10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17327
This article discusses the biopolitical dimension of digital circulation in the specific context of refugee relief. Drawing up on observational fieldwork conducted in Nahr el Bared, one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps in North Lebanon, it explores how the digital capture of social and spatial evidences fundamentally transforms the social capital invested in local knowledge, gradually eroding critical capacities for community selfgovernance. Building upon the concept of “data derivatives” developed by Louise Amore’s, the article focuses in particular on the speculative dimension of data to suggest that the conversion of an embodied memory into data-based forms provides powerful means for rendering unsanctioned claims of ownership and belonging visible, actionable and effective. At the same time it opens up new modes of “probalistic containment” that restrict individual and collective life chances under the pretext of democratic participation and empowerment.
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17327
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Monika Halkort
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
political claim making
Liquefying Social Capital. On the Bio-politics of Digital Circulation in a Palestinian Refugee Camp
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Essays
2017-01-24
2023-06-21
2017-01-24
2023-08-21
61-79
TS
Monika Halkort
2016
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17327
61
Lebanese American University
2038-3460
2
political claim making
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Liquefying Social Capital. On the Bio-politics of Digital Circulation in a Palestinian Refugee Camp
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7
                                                                                Essay
                                                                                       61




Liquefying Social Capital
On the Bio-politics of Digital Circulation in a
Palestinian Refugee Camp
Monika Halkort
Lebanese American University



     Abstract: This article discusses the biopolitical dimension of digital circula-
     tion in the specific context of refugee relief. Drawing up on observational
     fieldwork conducted in Nahr el Bared, one of the largest Palestinian refu-
     gee camps in North Lebanon, it explores how the digital capture of social
     and spatial evidences fundamentally transforms the social capital invested in
     local knowledge, gradually eroding critical capacities for community self-
     governance. Building upon the concept of “data derivatives” developed by
     Louise Amore’s, the article focuses in particular on the speculative dimen-
     sion of data to suggest that the conversion of an embodied memory into
     data-based forms provides powerful means for rendering unsanctioned
     claims of ownership and belonging visible, actionable and effective. At the
     same time it opens up new modes of “probalistic containment” that restrict
     individual and collective life chances under the pretext of democratic par-
     ticipation and empowerment.

     Keywords: Data derivatives; bio-politics; social capital; risk; speculation;
     political claim making.

     Corresponding author: Monika Halkort, Department of Communication
     Arts, Lebanese American University, P.O. Box 13-5053, Chouran Beirut:
     1102 2801, Lebanon - Email: monika.halkort@lau.edu.lb




1. Introduction

    Documentary evidence has been a key site of struggle for Palestinians.
The forced creation of the state of Israel (1948) not only dispossessed the
population of land, property and material assets but also destroyed vital
cultural and historical resources testifying to the Palestinian experience.
The long-term implications of this are most acutely felt in the more than
fifty refugee camps spread across the Arab region. Managed by UN agen-
cies and international non-governmental organisations the camps exist in

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
7 (2) pp. 61-79 - ISSN 2038-3460                    2016
www.tecnoscienza.net
62                                                              Tecnoscienza – 7 (2)

a political and legal limbo that left large parts of their social and spatial
history undocumented or only partially accounted for1.
    The structural crisis of memory reached a new high when one of the
largest camps in North Lebanon, Nahr el Bared, was completely de-
stroyed in 2007. The event left deprived the refugees of all formal docu-
mentation to reclaim what they had lost. It required aid agencies and
planners to drawn on oral testimonies from the refugees to retrieve the
camp’s historically grown spatial syntax so as to ensure the camp could be
rebuilt similar to the way it was before. Over the course of two years, ar-
chitects sat with each family to identify the exact size and location of ref-
ugee homes using satellite driven Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
and participatory planning methods. The collaborative effort of mapping
and reassembling Nahr el Bared turned data into a critical currency to re-
trieve lost property and assets. Yet, at the same time and in fact because
of that very reason, the community’s participation also became a site of
severe power struggles as those, in control of vital information, were able
to gain material and strategic advantages at the expense of the rest of the
refugees. What’s more, the digital maps provided aid agencies and gov-
ernment bodies with unprecedented access to the source code of the
camp’s lived an embodied memory with radical consequences for the
ways in which this memory would henceforth be recorded and accounted
for.
    Taking the participatory mapping of Nahr el Bared as a starting point,
this article develops an analysis of the specific modes of enclosure and
containment afforded by digital circulation in the specific context of hu-
manitarian practice. Drawing on the concept of “data derivatives” devel-
oped by Louise Amoore (2011) I explore how the digitisation and institu-
tional processing of spatial and temporal evidences brought competing
measures of risk, opportunity, security and value into collision, and em-
bedded the refugees in an ambience of bio-political calculations that fun-
damentally undermined the refugee’s ability to reclaim their historical
achievements in Lebanon.
    The informal nature of refugee property provides a suitable context to
explore the tensions and contradictions involved when improvised social
arrangements are captured into geo-spatial data sets circulating across so-
cial and technical registers. These tensions reveal how the expressive
force of data – their ability to multiply and reassemble lived and embod-

    1
      I don’t mean to suggest that nothing has been written about Palestinian
camps. To the contrary. Palestinian camps are some of the most researched places
in the world. I am referring to the highly selective and fragmented collection of
spatial and socio demographic data that has defined the work of international aid
agencies and UNRWA, the main UN agency in charge of the welfare of Palestini-
an refugees. For an insightful analysis how refugees experience the over-exposure
to academic scholars and self-appointed activists see Khalili (2007), Sukari-
eh&Tannoc (2012) or Allen (2014).
Halkort                                                                   63
ied substance into new, derivative forms – can, on one hand, render un-
sanctioned claims of ownership and belonging actionable and effective
while at the same time reconfiguring the very values, perceptions and
meanings they engender and represent. My specific interest here lies in
the modes of capture and escape that the conversion of lived and embod-
ied memory into digital derivatives enables in an environment where insti-
tutional mechanisms of protection are largely absent or weak.
    Derivatives, in their most basic understanding, refer to forms derived
from another source. Data derivatives are a specific instance of such an
inferences and can best be understood as the re-aggregation of disassem-
bled data on the basis of coded association rules (Amoore 2011, 27).
What is at stake in such moment of data-fication, I suggest, is not just the
objectification of historically contingent social arrangements but a radical
re-configuration of the networks through which mutual commitments
and obligations are established and that sustain lines of trust, solidarity
and the types of claims they occasion – both in a material and political
sense. It’s the transformation of these mutual commitments and obliga-
tions that I will be most concerned with in this paper and that the title
“liquefying social capital” signifies.
    Social capital, in the sociological literature, stands for the social
knowledge and connections that enable people to accomplish their goals
and extend their influence in a given setting. It involves useful social net-
works, trust and mutual obligations but also an understanding of the
norms that govern behaviour and that enables people to act effectively
(Giddens 2013, 855). These precious resources are of particular im-
portance in informal settings such as Nahr el Bared where legal mecha-
nisms and the institutional protection of rights and entitlements are most-
ly absent or compromised. In such conditions people depend by and
large on informal networks and agreements to further their interests. To
do this requires a careful management of personal contacts, knowledge
and connections so as to ensure that someone’s word or promise can suf-
ficiently replace legal guarantees. The collective effort of mapping Nahr el
Bared displaced this vital knowledge into institutional registers far re-
moved from the day to day reality of struggle, opening them up to logics
of exchange and calculation that put the collective desire to preserve the
camp as political symbol and sanctuary in open conflict with desperate
material needs.


2. Mapping, Empowerment and Community Cohesion

     Scholars in critical geography have elaborated extensively on the po-
tential and limits of participatory GIS in regards to community empow-
erment and democratisation. Participatory GIS draws upon the collabora-
tive practices of action research that aim to transform power relations to
the benefit of disadvantaged groups (Elwood 2006a, 199). One of its key
64                                                                  Tecnoscienza – 7 (2)

goals is to give voice to local populations and to put non-specialised
knowledge on equal footing with expert regimes (McCall and Dunn 2012,
85). Yet, as numerous studies show, community driven GIS may give lo-
cal publics an active stake in the planning process (Ventura et al. 2002;
Abbott 2003; Sliuzas 2003; Elwood 2006b) but, as it does so, it also pro-
liferates new ways of controlling the flow of data and knowledge which
fundamentally undermines the promise of redistributing power back to
local communities (Pickles 1995; Brodnig and Mayer-Schoenberger 2000;
Elwood 2001; McCall and Dunn 2012).
    There is, thus, an inherent tension between mechanisms of control
and surveillance in mapping practices and the lines of resistance they oc-
casion that can never be fully resolved. As Wilson (2011, 858) remarks,
participatory GIS always involves both: a disciplining of local knowledge
that encodes communal spaces according to its own logical standards
while at the same time opening up new channels for contestation that
provide local communities with the informational resource necessary to
articulate preferred alternatives (Brodnig and Mayer-Schoenberger 2000;
Elwood 2001; McCall and Dunn 2012). Against this backdrop it becomes
clear that the production and circulation of spatial data cannot be under-
stood independent of the matrix of strategic relations in which data is op-
erationalized and actioned and that shapes the political production of
self-knowledge as such (Wilson 2011, 585).
    Foucault’s concept of bio-power has long provided a primary refer-
ence point for the analysis of information as technology of power. Critics
of humanitarianism have used it to describe the distinct calculus of life at
work in relief operations, that puts aid workers in a position to nurture
and abandon life through the management of calorie intake and the track-
ing of health indicators or housing conditions and the like (Fassin 2010;
Feldmann 2012)2.
    Contemporary information technologies such as mobile communica-
tion, the internet, electronic surveillance, and communication satellites
have radically expanded the capacity to control and manipulate life on
the level of statistical calculation. Their ever expanding capacity to track
movements, transactions, and desires in real time invested technologies of
government with new anticipatory potentials which shifted the debate
away from the probabilities of life as a general principle towards the spe-
cific modes of abstraction facilitated by predictive analytics and algorith-
mic governance. As Hansen (2014, 39) observes: “What accounts for the
singularity of contemporary media is… that they impact experience on a

    2
      The concept of bio-politics forms part of Foucault’s (2003; 2008). Wider cri-
tique of sovereignty and juridical-political conceptions of power In its broadest
sense it refers to the management of populations through expert knowledge: the
counting, studying and defining of species and their productive requirements with
the overall aim of legitimizing the state as central harbinger of the wellbeing of so-
ciety as such (Lazzarato 2002).
Halkort                                                                   65
much broader basis than consciousness. They literally seep into the tex-
ture of experience, forming a background, a peripheral ‘calculative ambi-
ence’, that indirectly flavors any and all resulting events or phenomena”.
     The main point to be taken away from these accounts for the discus-
sion here is that data matters: both in the sense that they work on and
through bodies, designs, objects and materials but also in the sense that
they are generative of sensibilities, affects, and desires that escape human
conscious yet that remain central to the production of social and cultural
subjectivity nonetheless (Hansen 2014, 39). And yet, the datafication of
human subjectivity also matters in yet another way, insofar as it multiplies
and diffracts corporeal forms into liquid assemblages of informational
properties and values that can be infinitely reconfigured, encoded and re-
arranged. Amoore’s (2011) work on the use of algorithmically calculated
risk flags in electronic border policing provides a vivid example here.
Coining the notion of “data derivatives” she describes how border man-
agement systems particularize individuals into persons of interest by se-
lectively re-assembling personal data into risk profiles – data derivatives –
that are constantly updated and reassembled according to predefined as-
sociation rules. These rules of association do not draw on the full spec-
trum of knowledge that exists about a person but are based on probabil-
istic calculations about possible movements, tendencies or behaviors that
position individuals along preconceived risk scores. As Amoore (2011,
28) explains, data derivatives are not centered on who a person is or what
the data actually says about her, but on what can be inferred and imag-
ined about who she might be, according to algorithmically calculated
probabilities. Thus, just like financial derivatives, data derivatives remain
fundamentally indifferent to their underlying object. They project into the
gaps and uncertainties of their own imagination as they render speculative
scenarios into actionable form.
     This capacity to create a new reality around an object, as Appadurai
(2015, 231) suggests, constitutes a novel form of mediation, revealing its
effects as a particular mode of materialization rather than representing
pre-given forms. What materializes itself in data derivatives, in other
words, is the ever evolving distance between a person and its data proxy
that allows for the instalment of “ontologies of association” (Amoore,
2011, 27) in which mere assumptions and correlations between data
fragments can be actioned into effective interventions or policies. Hence,
it’s not actual events but the probability of their occurrence that renders
data derivatives operational and effective, irrespective of whether the as-
sumed scenario in fact happens or not. In Amoore’s (ibid.) words, it’s the
relation itself that renders data into an encoded course of action, assign-
ing them a plane of actuality in their own right.
     Building upon Amoore’s work I am interested in the speculative po-
tentials afforded by the selective assemblage of data fragments in Nahr el
Bared. Thus I am using the concept of data derivatives not to describe al-
gorithmically coded risk profiles but to discuss the particular rules of as-
66                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (2)

sociation created by social and institutional risk calculations in the specif-
ic context of refugee relief. It’s in this sense that I will use the term
“probalistic containment” to refer to the specific modes of curtailment
the production and circulation of spatial and temporal evidences enables
as they are filtered through the political and strategic considerations of
humanitarian actors and the state. I will show how they recalibrate indi-
vidual and collective life chances on the basis of fluctuating norms they
themselves engender as they bring different measures of risk, opportunity
and value into conversation and encode lived and embodied knowledges
along new governmental rationales.
    In line with this approach I will not limit my contribution to this vol-
ume to the work of data derivatives within digital networks, but rather as-
sess how their calculative possibilities diffract across social and technical
registers, reconfiguring local environments along new communicative
protocols. Following the lead of Lee and LiPuma (2002), I conceive of
digital circulation as a productive surrounds – as a site of mutual trans-
formation – in which the calculus of planning software articulates to so-
cial and institutional codes and calculations in ways that implicate digital
flows in dialectics of historical struggle on multiple scales. At the heart of
my discussion sits the question how data derivatives, as a specific instance
of digital circulation, organize perceptions, movements and desires along-
side their own speculative imagination and hold capacities for self-
preservation in productive tension with the (self)-destructive impulses
they entail.


3. About Nahr el Bared

    Nahr el Bared is one of twelve Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon
managed by UNRWA, the main UN agency in charge of the welfare of
Palestinian refugees. Located 16 kilometres outside Tripoli, in the North
of the country, Nahr el Bared was originally established in 1949, one year
after the forceful displacement of about 800.000 Palestinians in the
course of events that led up to the creation of the state of Israel (1948).
The camp moved the center of international attention in 2007, when a
small group of militants, Fatah al Islam, attacked a checkpoint of the
Lebanese army, just outside the refugee settlement. Eighteen soldiers
were killed in the course of the battle. The reprisal of the Lebanese mili-
tary resulted in three months of continuous bombardment that destroyed
the entire camp.
    Fatah al Islam forms part of a wider network of militant insurgents
backed by regional powers who are eager to influence political events
both in Lebanon and the Arab region at large. The origins of the group
remain obscure but there is evidence to suggest that they were supported
Halkort                                                                         67
both by Saudi Arabia and Syria prior to the outbreak of war there. Fatah   3

al Islam has no historical roots in Nahr e Bared and no long standing rela-
tion with the refugee population. Its presence, in fact, deeply divided the
refugees and the political factions in the camp.
    After sixty-eight years of exile Nahr el Bared has long outgrown its
original size and location. The land originally rented by UNRWA did not
exceed two-hundred thousand square meters and was soon not big
enough to house the second and third generation of refugees. People
started to expand, first vertically by building up additional floors; then
horizontally, by buying up land in the immediate vicinity of the camp.
Most of these extensions were never officially registered and exist in gross
violation of national zoning regulations and building codes. These homes
were often built on agricultural land or without building permit. And
while on the level of affect and vision this area is unmistakably part of the
Nahr el Bared’s urban fabric, it has never been formally recognized as
such. This raised great difficulties for reconstructing Nahr el Bared be-
cause the informal status of homes and businesses made it impossible to
issue official title deeds for this part of the camp.
    The precarious legal condition of property in and around Nahr el
Bared is a direct reflection of the many paradoxes and contradictions
built into the Palestinian struggle that have for decades defined the stra-
tegic role of the camps. Up until the 1980s the camps were widely regard-
ed as a living testimony for the unresolved promise of return to the lost
homeland. They provided both the grounds and horizon for national lib-
eration in the political imagination of Palestine (Aburahme 2015, 207).
The national pedagogy of resistance, however, required to insist on the
camps as temporary shelter, even if only for the sake of maintaining
grounds in negotiations about a future Palestinian state.4 Yet the longer
forced exile endured and the less progress was made in the Arab Israeli
peace talks the more this insistence on temporariness took on the form of
“cruel optimism” (Berlant 2006) – a sense of tragic attachment to an ob-
ject that is effectively harmful to ones ambitions or cause. Arab nations
have used the right to return as a pretext to deny the refugees access to
full citizenship rights, arguing that this would undermine their political
aims, while the Palestinian leadership at “home” has been reluctant to
address the question of return altogether, postponing it to a point in time
after the conditions for a Palestinian state have been defined.
    The temporal paradox of “permanent temporariness” confronted ar-

    3
       For a detailed account on the history and activities of Fatah al Islam see
Gambil (2007), Rogier (2007) and Rosen (2008).
     4
       Most refugees are well aware that they will never go back to Palestine and
more and more show little inclination to do so. Yet holding on to the right to re-
turn nonetheless is imperative to them. Giving up on the idea of return would
mean giving in to sixty years of systematic erasure of the Palestinian presence and
is thus not available for negotiation or compromise.
68                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (2)

chitects and planners with the difficult task of rebuilding a space that was
never meant to last in the first place and to protect the material traces of a
struggle whose political demands have become increasingly uncertain and
unclear. Rebuilding Nahr el Bared, in this sense, involved much more
then recuperating lost property and assets. It stands out as a collective at-
tempt to reclaim visibility and recognition of a political community that
has not yet been able to anchor its claims within the closed system design
of Westphalian states.
    Digital maps, in such a scene, can provide a powerful tool of “self-
mediation” (Chouliaraki 2010, 228), in which the mere fact of a people
“speaking out” about themselves can effectively replace institutionalized
forms of claim making in the absence of legal guarantees. In the specific
context of Nahr el Bared the maps opened up a plane of actuality that en-
abled the refugees to enforce senses of entitlement and belonging irre-
spective of their legal status and to reinstitute the camp as political space
and territory through the very act of putting themselves back on the geo-
political map. Yet the fact that for Palestinians such acts of self-mediation
don’t have a singular address also meant that their claims had to be re-
layed through a wide range of institutional registers that include: humani-
tarian agencies, international donors but also Lebanese governmental
bodies, all of whom brought their own calculus of entitlements and
needs, security and belonging to bear on the digitization of the camps
spatial syntax and memory.
    In what follows I explore how these competing registers of risks, re-
sponsibilities and obligations seeped into the textures of self-mediation.
Building upon Amoore’s notion of “data derivatives” I will describe how
the circulation of data both multiplied and reconfigured the camp in line
with military and humanitarian agendas and conjured up an ambience of
calculative operation that fundamentally undermined the refugee’s aspira-
tions and goals. What I contribute to Amoore’s analysis is an assessment
of the destabilising potentials of speculative data proxies. Thus I will not
limit my analytical focus to risk calculations at the hands of power, but
explore how they can be utilized for more subversive and empowering
ends. The extent to which data derivatives remain inherently indifferent
to their underlying object does not necessarily work only in support of
capture and containment but may equally facilitate a fundamental redis-
tribution of the probable or the likely to the benefit of the governed in
bio-political regimes. And yet, as I will show, this empowering potential
was soon lost once data became a primary tool for securing power and
material gains.
    The main argument I am advancing can be summarized as follows: the
selective re-assemblage of the refugee’s lived and embodied memory into
data derivatives encoded the camp’s historical grown social and spatial
syntax along new logics of risk, opportunity and value that gradually re-
scripted the camp’s social and material fabric along the pre-emptive logic
of humanitarian mandates and the state. This had radical consequences
Halkort                                                                  69
for the ways in which the social capital invested in the camp space could
be utilized and rendered effective. It redirected the flow of information
away from the site of everyday struggle, opening it up to a new calculus of
responsibilities and obligations up to a point where memory itself was
turned into an object of speculative trading among the refugees. The ac-
cumulative impact of these calculative operations deeply implicated the
refugees in logics of “probalistic containment” that fundamentally un-
dermined their shared vision to re-constitute themselves as political
community and collective, while at the same time enabling some to accu-
mulate power and material gains.
    My argument builds on long term observational fieldwork conducted
between 2007 and 2015. After 3 month of voluntary work for UNRWA’s
planning commission in 2008, I conducted 80 semi-structured and open
ended interviews and 15 focus groups between November 2009 and No-
vember 2012. These interviews included all major stakeholders in the
camp, starting with the refugees themselves, the leading architects and
planners as well as state representatives, UNRWA and other international
aid agencies, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the vari-
ous political factions in the camp. Additional information was gathered in
town hall gatherings, at social events and public protests. And I attended
the bi-weekly cluster meetings in which UNRWA coordinated its relief ef-
forts with the rest of national and international NGO’s and government
representatives. The cluster meetings provided an ideal platform to trace
the shifting power dynamics in the knowledge exchange between the ref-
ugees, the state and non-governmental actors and allowed me to closely
monitor the political economy of data and information in the camp. Since
2012 I have been following up on events with annual field visits and di-
rect updates from representatives of all sectors of the camp population.
Prior to the publication of this article 8 additional interviews and 2 field
visits were conducted between July 2015 and February 2016.


4. Reconstructing Nahr el Bared

    Reconstructing refugee camps is challenging under any circumstances.
What made matters particularly difficult for Nahr el Bared is the fact that
after 68 years the settlement has grown into a large village with a full
blown commercial infrastructure catering to the entire North of Lebanon.
The camp had its own port, a thriving business landscape, ran its own
mosques, hospitals and a diverse range of cultural and social institutions.
Most of the socio-economic investments have been made in circumven-
tion of national regulations, with many businesses operating from home
premises without commercial licences or registered cars. The question
whether and how to formalize the historical place and achievements of
the refugees almost inevitable brought competing registers of legitimacy
and need, ownership and belonging, risk and security into collision with
70                                                                 Tecnoscienza – 7 (2)

rather dramatic consequences for ability of the refugees to reclaim their
historical achievements in Lebanon.
    The Lebanese state had always made its approval to the reconstruc-
tion dependent on the possibility to reclaim sovereign control over Nahr
el Bard and to put an end to the long-standing policy of non-interference
in Palestinian internal affairs. At the same time, it confined its authority to
questions of security and law enforcement, while outsourcing all social re-
sponsibilities, such as health care, schooling and housing provision, to
UNRWA and international aid agencies5. These responsibilities are in-
deed at the core of UNRWA’s legal mandate yet the obligation to rebuild
refugee homes and businesses did not extend beyond the camp’s original
borders as established 68 years ago. This was painfully brought home to
the refugees in the first damage assessment by the UN’s satellite division,
UNO-SAT, that compared the camps topography before and after its de-
struction during the 2007 war.
    The aerial views occupy a curious temporal location. Instead of show-
ing the camp in its current place, the damage assessment super imposed
the settlement with a geo spatial grid that effectively repositioned Nah el
Bared within its historical borders, reducing it back to its original size in
1948. This effectively cut the camp in half and divided the historically
grown spatial syntax into two separate governmental districts, and two
separate datasets. This enabled UNRWA to restrict its responsibility for
rebuilding Nahr el Bared to the housing facilities inside its mandate area,
while leaving those who settled outside its operational territory in a legal
and political limbo, as neither UNRWA nor the state were under any ob-
ligation to rebuild this part of the camp.
    The new boundaries in and around the camp are a direct reflection of
the strategic imperatives that guided the entire reconstruction process
and that fragmented the camp into a flexible assemblage of overlapping
sovereignties shared between UNRWA, the Lebanese government and
international donor states. Thus rather than reflecting the full spectrum
of movements, transactions and spill-overs that defined the social and
spatial fabric of Nahr el Bared the data collected in the damage
assessment selectively re-assembled the camp alongside a matrix of
calculated risks and responsibilities that moved the digital maps further
and further away from the lived and embodied reality of the camp.


     The refugees as well as Arab states were always keen to establish a direct link
     5

between UNRWA’s operational mandate and UN resolution 194, in which the in-
ternational community committed itself to facilitate the return of Palestinian refu-
gees to their homes and to compensate those who chose not to do so for the loss
or damages to their property. This explains why the refugees do not necessarily
disagree with the decision to leave all social responsibilities with UNRWA and
not the Lebanese state. For a brilliant account of the significance of refugee status
and ration cards for the emergence of national conscious and awareness among
Palestinian Refugees see Ilana Feldmann (2007).
Halkort                                                                         71
    One of the primary concerns for the Lebanese state, next to preven-
ting a permanent settlement of the refugees, was to contain the possibility
of further militant attacks from armed groups inside Nahr el Bared. To
contain this risk, the camp was enclosed behind five military checkpoints
that policed all exits and entrances with a rigid permit regime. This not
only curtailed the free movement of goods and people but effectively
destroyed the vibrant local economy of Nahr el Bared as customers from
outside were no longer able to access the camp.
    The national consensus to pre-empt a permanent settlement of the
refugees together with the new permit regime transferred most of the
risks and responsibilities back to the refugees, nurturing the impression
that they are held collectively responsible for the actions of a group that
had no substantive connection to the camp. Confronted with these severe
political, legal and military restrictions on all fronts the refugees soon
came to realize that the war had not only destroyed precious homes,
property and businesses but one of the their most valuable assets: the self-
sufficiency, and independence they were able to establish through
individual and shared investments in the camp. It took more than 3 years
to negotiate a compromise that enabled those, who had settled outside
the camps original territory, to obtain a building permit for conducting
simple repair works. Yet this agreement did not extend to completely
destroyed homes6.
    The risk calculus of UNRWA and the state provides a powerful
example for the specific modes of “probalistic containment” facilitated by
data derivatives in humanitarian operations. They selectively re-assembled
the camps spatial history into new topographical arrangements that made
the visibility and recognition of refugee property and people’s eligibility
for compensation ever more dependent on their legal status and their
geographic position within the mandate territories of humanitarian actors
and the state. This systematically reduced the number of possibilities for
the refugees to rebuild their lives and futures and effectively confined the
spatial and temporal horizons of their spatial memory to the legal and
political imaginations built into the digital maps of the camp. The
strategic indifference of these maps towards the historically grown reality
of Nahr el Bared had far reaching consequences for the ways in which
material and affective investments in the camp could be rendered
effective. It facilitated a radical recalibration of the mutual commitments
and social arrangements based on which camps spatial syntax had

    6
      Sales contracts in Lebanon are only considered valid if they are registered
with the state. The fact that hardly any of the private homeowners had registered
their land acquisition in the national cadaster rendered the majority of buildings
outside UNRWA’s main mandate area illegitimate. The agreement with the gov-
ernment left about 100 fully destroyed homes owners unable to rebuild their
homes leading many to simply pay off military officials to bypass the discriminato-
ry policies of Lebanon.
72                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (2)

developed, reconfiguring them alongside ontologies of association that
reflected above all the strategic interests of aid agencies and the Lebanese
State.


5. Liquefying Nahr el Bared’s Social Capital

    The precarious social and political situation of the Palestinian refugees
has always extended the value of trust, local knowledge and friendship re-
lations far beyond the interests and needs of individuals. This trust pro-
vided the primary backbone for the maintenance and reproduction of in-
dividual and collective life in an environment that has grown increasingly
hostile to their presence and needs. Being able to rely on each other and
to pool resources allowed the refugees to confront the day-to-day chal-
lenges of survival under conditions of structural invisibility and attrition.
The gradual extension of Nahr el Bared into the surrounding villages
gives vivid evidence of this. It testifies to the resourcefulness with which
the refugee population has learned to circumvent their political and eco-
nomic curtailment. Caught in-between the resistance to assimilate into the
Lebanese body politic and the impossibility of returning, Palestinians
gradually started to redirect their expectations away from the grand pro-
ject of national liberation and to invest in their immediate future ahead.
Their geographic position in one of the poorest regions of Lebanon, Ak-
kar, next to the Syrian border provided a significant advantage here.
    Akkar has always suffered from severe neglect by the central state ad-
ministration. The shared experience of abandonment among Palestinian
and Lebanese provided fertile grounds to build up a complex web of
network relations, in which goods, services, land and infrastructures
could be traded for money or through mechanisms of reciprocal ex-
change. Transactions between the camp and the surrounding villages
were not confined to commercial activities, land sales, intermarriage and
friendships. The first generation of refugees also introduced a whole new
set of knowledge to the area, drawing upon its extensive experience in
citrus and olive production to enhance local farming practices with new
agricultural expertise. These day to day interactions enabled the refugees
to extend their presence further and further into the neighbouring villag-
es turning emergent needs and aspirations into a powerful medium for
the camp’s further growth.
    Against this backdrop the informal extension of Nahr al Bared can be
described as a remarkable historical achievement. It delineates a space of
opportunity that hardly any other camp in Lebanon was able to establish.
It’s unique economic success made it possible for the refugees to reinsert
their lives into a matrix of possibility of their own making, in which hori-
zons of expectation were no longer dependent on the financial capacities
of international aid agencies and donors but on their own entrepreneurial
spirit and creativity. The war of 2007 severely disrupted this real time
Halkort                                                                         73
economy of goods and favours and exposed the camp to a whole new set
of strategic calculations that no longer corresponded with the refugee’s
immediate aspirations and needs.
     The rigid checkpoint regime rendered time honoured social contracts
and arrangements between the camp and its neighbours ineffective. Una-
ble to rebuild their strong socio-economic ties left both populations ever
more dependent on humanitarian aid and emergency funding, turning
what was once a self-sufficient community of destiny into passive recipi-
ents but also into active rivals in the political economy of humanitarian
aid.
     The data collected on Nahr el Bared provided the key technology for
this redistribution of opportunities and potentials. It provided the state
and humanitarian actors with access to vital information that had never
been available to them before. The circulation of data on each family’s
socio-demographic condition, income and property between funding
agencies and governmental bodies allowed to directly monitor and con-
trol the distribution of resources and potentials and to re-align individual
and collective interests and aspirations in accordance with the political
and operational mandates of humanitarian actors and the state. Members
of the former “camp elite”, who were able to acquire private property
outside UNRWA’s mandate area, suddenly found themselves in the
weakest position. The informal status of many land and business holdings
not only obstructed the repair and reconstruction of homes or businesses
but also posed severe obstacles to the distribution of international funds.
This tied the refugee’s capacity to retrieve past investments in the camps
social and material infrastructure ever closer to information exchange
networks far removed from the necessities of day-to-day survival, leaving
the refugees with little or no control over the benefits and values of their
investments in the camp7.
     The displacement of local knowledge together with the newly im-
posed economic dependency severely undermined the long-standing
commitments and mutual obligations that had stabilized social differ-
ences and relations in the past. These relations were by no means harmo-
nious or grounded in a shared belief in social equality and community
cohesion. To the contrary, Nahr el Bared was known for its competitive
and self-exploitative business culture, yet the accumulative impact of the-
se individual investments always also nurtured the interests and needs of
all residents in and around the camp. Nahr el Bared had around 1.500 lo-
cal businesses providing thousands of jobs for the refuges. The sudden in-

    7
      That, together with the fact that, since 2001, Palestinians can no longer own
property in Lebanon, left refugees without any legal mechanism to rebuild their
assets and to formalize their presence. It took more than 3 years to negotiate a
compromise with the Lebanese government according to which simple repairs
works could be conducted without sales contracts and building permits, yet this
did not include the full blown reconstruction of completely destroyed homes.
74                                                               Tecnoscienza – 7 (2)

flux of aid agencies and law enforcement relayed these potentials into the
augmented sphere of calculated risks and potentials, that made the return
of investment in the camp’s social and material infrastructure contingent
on fitting into institutionalized registers of eligibility and need. Caught in
this new state of instituted paralysis the refugees quickly adjusted their
strategies and tactics to the new raison d’état and started to skilfully ex-
ploit the ever-evolving distance between the calculus of rights and enti-
tlements driving the reconstruction process and their actual aspirations
and demands. The intense negotiations between the families and planners
about the size and design of their new homes in the UNRWA mandate
territory are instructive here.


6. Data Derivatives as a Source of Value Creation

    Homes with the number of family members born into a house. With
each new married son, an extra floor would be added to make room for
the newlywed couple. These informal extensions were not just about ac-
commodating to the natural growth of the population. They maintained
an unspoken social contract between family members of different genera-
tions. Each floor added, were two extra pairs of hands to count on in
times of hardship and old age.
    The mapping process radically changed these fluid and flexible ar-
rangements, as architects and planners started to divide each building in-
to individual residential units and to assign each one of them to a distinct
member of the family. This made it easier to organise the planning pro-
cess and to distribute material gifts from donors, i.e. doors, bathrooms or
kitchen sets. While grateful for the support they received, the camp resi-
dents soon started to complain that their homes were divided into item-
ised objects on an abstract planning grid. Some perceived the spatial ra-
tional of the planners as an unwanted intrusion that disrupted the unspo-
ken contract of reciprocity and mutual obligation on which collective
ownership of a family home had been established in the past (Interview,
Nahr el Bared, May 22, 2010). Others quickly seized the opportunity and
happily divided their homes into as many units as possible, so as to max-
imise their potential for compensation checks8. This created a gross im-
balance in the distribution of payments and generated a lot of anger and
frustration among the refugees.
    The rasterized planning grid of humanitarian agencies and planners
fundamentally rearranged the ontology of association that had defined

     8
      Such checks were issued by UNRWA to replace lost furniture. The total sum
of money available was calculated per residential unit and not according to the
size or need of individual families. Thus, a home defined as one residential unit,
housing a family of thirteen, would get one check, while a house composed of
four units, with only two people living in each, would get four checks.
Halkort                                                                   75
senses of ownership and belonging in UNRWA managed housing com-
pounds. It effectively recalibrated rights and entitlements along a liberal-
ist model of propertied citizen-subjects that stood in harsh contradiction
to the practice of sharing and co-habitation that defined people’s sense of
ownership in the past. Yet, the refugees were by no means just passive
victims but deeply implicated in the gross injustices and imbalance creat-
ed by the reconstruction regime.
    The ambition to make people’s personal memory the primary basis of
planning always carried the risk of encouraging gross exaggerations and
tactical manipulation by the refugees. The mere fact that they were in-
cluded in the planning process, after all, was by no means a guarantee
that the information they provided was in fact valid and accurate. Many
overstated the value and size of their homes and businesses making it
necessary to carefully check and evaluate people’s personal accounts
against the testimony of friends and neighbours. The final verdict over a
family’s property lay in the hand of community elders who spearheaded
the validation process and mediated in case of conflict or contradictory
reports. Yet their judgement turned out not to be reliable either, as
UNRWA soon received complaints that some residents were forced to
sign off on less space than they actually had. Some of the community el-
ders had used their mediating power to their own advantage and redis-
tributed available square meters from one family to another in exchange
for favours and status rewards. This required to revalidate all information
provided by the complaining parties and to find a fair mechanism to
compensate them for their loss. As one of the planners later remarked:
“The validation process has slowed down the reconstruction tremendous-
ly and wasted vital resources of time and money UNRWA never really
had” (Interview, Beirut, September 10th, 2015). The tensions were in the
end resolved by offering all those, who had lost substantive amounts of
space, additional square meters in buildings still under construction.
They were of little practical use to the affected families and hence were
quickly sold to the future owners of the respective homes. The price of
one square meter could climb up to US 300$, according to one engineer
(Interview, September 10th, 2015).
    It’s here where the data derivatives reveal their effect as highly ambiv-
alent platform of self mediation. The circulation of social and spatial data
not only realigned individual hopes and expectations along competitive
principles of value creation but redirected modes of attunement away
from the shared commitment to preserve Nahr el Bared, turning people’s
affective and material investment in the camp into a key asset to secure
individual advantages, power and control.
    Up until today UNRWA has not been able to secure the total budget
needed to rebuild Nahr el Bared. Out of the total projected cost of $345
million only 58% of the funds have been secured. This meant that 50%
of the refugee homes remain uncompleted, leaving the future of about
2.000 families, 10.000 people, unclear. 8 years into the reconstruction in-
76                                                          Tecnoscienza – 7 (2)

ternational donors have long directed their attention away from Nahr el
Bared to support new, upcoming crises, such as the massive influx of Syr-
ian refugees into Lebanon. Against this backdrop the prospects of finish-
ing the reconstruction of Nahr el Bared appear rather unlikely. It remains
uncertain if the remaining homes will ever be rebuilt.


7. Concluding Remarks

    To address one’s participation calculatively, as Allen Pottage (2010,
123) remarks in regards to collaborative research, is much more signifi-
cant in the replication of contemporary bio-power than conventional
forms of sovereignty: “It instrumentalizes the notion of freedom as a me-
dium for its own curtailment and disguises intentionally placed mecha-
nisms of constraint behind a rhetoric of collaboration and choice”. In this
paper, I have examined how this replication of bio-power is further am-
plified by the speculative potential of data generated through participa-
tory mapping regimes. The inclusion of populations in the production
governmental data, as the example of Nahr el Bared shows, certainly de-
centralises power over-life to the benefit of the governed but it also opens
up new forms of subjectification that render participants into active ac-
complices in the political optimisation of individual and collective life
chances under the pretext of inclusion and empowerment.
    This inherent ambivalence calls for new concepts and approaches to
understand the specificity of calculative manoeuvres afforded by digital
circulation and its bio-political effects. Extending the Foucauldian con-
cept of bio-power I have conceptualized these effects as a distinct mode
of “probalistic containment” in which the source and authority of gov-
ernmental rationalities is displaced into the realm of speculation and,
hence, inherently uncertain and unclear. Thus “probalistic containment”,
here, refers to the specific modes of curtailment afforded by the selective
assemblage spatial and temporal evidences into data proxies once they are
processed through the risk calculus of humanitarian actors and the state.
In the specific context of Nahr el Bared it revealed how digital maps mul-
tiplied the number of possible states in which the camp come to exists
and was able to reaffirm its place as a social and political location, while
at the same time opening them up new forms of enclosure on the level of
calculated risks and potentials that fundamentally undermined the refu-
gee’s existence as autonomous, self-sufficient political community.
    Collectively held knowledge is one of the most precious resources
available to populations who have little more than their memory to affirm
their existence on the geopolitical map. It constitutes a critical domain of
sovereignty in the realm of self-narration that allows those, who have so
far been deprived of political autonomy and self-determination to control
how they become visible, recognisable and addressable as stakeholders,
constituencies and political force. The collective effort of mapping and
Halkort                                                                      77
reassembling Nahr el Bared certainly increased these potentials by adding
new layers of materiality to the camp space and enabled the refugees to
convert their structural invisibility into an actionable presence in data-
based form. The fundamental indifference of data derivatives towards
their underlying object afforded the camp population with new tactical
manoeuvres to enforce unsanctioned claims of ownership and belonging
and to transform long standing legal and political deficits into moral obli-
gations through which the lack of legal protection could be compensated
and redeemed. Yet this ability to create a whole new reality around the
camp’s historically grown spatial syntax also made room for a series of
new contracts to be established that rendered everything that escaped the
calculative register of the state and humanitarian actors illegitimate, in-
actionable or ineffective, and thus obsolete. These rather ambivalent ef-
fects were neither inevitable nor a sole function of the speculative poten-
tials afforded by digital maps and data. They rather reflect how the pro-
cedural frictions between social and computational logics of measuring,
counting, and envisioning communal space articulate to the calculus of
risks, responsibilities and obligations of humanitarian actors and the state.
In the case of Nahr el Bard, these tensions not only facilitated a radical
rezoning of the camps territorial borders but afforded a radical re-
scripting of actions, expectations and imaginative horizons that deeply
implicated the refugees in the gradual erosion of their collective bargain-
ing power vis-a-vis UNRWA and the state. The conversion of lived and
embodied memory into digital aggregates, in this sense, went hand in
hand with a radical transformation of the social and strategic capital in-
vested in the camp space. It conjured up an ambience of opportunistic
calculations that turned memory itself into a tradable asset leading some
to exchange time honoured, collective stakes in the camps history and fu-
ture against individual advantages and material gains.


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