Nora Stel
Biographic Data
| ID | 367547 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nora Stel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nora |
| FAMILY NAME | Stel |
| SIGNATURE | STEL N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Maastricht School of Management |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2560-6458 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 198 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Deportation Diplomacy
This article traces how, despite protracted violence in Syria under the Assad regime, deportation-oriented rhetoric and practices targeting Syrian refugees proliferated among EU countries and regional host states—focusing particularly on Denmark, Lebanon, and Jordan. Theoretically, the article draws on scholarly debates on migration diplomacy and deportation regimes and international political sociology literature on norm diffusion to grasp a gro…
The agnopolitics of refoulement
Lebanon and Türkiye are key partners in the EU’s containment of refugees. Before the unexpected fall of the Assad regime in Syria, the EU insisted that conditions for safe return to Syria were not in place. Nevertheless, Lebanese and Turkish authorities increasingly assertively coerced refugee returns. In light of this, European actors reiterated refoulement as a red line. Follow-up on documented cases of potential refoulement, however, was rare.…
The dog that barks doesn’t bite’? Non-performativity in migration diplomacy
Contains fulltext : 322071.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access
Strategic non-regulation as migration governance
Over the last decade, critical migration scholarship has been increasingly concerned with how state actors in both the Global South and Global North deploy forms of inaction and ambivalent action to govern migrants. Scholars have mobilized and developed concepts to capture such strategic non-regulation, ranging from notions of standoffishness, ignorance, indifference, ambiguity, adhocracy, and informality in political science, IR and sociology, t…
EU Engagement with Contested Refugee Returns in Lebanon
While much literature has concentrated on the EU’s policy to return people from within its borders, this article seeks to understand how the EU cooperates with refugee-hosting states beyond its borders, in its ‘Southern Neighbourhood’, to uphold conditions for voluntary, safe and dignified returns. We build on the case of Lebanon, which hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide after receiving more than one million displaced Syria…
Refugee entrepreneurship
Strategic ignorance and the legitimation of remote warfare
How must we understand and conceptualize the rationales and repercussions of remote warfare? This article contributes to scholarship on the ontology of remote war by analysing how Dutch officials engage with responsibility for the bombardment of an Islamic State weapons factory in Hawija, Iraq in 2015 under Operation Inherent Resolve. It observes that the main feature of Dutch officials’ accounts of Hawija is their diverse claims to not knowing a…
Uncertainty, exhaustion, and abandonment beyond South/North divides
Forced migration studies struggles to counterbalance policy assumptions that the governance of displaced people is of a fundamentally different nature in the Global South and North. This paper contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship that questions the epistemic segregation and theoretical demarcation that reproduce such exceptionalism. It mobilizes the idea of strategic institutional ambiguity to innovatively interrogate routinely a…
Reflections and contributions
The endemic informality, liminality, and exceptionalism that characterize Lebanese refugee governance have crucial strategic dimensions. This final chapter explicates the empirical contributions of this conclusion, demonstrating that connecting Lebanon’s governance of Palestinian and Syrian refugees from the perspective of strategic institutional ambiguity sheds new light on both cases and offers a unique window onto Lebanese governance in genera…
The Lebanese state
This chapter explores the structural dimensions of the institutional ambiguity that determines Lebanon’s governance of refugees by critically interrogating the conceptual and empirical dimensions of the Lebanese state. It analyzes Lebanon as a hybrid order in which political parties that institutionally represent much wider sectarian, communal, and economic fields operate as twilight institutions that are simultaneously part of the official state…
The governance of Syrian refugees in Lebanon
This first empirical chapter engages with the national dimensions of Lebanon’s response to the Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ and explores the instances of strategic ambiguity that have shaped it. Drawing on desk research and in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the chapter outlines how Lebanon’s governance of Syrian refugees’ status, shelter, and representation has developed from inaction before the issuing of the government’s Policy Paper on Syrian D…
Governing Lebanon’s Palestinian ‘gatherings’
This chapter turns to local case-studies of governance in informal Palestinian settlements in South Lebanon to explore the dynamics, effects, and functionalities of institutionalized informality, liminality, and exceptionalism. The undetermined status of these ‘gatherings’ reinstates the temporariness of refugees’ presence and allows authorities to shirk responsibility. Lebanese authorities routinely engage with the local governance committees th…
The governance of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon
This chapter introduces Lebanon’s governance of Palestinian refugees. By exploring the national politics and policies through which Lebanon engages with the protracted Palestinian refugee presence in the country, the chapter reveals how the institutional ambiguity that defines Lebanon’s response to the Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ is institutionally prefigured by its experience with the Palestinian ‘issue.’ Drawing on literature review, document analy…
Governing Syrian ‘informal tented settlements’ in Lebanon
This chapter explores the local implications of the national policy inaction and ambiguity analyzed in the previous chapter. Drawing on contextualized case-studies of so-called informal tented settlements in Lebanon’s Central Bekaa district, it demonstrates how informality, liminality, and exceptionalism are reproduced by local authorities in their securitized and politicized attempts to govern refugees. In terms of representation, municipalities…
Knowledge and power revisited
This chapter connects the explanatory power of the hybrid political order, central to Chapter 1 , and the politics of uncertainty, developed in the Introduction, to analyze how and why institutional ambiguity operates in Lebanon’s refugee governance. It does so by drawing on the emerging field of ignorance studies. Reconsidering the cases presented in the empirical chapters from the perspective of epistemic politics construes inaction and ambiguo…
Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty
Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty is the first comprehensive analysis of how institutional ambiguity shapes refugee governance.Nora Stel offers a nuanced reading of the proliferating modes of uncertainty that emerge both strategically and tactically at the intersection of local, national and international governance in Lebanon.The book explores the other side of knowledge, its institutional production, and its effects on subj…
Lebanon's response to the Syrian refugee crisis – Institutional ambiguity as a governance strategy
Political Parties and Minority Governance in Hybrid Political Orders
This article analyses how minority populations govern and are governed in South Lebanon’s informal Palestinian settlements and the Serbian enclave in North Kosovo. Drawing on literature about hybrid political orders, it is argued that in both settings political parties play a linchpin role in local governance. Based on this finding, three key functions of political parties in the governance of minority populations in hybrid political orders are i…
Mediated Stateness as a Continuum
Since the 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has implemented an extensive governance project in Lebanon that is often regarded as contributing to the weakness of the Lebanese state. Challenging such zero-sum logic, this article explores the institutional interdependencies between the PLO and the Lebanese state and their different yet mutual interests in governance coordination. It conceptualises the relations between the PLO and t…
‘Public–Private Entanglement’
While the literature is clear that political influence and clientelism characterises the investment decisions of entrepreneurs and the performance of their firms when governance is weak, it is less understood how governance systems and entrepreneurs interact, particularly when governance is of a hybrid nature. We address this issue in this paper by studying how entrepreneurs obtain access to electricity in Lebanon, showing that the hybrid politic…
Organized Chaos
Informal institutions are increasingly recognized as a core concept in our understanding of the organization of socio-political life in refugee communities. This article contributes to this understanding by exploring the ways in which urban refugees in the Palestinian informal community, known as gathering, of Maashouk create, reconfigure and contest informal institutions in their quest to access basic urban services such as electricity, water, w…
The Agnotology of Eviction in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings
A significant part of Lebanon's Palestinian refugees live in unofficial camps, so‐called “gatherings”, where they reside on Lebanese land. Many of these gatherings are now threatened with eviction. By means of two qualitative case studies this article explores responses to such eviction threats. Residents, it turns out, engage in deliberate disinformation and stalling tactics and invoke both a professed and real ignorance about their situation. I…
Languages of Stateness in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings
Public authority beyond the state has often been seen as isolated from the state and/or constituting a threat to the state. Recent scholarship, however, has started to conceptualize 'state' and 'non-state' forms of public authority as closely connected and interdependent. This article contributes to this theoretical shift by means of a qualitative case study of public authority in Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon. Lebanon's Palestinian …
Lebanese–Palestinian Governance Interaction in the Palestinian Gathering of Shabriha, South Lebanon – A Tentative Extension of the ‘Mediated State’ from Africa to the Mediterranean
This article offers a qualitative case study of the interaction between Lebanese state institutions and Palestinian authorities concerning the unofficial Palestinian camp of Shabriha. It particularly highlights the indirect nature of these interactions and the brokering role of Lebanese political parties. Governance in Shabriha is conceptualized as a manifestation of a ‘mediated state’, a notion that has been instrumental in understanding governa…
The Children of the State’? How Palestinians from the Seven Villages Negotiate Sect, Party and State in Lebanon
In Lebanon, the fear of tawṭīn makes nationalization of Palestinian refugees an anathema. Yet several groups of Palestinians have received Lebanese citizenship since 1948, most (in)famously those from the ‘seven villages’, a chain of Shi‘i villages on Lebanon's southern border that was incorporated into Palestine in 1923. The trajectory of their nationalization is usually presented as a straightforward consequence of top-down Lebanese electoral p…
Lebanon's response to the Syrian refugee crisis – Institutional ambiguity as a governance strategy
Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty
Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty is the first comprehensive analysis of how institutional ambiguity shapes refugee governance.Nora Stel offers a nuanced reading of the proliferating modes of uncertainty that emerge both strategically and tactically at the intersection of local, national and international governance in Lebanon.The book explores the other side of knowledge, its institutional production, and its effects on subj…
Uncertainty, exhaustion, and abandonment beyond South/North divides
Forced migration studies struggles to counterbalance policy assumptions that the governance of displaced people is of a fundamentally different nature in the Global South and North. This paper contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship that questions the epistemic segregation and theoretical demarcation that reproduce such exceptionalism. It mobilizes the idea of strategic institutional ambiguity to innovatively interrogate routinely a…
The Agnotology of Eviction in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings
A significant part of Lebanon's Palestinian refugees live in unofficial camps, so‐called “gatherings”, where they reside on Lebanese land. Many of these gatherings are now threatened with eviction. By means of two qualitative case studies this article explores responses to such eviction threats. Residents, it turns out, engage in deliberate disinformation and stalling tactics and invoke both a professed and real ignorance about their situation. I…
Strategic non-regulation as migration governance
Over the last decade, critical migration scholarship has been increasingly concerned with how state actors in both the Global South and Global North deploy forms of inaction and ambivalent action to govern migrants. Scholars have mobilized and developed concepts to capture such strategic non-regulation, ranging from notions of standoffishness, ignorance, indifference, ambiguity, adhocracy, and informality in political science, IR and sociology, t…
The Eye of the Beholder
State legitimacy - particularly its alleged potential to counter state fragility - has received increasing attention in academic and policy literature concerned with African development. Service provision can substantially influence such state legitimacy. Services, however, are mostly provided by a multiplicity of (state and non-state) providers. This article therefore specifically explores how joint service delivery by multiple providers shapes …
EU Engagement with Contested Refugee Returns in Lebanon
While much literature has concentrated on the EU’s policy to return people from within its borders, this article seeks to understand how the EU cooperates with refugee-hosting states beyond its borders, in its ‘Southern Neighbourhood’, to uphold conditions for voluntary, safe and dignified returns. We build on the case of Lebanon, which hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide after receiving more than one million displaced Syria…
Mediated Stateness as a Continuum
Since the 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has implemented an extensive governance project in Lebanon that is often regarded as contributing to the weakness of the Lebanese state. Challenging such zero-sum logic, this article explores the institutional interdependencies between the PLO and the Lebanese state and their different yet mutual interests in governance coordination. It conceptualises the relations between the PLO and t…
Lebanese–Palestinian Governance Interaction in the Palestinian Gathering of Shabriha, South Lebanon – A Tentative Extension of the ‘Mediated State’ from Africa to the Mediterranean
This article offers a qualitative case study of the interaction between Lebanese state institutions and Palestinian authorities concerning the unofficial Palestinian camp of Shabriha. It particularly highlights the indirect nature of these interactions and the brokering role of Lebanese political parties. Governance in Shabriha is conceptualized as a manifestation of a ‘mediated state’, a notion that has been instrumental in understanding governa…
Organized Chaos
Informal institutions are increasingly recognized as a core concept in our understanding of the organization of socio-political life in refugee communities. This article contributes to this understanding by exploring the ways in which urban refugees in the Palestinian informal community, known as gathering, of Maashouk create, reconfigure and contest informal institutions in their quest to access basic urban services such as electricity, water, w…
The dog that barks doesn’t bite’? Non-performativity in migration diplomacy
Contains fulltext : 322071.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access
Strategic ignorance and the legitimation of remote warfare
How must we understand and conceptualize the rationales and repercussions of remote warfare? This article contributes to scholarship on the ontology of remote war by analysing how Dutch officials engage with responsibility for the bombardment of an Islamic State weapons factory in Hawija, Iraq in 2015 under Operation Inherent Resolve. It observes that the main feature of Dutch officials’ accounts of Hawija is their diverse claims to not knowing a…
The Children of the State’? How Palestinians from the Seven Villages Negotiate Sect, Party and State in Lebanon
In Lebanon, the fear of tawṭīn makes nationalization of Palestinian refugees an anathema. Yet several groups of Palestinians have received Lebanese citizenship since 1948, most (in)famously those from the ‘seven villages’, a chain of Shi‘i villages on Lebanon's southern border that was incorporated into Palestine in 1923. The trajectory of their nationalization is usually presented as a straightforward consequence of top-down Lebanese electoral p…
Between Control and Cooperation
Political Parties and Minority Governance in Hybrid Political Orders
This article analyses how minority populations govern and are governed in South Lebanon’s informal Palestinian settlements and the Serbian enclave in North Kosovo. Drawing on literature about hybrid political orders, it is argued that in both settings political parties play a linchpin role in local governance. Based on this finding, three key functions of political parties in the governance of minority populations in hybrid political orders are i…
Languages of Stateness in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings
Public authority beyond the state has often been seen as isolated from the state and/or constituting a threat to the state. Recent scholarship, however, has started to conceptualize 'state' and 'non-state' forms of public authority as closely connected and interdependent. This article contributes to this theoretical shift by means of a qualitative case study of public authority in Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon. Lebanon's Palestinian …
Between Control and Cooperation
The Eye of the Beholder
State legitimacy - particularly its alleged potential to counter state fragility - has received increasing attention in academic and policy literature concerned with African development. Service provision can substantially influence such state legitimacy. Services, however, are mostly provided by a multiplicity of (state and non-state) providers. This article therefore specifically explores how joint service delivery by multiple providers shapes …
Lebanese–Palestinian Governance Interaction in the Palestinian Gathering of Shabriha, South Lebanon – A Tentative Extension of the ‘Mediated State’ from Africa to the Mediterranean
This article offers a qualitative case study of the interaction between Lebanese state institutions and Palestinian authorities concerning the unofficial Palestinian camp of Shabriha. It particularly highlights the indirect nature of these interactions and the brokering role of Lebanese political parties. Governance in Shabriha is conceptualized as a manifestation of a ‘mediated state’, a notion that has been instrumental in understanding governa…
The Children of the State’? How Palestinians from the Seven Villages Negotiate Sect, Party and State in Lebanon
In Lebanon, the fear of tawṭīn makes nationalization of Palestinian refugees an anathema. Yet several groups of Palestinians have received Lebanese citizenship since 1948, most (in)famously those from the ‘seven villages’, a chain of Shi‘i villages on Lebanon's southern border that was incorporated into Palestine in 1923. The trajectory of their nationalization is usually presented as a straightforward consequence of top-down Lebanese electoral p…
Environmental vulnerability as a legacy of violent conflict
In 2012, South Lebanon faced a solid waste management crisis that particularly affected Palestinian refugee communities, which were excluded from municipal service mandates. By means of a case study of the Palestinian community living in Shabriha, this article demonstrates that the vulnerability to the environmental effects of this waste crisis ultimately stems from a legacy of violent conflict. Lebanon's fragile political order and history of pr…
‘Public–Private Entanglement’
While the literature is clear that political influence and clientelism characterises the investment decisions of entrepreneurs and the performance of their firms when governance is weak, it is less understood how governance systems and entrepreneurs interact, particularly when governance is of a hybrid nature. We address this issue in this paper by studying how entrepreneurs obtain access to electricity in Lebanon, showing that the hybrid politic…
Organized Chaos
Informal institutions are increasingly recognized as a core concept in our understanding of the organization of socio-political life in refugee communities. This article contributes to this understanding by exploring the ways in which urban refugees in the Palestinian informal community, known as gathering, of Maashouk create, reconfigure and contest informal institutions in their quest to access basic urban services such as electricity, water, w…
The Agnotology of Eviction in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings
A significant part of Lebanon's Palestinian refugees live in unofficial camps, so‐called “gatherings”, where they reside on Lebanese land. Many of these gatherings are now threatened with eviction. By means of two qualitative case studies this article explores responses to such eviction threats. Residents, it turns out, engage in deliberate disinformation and stalling tactics and invoke both a professed and real ignorance about their situation. I…
Languages of Stateness in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings
Public authority beyond the state has often been seen as isolated from the state and/or constituting a threat to the state. Recent scholarship, however, has started to conceptualize 'state' and 'non-state' forms of public authority as closely connected and interdependent. This article contributes to this theoretical shift by means of a qualitative case study of public authority in Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon. Lebanon's Palestinian …
Political Parties and Minority Governance in Hybrid Political Orders
This article analyses how minority populations govern and are governed in South Lebanon’s informal Palestinian settlements and the Serbian enclave in North Kosovo. Drawing on literature about hybrid political orders, it is argued that in both settings political parties play a linchpin role in local governance. Based on this finding, three key functions of political parties in the governance of minority populations in hybrid political orders are i…
Mediated Stateness as a Continuum
Since the 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has implemented an extensive governance project in Lebanon that is often regarded as contributing to the weakness of the Lebanese state. Challenging such zero-sum logic, this article explores the institutional interdependencies between the PLO and the Lebanese state and their different yet mutual interests in governance coordination. It conceptualises the relations between the PLO and t…
Lebanon's response to the Syrian refugee crisis – Institutional ambiguity as a governance strategy
Reflections and contributions
The endemic informality, liminality, and exceptionalism that characterize Lebanese refugee governance have crucial strategic dimensions. This final chapter explicates the empirical contributions of this conclusion, demonstrating that connecting Lebanon’s governance of Palestinian and Syrian refugees from the perspective of strategic institutional ambiguity sheds new light on both cases and offers a unique window onto Lebanese governance in genera…
The Lebanese state
This chapter explores the structural dimensions of the institutional ambiguity that determines Lebanon’s governance of refugees by critically interrogating the conceptual and empirical dimensions of the Lebanese state. It analyzes Lebanon as a hybrid order in which political parties that institutionally represent much wider sectarian, communal, and economic fields operate as twilight institutions that are simultaneously part of the official state…
The governance of Syrian refugees in Lebanon
This first empirical chapter engages with the national dimensions of Lebanon’s response to the Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ and explores the instances of strategic ambiguity that have shaped it. Drawing on desk research and in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the chapter outlines how Lebanon’s governance of Syrian refugees’ status, shelter, and representation has developed from inaction before the issuing of the government’s Policy Paper on Syrian D…
Governing Lebanon’s Palestinian ‘gatherings’
This chapter turns to local case-studies of governance in informal Palestinian settlements in South Lebanon to explore the dynamics, effects, and functionalities of institutionalized informality, liminality, and exceptionalism. The undetermined status of these ‘gatherings’ reinstates the temporariness of refugees’ presence and allows authorities to shirk responsibility. Lebanese authorities routinely engage with the local governance committees th…
The governance of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon
This chapter introduces Lebanon’s governance of Palestinian refugees. By exploring the national politics and policies through which Lebanon engages with the protracted Palestinian refugee presence in the country, the chapter reveals how the institutional ambiguity that defines Lebanon’s response to the Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ is institutionally prefigured by its experience with the Palestinian ‘issue.’ Drawing on literature review, document analy…
Governing Syrian ‘informal tented settlements’ in Lebanon
This chapter explores the local implications of the national policy inaction and ambiguity analyzed in the previous chapter. Drawing on contextualized case-studies of so-called informal tented settlements in Lebanon’s Central Bekaa district, it demonstrates how informality, liminality, and exceptionalism are reproduced by local authorities in their securitized and politicized attempts to govern refugees. In terms of representation, municipalities…
Knowledge and power revisited
This chapter connects the explanatory power of the hybrid political order, central to Chapter 1 , and the politics of uncertainty, developed in the Introduction, to analyze how and why institutional ambiguity operates in Lebanon’s refugee governance. It does so by drawing on the emerging field of ignorance studies. Reconsidering the cases presented in the empirical chapters from the perspective of epistemic politics construes inaction and ambiguo…
Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty
Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty is the first comprehensive analysis of how institutional ambiguity shapes refugee governance.Nora Stel offers a nuanced reading of the proliferating modes of uncertainty that emerge both strategically and tactically at the intersection of local, national and international governance in Lebanon.The book explores the other side of knowledge, its institutional production, and its effects on subj…
Refugee entrepreneurship
Strategic ignorance and the legitimation of remote warfare
How must we understand and conceptualize the rationales and repercussions of remote warfare? This article contributes to scholarship on the ontology of remote war by analysing how Dutch officials engage with responsibility for the bombardment of an Islamic State weapons factory in Hawija, Iraq in 2015 under Operation Inherent Resolve. It observes that the main feature of Dutch officials’ accounts of Hawija is their diverse claims to not knowing a…
Uncertainty, exhaustion, and abandonment beyond South/North divides
Forced migration studies struggles to counterbalance policy assumptions that the governance of displaced people is of a fundamentally different nature in the Global South and North. This paper contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship that questions the epistemic segregation and theoretical demarcation that reproduce such exceptionalism. It mobilizes the idea of strategic institutional ambiguity to innovatively interrogate routinely a…
Strategic non-regulation as migration governance
Over the last decade, critical migration scholarship has been increasingly concerned with how state actors in both the Global South and Global North deploy forms of inaction and ambivalent action to govern migrants. Scholars have mobilized and developed concepts to capture such strategic non-regulation, ranging from notions of standoffishness, ignorance, indifference, ambiguity, adhocracy, and informality in political science, IR and sociology, t…
EU Engagement with Contested Refugee Returns in Lebanon
While much literature has concentrated on the EU’s policy to return people from within its borders, this article seeks to understand how the EU cooperates with refugee-hosting states beyond its borders, in its ‘Southern Neighbourhood’, to uphold conditions for voluntary, safe and dignified returns. We build on the case of Lebanon, which hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide after receiving more than one million displaced Syria…
Political science (23 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (21 works) · Law (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Corporate governance (12 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Refugee (12 works) · Economics (11 works)