Drawing on empirical findings from my doctoral study in Beirut - Lebanon’s capital - this contribution sheds light on various roles of brokers employed by refugee street children to improve their work conditions. In Lebanon, where displacement is managed through ambiguous policies (Nassar and Stel, 2019), the traditional Euro-centric humanitarian model of a refugee falls short. Unlike states that are signatories of the 1951 UNHCR refugee convention and its 1967 protocol, the Lebanese state lacks the regional instruments to provide protection to refugees (Trad and Frangieh, 2007). The state rather acknowledges Syrians as ‘displaced’ persons (Shuayb and Hammoud, 2021) emphasizing its role as a country of transit. Amidst these structural challenges, Syrian de-facto refugees draw on local and transnational brokers to navigate urban informality.

Through the lens of ‘subaltern agency’ (Roy, 2011), this paper asks: what are the multifaceted roles played by various brokers in the daily lives of Syrian refugee street children? The discussion is based on a two-year ethnographic study with twenty street children, as well as their families, peers, local shop owners, police officers and informal organizations in three different areas in Beirut. The findings indicate that the forms of brokerage varied from engaging with smugglers who facilitated cross-border human and resource movement, to collaborating with members from the local society, negotiating with local authorities and even gangsters who acted as gatekeepers, and forming ‘tentative friendships’ (Amrith, 2018) with more established street workers.

The findings revealed three distinct roles that brokerage played in the lives of refugee children based on their site of work. It is important to note that this approach is not intended to represent a geographic unit of analysis. Instead, it demonstrates the different socioeconomic statuses and migration experiences that brought refugees to different areas in the first place, and that continued to shape their circumstances and opportunities vis-à-vis work and migration.

Firstly, in the ‘Nabaa’ neighborhood, which Martin (2015) describes as a ‘campscape’, or an open space characterized by overlapping displacement and poverty, refugee children and their families leveraged brokerage to ‘get by’ (Thieme, 2018) while they collectively envisioned a return to their homelands (Malkki, 1995). In ‘Hamra’, which Joyner and Yazbeck (2021) describe as an upscale neighborhood undergoing transformation, brokerage facilitated the refugees' efforts for ‘emplacement’ (Simsek-Caglar and Schiller, 2018). This comprises ‘improving their lots’ on Beirut’s streets (Bayat, 2004), enhancing their assets back home, and expanding their work to neighbouring countries. Lastly, in ‘Corniche’, which Minton (2006) would describe as a public promenade undergoing privatization, refugees drew on various forms of brokerage to secure safe operations on the streets, and assimilate into formal education (Shuayb and Brun, 2020), paving the way for onward migration.

By exploring the diverse roles of brokerage, especially regarding refugees working on the streets of Beirut, this paper illuminates the intricate dynamics of their daily lives. In doing so, it enriches the discourse on refugee narratives and contributes to broader discussions aimed at de-homogenizing and decolonizing the perception of refugee experiences in the Global South.

Scholarship focusing on immigration and refugee resettlement in small towns and rural areas is growing. Yet there is little work explicitly looking into the various brokering activities that facilitate the arrival and settlement of migrants and refugees in these contexts, and most of it focuses on formal NGO and government activities (e.g., Erickson, 2020; Moralli et al., 2023; Patuzzi et al., 2020). In this paper, I focus on the role that a few “key individuals” – NGO workers, language teachers, ordinary citizens – play in shaping experiences of arrival and settlement for both migrants and asylum seekers in remote mountain areas. Drawing on ethnographic research in an Alpine region of northeast Italy, I discuss how my interlocutors narrated their encounters with these individuals as turning points in their lives, affecting their subsequent choices and opportunities to settle in the area as well as their feelings of belonging and place attachment.

I adopt a diachronic perspective to analyze some of the brokering activities carried out by these "key individuals" over the years, as well as their evolving relationship with migrants and refugees, which went from providing practical and bureaucratic help, to activating personal and familial networks in order to help people find housing, to creating occasions for conationals living in different parts of the province to meet and thus overcome experiences of socio-spatial isolation. I reflect on how this blurring of boundaries between formal and informal practices might be typical of the rarefied social space of small towns, where “it’s the same two people” and, often, the same multipurpose building – rather than “concentrations of institutions, social spaces, and actors” (Wessendorf 2022: 173) that effectively serve as arrival infrastructures.

This paper examines brokering practices in the area of labour market incorporation for refugee newcomers. Focusing on a regional city in the UK, this paper considers the activities of migrant and non-migrant ‘arrival brokers’, who facilitate opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship and other settlement support for refugees. Through in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs from a refugee background and street-level bureaucrats (local authority and voluntary sector professionals) conducted over the past three years, it explores the degrees of formality and informality in these brokers’ activities as they sit inside, outside or alongside the organisational structures of the formalised (refugee) arrival infrastructure. The paper argues that these brokers operationalise agency in offering support by navigating around restrictions often through informal activities, or creating new modes of operation, such as formalised new services or organisations. At the same time, tensions are evident in continuing constraints on activities imposed by the formalised structures that may dictate terms of operation, such as funding restricting activities to favoured groups of refugees, namely those resettled to the UK on official schemes, thus creating a hierarchy of support. The paper discusses the various roles played by different types of arrival brokers. It suggests that the formal nature of brokers operating in the arrival infrastructure, who are mainly street-level bureaucrats, may obstruct the longevity of support initiatives, which may be linked to funding availability. Amongst the entrepreneurs, there is a more sustained commitment to brokering activities less fashioned by the formal/informal dichotomy.