Speaking Back to a World of Checkpoints: Oral History as a Decolonizing Tool in the Study of Palestinian Refugees from Syria in Lebanon

This article questions the validity of conventional notions of borders as fixed territorial areas. Throughoral history as a method and critique, I examine the narratives of eight persons who are Palestinianstateless refugees from Syrian who have escaped to neighboring Lebanon since 2011. Oral history has amethodological strength that allows access to narratives of past and present events, some of which linkthe mass eviction of people from Palestine in 1948 – known as Al-Nakba (the Catastrophe), to the currentday Syrian crisis, which is perceived by Palestinians from Syria as a new and ongoing Nakba (al Nakbaal mustamirrah in Arabic). The narrators of this often experience border crossing as a pervasive part oftheir reality one that can be described as “social death,” a result of the limitations imposed by borders onthe lives of stateless people. I argue that the accounts presented speak back to a world of borders whilstchallenging the nation-state driven order of borders as fixed spaces. Through strategies of self-reflexivity,shared authority and maintaining relations, I open a discussion of how to use privilege, for example theprivilege of possessing a European passport, and having the recourses to document experiences acrossgeographical areas, as a way of speaking back to a world of checkpoints whilst advocating a process ofresearch decolonization.