The Flotsam and Jetsam of Levantine Middle East: The Politics of Displacement in Iraq and Syria

In the last five decades, Levantine Middle East has lurched through wars, civil wars, insurgencies, and occupations, producing not only refugees who cross borders, but a larger residue of displacement within states themselves. This chapter foregrounds internally displaced persons in Iraq and Syria and argues that displacement is not a temporary humanitarian aftermath, but a political condition produced, managed, and prolonged across phases of violence and postwar reconstruction. Using the Iraq War of 2003, the Syrian Civil War, and the rise and collapse of Da‘esh as critical moments, it traces how armed conflict intersected with sectarian consolidation, militia governance, and state strategies of return and resettlement. In Iraq, cycles of Arabization, de Baathification, counter insurgency, and militia control generate repeated displacement, conditional return, and renewed suspicion. In Syria, selective reconstruction, external patronage, and the logic of useful territory transform displacement into a demographic instrument rather than an aberration of war. Internally displaced populations emerge not as passive victims, but as the material through which post conflict orders are negotiated, territorial control is stabilised, and plural social landscapes are narrowed. The chapter treats internal displacement as political ordering, where return is deferred and belonging recalibrated through bureaucratic and security practices.