is rarely a singular or linear process. It is fragmented, conditional, and shaped by ongoing calculations of risk, shifting circumstances, and diverse individual experiences. Hence, this event interrogates the notion of return not by asking whether Syria is “safe,” but rather: safe for whom?

Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab, Director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University, will present her latest research findings on the complex dynamics of refugee return from Lebanon to Syria. Drawing on recent fieldwork with marginalised groups including Syrian female-headed households, LGBT refugees, and Palestinian refugees from Syria, Dr. Diab will engage in a moderated conversation with Professor Dawn Chatty and Professor Nicholas Van Hear,exploring the broader political landscape surrounding return.

Together, the speakers will reflect on what “return” means in contexts of political transition, social change, and structural precarity. The discussion aims to engage in exploring dominant policy narratives that treat return as a fixed endpoint, and calls for more flexible, nuanced frameworks that recognise the multi-dimensional nature of displacement, identity, and belonging.

Keynote Speaker

Dr Jasmin Lilian Diab is the Director of the Institute for Migration Studies (IMS) at the Lebanese American University, where she also serves as an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Migration Studies at the Department of Communication, Mobility and Identity. In 2025, her research was awarded the Lisa Gilad Prize from the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM). Dr. Diab is a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University and a Global Fellow at Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. As of 2024, she is a Visiting Professor in Migration Studies at Sciences Po Lyon. 

Panelists

Professor Dawn Chatty is a social anthropologist whose ethnographic interests lie in the Middle East, particularly with nomadic pastoral tribes and refugee young people. Her research interests include a number of forced migration and development issues such as conservation-induced displacement, tribal resettlement, modern technology and social change, gender and development and the impact of prolonged conflict on refugee young people.

Professor Nicholas Van Hear is an Emeritus Fellow at COMPAS and SAME. With a background in anthropology and development studies, he has worked on forced migration, conflict, development, diaspora, transnationalism and related issues, and has field experience in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, North America and Europe. His main contributions have been on force and choice in migration; the relationship between mobility and immobility; migration and development; diaspora formation and engagement in conflict settings, including post-war recovery; and migration and class.

Moderator

Josiane Matar is a Rhodes scholar and a DPhil candidate in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research examines refugee governance in times of crisis, with a particular focus on Syrian displacement in Lebanon. She explores how the Lebanese state maintains order amidst prolonged instability, and how refugees navigate liminality, negotiate survival, and manage their interactions with host communities. Josiane is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University and serves as the Corresponding Editor of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO).