Protection amid chaos

"How do communities find protection in chaotic political economic settings? This book endeavors to show how normal people placed in extraordinarily difficult conditions created protections for their assets and buffered against outsider predation through property rights. The research project focuses on Palestinians living in seven refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. Using interviews with 200 Palestinian refugees, legal title documents, memoirs, and United Nations Relief Works Agency archives the author traces the evolution of property rights from informal understandings of ownership to formal legal claims of assets and resources to shed light on how communities thrive in challenging political economic spaces. Initially, Palestinians deployed bits and pieces of their pre-refugee life to craft property rights that met the challenges of living in refugee camps. Later, as the camps increased in complexity with expanding markets and new outsiders entering the political fray, then Palestinians strategically melded their informal institutional practices with the formal rules of political outsiders. Palestinian refugees, to varying degrees of success, managed to protect their assets and community from predation and state incorporation"--Publisher's website.