From Tension to Violence: Understanding and Preventing Violence between Refugees and Host Communities in Lebanon

Mercy Corps has worked with 27 municipalities in the North of Lebanon and the Bekaa region since 2013 to improve governance, social cohesion and social stability, with the support of the UK, EU, and Regional Development and Protection Program managed by Danida. Over this period, Mercy Corps has carried out a number of research initiatives, which have tested the underlying hypotheses which orient social cohesion and stability programming in Lebanon. To date, allocations of programmatic resources in response to the Syrian refugee crisis overwhelmingly focus on increasing access to social and municipal services for Lebanese and Syrians. This is because assessments from multiple organizations identify that worsening living standards are closely connected to rising inter-communal tensions. These assessments assume increased tensions over access to social and municipal services lead to violence; however, they rarely try to understand in more detail how tensions correlate with disputes and violence, or try to understand whether access to different types of services or opportunities has any impact an individual’s propensity to use violence.

In order to understand this dynamic in more detail, Mercy Corps carried out a survey of 2,437 households in eight municipalities in North of Lebanon. This survey sought to identify when physical violence occurs – understanding that not all tensions manifest as disputes, and not all disputes escalate into violence – in order to better test the assumption that increased tensions over social service provision will lead to violence.