1. INTRODUCTION
The research project was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences. The core research team consisted of Ronald Stade, Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies with specialization in Anthropology at Malmö University, Sweden, and Lana Khattab, MSc in Middle East Politics from SOAS, University of London. Two consultants, Lina Ashkar and Zeina Shoueib, were engaged as focus group moderators. The objective of the project was to identify security and protection concerns, as well as perspectives toward the future, shared by Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey.
For the project we were able to use data from a cross-sectoral baseline study that we conducted in 2017 on behalf of the country office of UNICEF in Lebanon (Malmö University and UNICEF 2017).
The study was on the knowledge, attitudes, and practice among Lebanese and Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Lebanon with regard to each of UNICEF Lebanon’s program areas. Data collection consisted of 7,000 hour-long household interviews (reaching 34,711 persons), 48 focus group discussions (FGDs), and 42 key informant interviews. For the current project, we conducted an additional 26 FGDs with, in all, 154 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. FGDs were always conducted separately with male and female respondents and with different age groups.
Empirically, we wanted to find answers to three questions:
Vernacular indicators of insecurity: How do Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey define security risks, both in their host country and if they were to return to Syria?
Communication for safety: What information and information channels do Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey use to determine if the situation inside Syria is safe and secure?
Qualitative intent data: What hopes, intentions, and plans do Syrian refugees in Lebanon,
Jordan, and Turkey have for the future?
Analytically, we wanted to collate the empirical answers to these questions with the three durable solutions for refugees identified by UNHCR:
Voluntary repatriation in safety and dignity
Resettlement to another country
Integration in the host community
The collation can be found at the end of this report (in 6. Conclusions). It serves the purpose of illustrating the challenges that remain to be overcome from the point of view of Syrian refugees.
It is important to keep in mind that the overall purpose of our study and this report is to present the experiences, knowledge, attitudes, and intentions of Syrian refugees, even if this results in inconvenient truths becoming public
