China Sajadian, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, was awarded an ACLS Fellowship for her book project Debt and Refuge: Syrian Farmworkers and the Politics of Displacement in Lebanon. This book brings together two urgent problems that are rarely linked in scholarship on refugees—mass migration and mass indebtedness.

As Syrian farmworkers’ predicaments make apparent, debt is among the most common, yet least visible, forces governing peoples’ mobility today, particularly in the countryside. Debt is central to the politics of displacement because it is the means by which many ordinary people make ends meet in the face of compounding crises, insufficient wages, slashed public spending, and rising global inequalities.

Centered on a South-South borderland region at the nexus of ongoing war and financial crisis, this book’s ethnographic focus on how debt shapes farmworkers’ mobility is both timely and globally relevant. Despite 85% of the world’s displaced people living in various states of legal and political limbo in postcolonial nations like Lebanon, migrations to the US and Europe continue to garner the most headlines.

Bringing together agrarian studies, migration and refugee studies, feminist studies, and economic anthropology, Debt and Refuge takes the study of refugees beyond the domain of humanitarianism and the many well-established critiques of it. By examining the distinctly agrarian conditions of Syrian farmworkers’ displacement across multiple domains and scales of social life—from the aftermath of land reform and their dependence on waged labor across borders, to the political economy of debt in camps and interfamilial struggles over women’s labor and life transitions—this book boldly challenges the distinction between “involuntary” refugees and “voluntary” labor migrants as well as the idea of a refugee crisis itself.