Networked Refugees

Front matter

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CRITICAL REFUGEE STUDIES Edited by the Critical Refugee Studies Collective

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Giving Thanks xi Preface xiii

1. Cooperation and Community Building in Catastrophe 1

2. Mapping Palestinian Ahl and Hamula Networks in Analog and

Preface

This study of reciprocity and remittances among networked refugees has unfolded in the worst of times for Palestinian refugee communities. I began making research visits to refugee camps across Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria in the summer of 2004. Since then, the structural conditions and communal psyche in the refugee camps have gone from very bad to catastrophic. It is hard to find the words to describe what it is like for successive generations to live in a refugee camp with few prospects for a better future. The thesaurus presents words like fatal, ruinous, tragic, and cataclysmic; and all those descriptors are accurate. Refugees face significant challenges in accessing clean water and food, finding safe housing, and even burying their dead. In one interview, a Palestinian refugee described a fear worse than death:

It’s not the dying part that has worried me because, honestly, it will bring me peace to die and not live in this terrible place on Earth. But if I died, how would my family bury me? There is no place to bury, and families are left in very tough spots. I shudder to think of my wife and young children having to deal with the process. There would be no sanctuary for me, even in death. I dort even have a place to call home when my body dies. I know my soul will go to Paradise because I have been a good person, a good Muslim, you know? But, but . . . where will my family place my bones? Where is our home?(I-96L)!

Though the Geneva Convention specifies the rights of refugees and the responsibilities of the global community to help them, the international community is increasingly reneging on those commitments. Host states in Europe, North America, and the Middle East routinely deny refugees and migrants the ability to bury bodies on their soil. Moreover, the continued Israeli occupation and xiii xiv PREFACE violence in the Occupied Territories makes it impossible for Palestinians to assert the right of return to their homeland. There exists a vast chasm and legal gray area regarding the rights of refugees. Like the rest of the 68.5 million refugees suffering around the globe, Palestinians bear a significant burden of our casual disregard for the humanity of others, a state I refer to as brokenness.

I am humbled by the brokenness I have witnessed in refugee camps. I often feel overwhelmed by the conversations I have with refugees and by the reports I read of their suffering. There are times when hopelessness pervades my own outlook and writing. This is compounded by the fact that I am myself a Palestinian refugee. My father, Dr. Hatim Hajj, fled the village of Samoie in 1948 and grew up in Nahr al-Bared. He was the “lucky one” who received a scholarship that gave him access to educational opportunities beyond the confines of camp life. He went on to earn a master’s degree and doctorate at universities in America. He continues, even into his late seventies, to send more than 10 percent of his income to his family (ahl) and village (hamula) in the camp. He has funded hundreds of college degrees and small business startups, and paid the medical bills and burial costs for countless people, some of whom are only distant relatives.

I had several conversations with Dr. Anthony Sahyoun, a retired Palestinian surgeon who lived in Wellesley, Massachusetts, before his passing in 2019. Dr. Sahyoun came from a prominent Christian family in Haifa, Palestine. Born in 1922, he grew up in Haifa during the British mandate and trained as a medical surgeon in Britain. At the time of the Nakba—the 1948 “Catastrophic War” that prompted the Palestinian refugee situation—he served Palestinians as a doctor in the Red Cross, and he later headed the first hospital serving Palestinians with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). He recalled:

My father was a vice mayor in Haifa, sharing the role with Jewish and Muslim vice mayors. In 1948, when the war began, my father fled with the rest of the family and moved to Egypt. At that same time in 1948, I was sitting at my college flat in London and heard on the wireless radio an advertisement from the Red Cross looking for surgeons to work in Palestine and the Levant region. I agreed to sign on to the Red Cross. It was also at this time that I gained British citizenship. In 1949, I became the lieutenant colonel Red Cross chief of surgery in Jordan. I worked at the Salt Hospital, which served several Palestinian refugee camps. I had to organize the entire camp medical system: the clinics, the nurses, and an ambulance route. This was an enormous undertaking because I created the entire system on my own. I was young and had boundless energy. . . . I didnt move away until 1958. By that time, I needed a change from the relentless pace.

He eventually moved to Boston, where he became associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, chief of emergency medicine at the Faulkner Hospital, and associate chief of transplant surgery at the New England Deaconess Hospital. He never forgot the Palestinian community he left behind in the refugee

PREFACE XV camps, and he expended his time, social capital, and income to set up an exchange program that enabled Palestinian medical doctors to undertake medical residency and training in Boston. He also funded trips for Palestinian refugee children to receive life-saving medical operations at American hospitals. Even into his late nineties, his generosity helped generations of Palestinian doctors better serve their own suffering people.

Sadly, in the past two years, almost the entire generation of Palestinians who remembered the Nakba and the early years of life in the refugee camps—including Dr. Sahyoun and five of my father’s six siblings—has passed. I wonder whether successive generations of the Palestinian diaspora will serve members of their community still living in the camps in the same way that earlier generations did.

How can refugee communities overcome the brokenness of the world? In Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson contemplates the challenges of the American judicial system and the harsh punishments that offer no hope for redemption to some of those who suffer most in our society. In pondering how we might reclaim our regard for humanity, and heal the fracturing of our communities, he observes, “There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity” (Stevenson 2014, 290). Reciprocity, or the exchange of privileges, favors, and services with other members of a social network, as embodied in the actions of my father and Dr. Sahyoun, is the key to rebuilding refugee communities amid global apathy and repression (Mauss 1954).

But how can dispersed, oppressed, and disadvantaged communities engage in acts of reciprocity? This book endeavors to understand how refugees living in the camps use digital platforms like Facebook to inspire reciprocity among transnational networks of Palestinians and improve their overall well-being. It offers a glimmer of hope by showing how the community is rebuilding and reimagining itself, albeit slowly and imperfectly, by melding modern technologies with Palestinian norms and values of loyalty, honor, steadfastness, and shame, collectively known as ‘adat wa taqlid, to inspire new generations of Palestinians to assist others who are suffering and offer money and services to those still living in the camps. The book aims to show how networks of refugees inspire reciprocity and the multidirectional flow of economic and social remittances in the digital age.

Cooperation and Community Building in Catastrophe

The hegira, or perilous journey, of refugees causes them to lose both their homes and the protections afforded to them by a state. Though the Geneva Convention specifies their rights, there is no accessible, state-bounded framework by which refugees can demand protection or expect the enforcement of these rights (Hajj 2014, 2016; Jacobsen 2005). This “protection gap,” the chasm between promised legal protections and actual treatment, has widened in recent years because of the increasing demands placed on humanitarian services, with more than 68.5 million refugees displaced worldwide, and host countries’ abrogation of their legal obligations to refugee communities (Aleinikoff and Zamore 2019).

The protection gap is especially evident with regard to Palestinian refugees because the ongoing violent conflict with Israel prevents refugee repatriation, even though United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 (II) of December 1948 states their right of return. While Israel contends that Palestinian refugees are the problem of neighboring Arab states, many Arab host states, like Lebanon, refuse integration (tawtin) of Palestinians into economic and social structures, even after more than seventy years (Masalha 2003; Sayigh 1995a). Denial of the right of return and meager host-country support are further compounded by dwindling aid for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the only UN agency responsible for providing welfare, goods, and services to Palestinian refugees. On August 30, 2018, President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of US funding for UNRWA. On April 7, 2021, President Joseph Biden reinstated this funding, but the budget crisis of the last several years continues to limit access to vital goods and services.

The disorientation of the refugee condition was poignantly described to me by one Palestinian refugee in Lebanon: “I do not know what is up and what is down. I do not know the words to ask for help and the person to ask for it. Do I even count anymore as a person?” (I-8L). Indeed, there is a pervasive sense of despair among Palestinian refugees that the world has left them behind. The Palestinian American poet and activist Suheir Hammad (2004) describes the Palestinian refugee condition: “Every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water.” The despair was echoed in a recurrent phrase I heard in conversations with refugees in camps across Lebanon. Refugees lamented, “Min ‘eeash bedoun amal” (We live without hope).

Community “scouts” who traveled abroad to find economic opportunity and send money or remittances “home” to the camps mitigated abject poverty and hopelessness in the initial years after the 1948 Nakba (Jacobsen 2005; Levitt 2001; Masalha 2003; Schiff 1993). These scouts formed part of the Palestinian diaspora. Indeed, though much research on Palestinians today is centered on the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem, the Palestinian diaspora is vast and still plays an essential role in the survival of the Palestinian community (Hammer 2005, 11). I adopt the term diaspora because it attends to the liminal transnational space that Palestinian refugees occupy. As Thea Abu el-Haj notes in Unsettled Belonging, the term diaspora, unlike the category of immigrant, attends to the processes of globalization and migration that lead refugees to forge a sense of transnational belonging and connection (Abu el-Haj 2015, 29).

As members of the diaspora have worked hard to survive and adapt in new host states, their remittances have helped refugees in the camps build better homes, obtain food, send children to school, and access specialized medical care that is not provided by host states or aid agencies (Hajj 2016). Remittances often exceed the amount of official development assistance to refugees and marginalized communities. In 1995, migrants around the world sent more than US $70 billion back to families. Remittances significantly improve health, education, and welfare services in the imperfect market conditions that refugees face (Taylor 1999, 63, 81). In addition, they mitigate conflict and displacement because “some portion of the remittances also goes to religious organizations and hometown associations that sustain the community in crisis” (Koser and Van Hear 2003, 60).

Remittances have fueled economic growth and hope for new generations of Palestinians in the camps. One elderly refugee in the diaspora said: “There is no one else to help us. It is terribly unsettling to realize we are on our own despite all the bad things others have done to us, especially knowing that they legally owe us better. I do not operate in a world of perfect solutions, where I magically create a new state for us. I operate in a real-world place of sending as much money as I can, when I can, to help my people survive for a better future” (I-116L).

But remittances may decrease with time and distance, a phenomenon known as remittance decay (Jacobsen 2005). As global conflicts persist and the older generations of scouts dies, the diasporas bonds of loyalty to the camp communities weaken while the protection gap widens. How do refugees today access the goods and services they desperately need? Specifically, how do Palestinian refugees continue to motivate reciprocity, a cooperative interaction marked by the exchange of favors and privileges (Lawson and Greene 2014; Mauss 1954; Stack 1974), and, in turn, spark remittance flows from the transnational diaspora?

Even in lab-controlled conditions, cooperative behavior can be a challenge for people (Axelrod 1984; Axelrod and Hamilton 1981; Fehr and Gachter 2002; Fehr and Henrich 2003). Kin-based groups with repeated interactions are more likely to engage in reciprocity, but the time and distance separating refugee family networks create challenges. Though certainly not a perfect solution to the challenges refugee face, information communication technologies (ICTs) may offer a virtual space where refugees can reconstitute their community and memories. Furthermore, this space might serve to generate real-world material benefits in the form of economic remittances.

Studies of the role of ICTs in refugee spaces have generally been limited to exploring how aid agencies use them to map assets and distribute resources (e.g., Maitland and Xu 2015). These studies consider ICTs as a potential “digital lifeline” to improve the flow of international aid (Maitland 2018). Few studies have examined how refugees, without the intervention of international aid agencies, develop their own transnational digital networks and access resources that help them endure and even thrive (Oirzabal 2010).

In his novel Exit West, Mohsin Hamid poignantly describes forced migrations and the refugee condition. He describes the relationship of two refugee protagonists to their cell phones: “Nadia and Saeed were, back then, always in possession of their phones. In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be” (Hamid 2017, 39). In his portrayal, refugees use smartphones to transcend geographic borders and tap into a global network to build a community and access needed resources.

In the real world, however, researchers are divided over the question of whether Internet-based platforms generate tangible benefits for users. Technology pessimists view ICTs as a force causing individuals to turn inward, to deny their embeddedness in the social fabric, and to become apathetic (Simanowski 2018). Technology optimists consider ICTs to be a vehicle for sociopolitical change (LaBelle 2018). They view ICTs as nonstate market mechanisms that empower individuals to connect with one another, share information, and engage in collective action (Lynch 2011; Shirky 2011).

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, philosophers have observed that although technology enables us to communicate with increasing speed— through, successively, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, and the internet—it does not bring us nearer to one another, in the sense of feeling that we are deeply connected to others even when separated by vast geographic distances.

Nearness entails the realization that our existence is dependent on the support of others. Technology enables us to overcome the barriers of time and distance, but, as the Nobel laureate Emily Greene Balch observed in 1948, “Technology is a tool, not a virtue. It may be used for good or bad ends, and bringing men closer does not make them love one another unless they prove lovable. Multiplying contacts can mean multiplying points of friction” (Balch 1948). ICTs may allow refugee communities to create transnational networks, but these connections do not guarantee and in fact may impede nearness and real-world exchanges of support.

To create nearness and all the potential benefits it entails for refugees, individuals must relate more to a communal truth—that people living far apart from one another are deeply connected and interdependent—than to the technology itself. For ICTs to inspire reciprocity and help the Palestinian community survive catastrophic conditions, refugees must use them to evoke culturally and historically specific connections with members of the diaspora. The enforcement of norms or shared understandings of expected behavior in familiar group settings is often identified as a key motivator for cooperation and reciprocity (Axelrod 1984; Boyd et al. 2003; Fehr and Gachter 2002; West, Griffin, and Gardener 2006).

Examining the digital behavior of Palestinians living in camps in Lebanon and the diaspora generates new data on the role of reciprocity and ICTs in refugee community building. Through refugee camp interviews, surveys with members of the diaspora, and Internet data scraping, or collection of data, using Selenium WebDriver and Google Maps API, I have found that Palestinian refugees are adept at strategically melding forms of social organization and norms of communal behavior with new technologies to rebuild their community amid the contemporary catastrophe. Specifically, the representation of precrisis family and village networks in digital spaces allows Palestinians living in refugee camps to connect with the transnational diaspora in culturally and historically familiar ways. ICT users strategically deploy behaviors that are malleable and fluid versions of traditional Palestinian communal behavior.

This research disentangles the multiple levels of connection that make up the transnational Palestinian identity. In the camps, people remain connected to Palestine through subnational, village, and family identities. These in turn enable those who have left the camp, who live in a kind of double diaspora—separated first from Palestine and second from the camp—to remain connected to the camp, and, through that connection, to Palestine itself. Broadcasting the Palestinian norms and values of loyalty, honor, steadfastness, and shame, collectively known as the ‘adat wa taqlid, via digital videos, images, and chat rooms motivates continued remittance flows to those in the camps. Diaspora remittances provide valuable public goods for the camp community and fill the protection gap left by host states, elite political parties, and international aid agencies. The reciprocal networks of remittance flows speak to the power of the ahl and hamula identities, but also to the power of a Palestinian refugee identity that exists within a larger Palestinian national identity. These digital spaces of subnational connection also empower new community members and new conversations that may disrupt the very social dynamics and norms that initially anchored the community. Nevertheless, Palestinian refugees’ strategic use of ICTs to generate reciprocity and remittances offers a window into the resilience and reimagined identity of a marginalized community enduring a broken world.

THE PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMPS IN LEBANON

Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon are an unlikely site for the emergence of a vibrant transnational community, capable of providing its own public goods and services, because there are numerous atomizing forces at work. The protracted conflict, the exposure to violence, and the host country’s refusal to integrate Palestinians into its economic structures have pushed many young Palestinians to seek economic opportunity abroad (Hajj 2014, 2016).

For the Palestinian refugee community, both in the camps and in the diaspora, Israeli occupation makes the return to their ancestral lands practically impossible. This situation was born of violence and instability when the state of Israel was created (Schiff 1993). The scale of this catastrophe cannot be overestimated. In 1948, 720,000 to 750,000 Palestinians were forced into exile—a majority of the Arab population at the time (Brand 1988; Schiff 1993). Dispossession is not merely a state of mind for refugees: it is codified in the legal statutes of host states and Israeli occupation. The purpose of Israeli occupation is to accumulate territory, deny the existence of an indigenous community, and cut off the possibility for commonality, connection, and collective activism. Patrick Wolfe maintains the occupation is “not a singular event but an on-going organizing principle” that “strives for the dissolution of native societies” (2006, 388). Through a variety of legal codes, informal policies, and Israeli lobbying, Palestinians are treated as mythical. Masalha (2003) argues that Israel’s denial of the right of return has created a permanent situation of “warehoused” Palestinian refugees who are kept in a marginalized, disenfranchised status while Israel reinforces its own power and domination over Palestinian territories through legal and policy strategies. The impossibility of returning home, the erasure of Palestinian identity, and denial of Palestinian claims to territory forcefully atomize society (Masalha 2003; Wolfe 2006, 388).'

Aside from Israeli policies, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have had a frontrow seat during many of the violent conflicts in the Middle East region. Even after settlement in refugee camps outside the Occupied Territories (OT), they witnessed and experienced massacres, like the ones in Sabra and Shatila in 1982 during the decades-long Lebanese civil war (Sayigh 1986). Since the end of the civil war, Palestinian refugee camps have become pawns in regional elite politics.

In After the Last Sky, his 1986 collaborative venture with Jean Mohr, Edward Said, the famed Palestinian scholar, reflects on the dispossession and fragmentation of Palestinian society. The first part of the work, called “States,” is a passionate and moving meditation on displacement, landlessness, exile, and identity:

Do we exist? What proof do we have? The further we get from the Palestine of our past, the more precarious our status, the more disrupted our being, the more intermittent our presence. When did we become a people? When did we stop being one? Or are we in the process of becoming one? What do those big questions have to do with our intimate relationships with each other and with others? We frequently end our letters with the motto “Palestinian love” or “Palestinian kisses.” Are there really such things as Palestinian intimacy and embraces, or are they simply intimacy and embraces—experiences common to everyone, neither politically significant nor particular to a nation or a people? (Said 1986, 34)

Indeed, the living conditions for Palestinians in Israel and Lebanon work against any sense of “Palestinian intimacy and embraces.’ The Nahr al-Bared refugee camp offers a microcosm in which to examine the processes of atomization and community efforts to build transnational networks and procure diaspora remittances. Nahr al-Bared was built in 1951 roughly sixteen kilometers from the port of Tripoli in Lebanon, on the Mediterranean Sea.

On May 15, 2007, Nahr al-Bared was destroyed during a military conflict between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam, an extremist group with murky, non- Palestinian origins that attacked Lebanese forces using Nahr al-Bared as a base of operations (Butters 2008; Hajj 2016). Roughly twenty-seven thousand of the thirty thousand people then resident in the camp were forced to relocate. UNRWA, international donors, and the Lebanese government have slowly rebuilt the camp. The reconstruction project involves 4,876 residential units, 1,150 shops, the UNRWA compound, and the camp’s entire infrastructure (Hajj 2016, 26). As of 2020, 54% of camp residents had returned to Nahr al-Bared (De Stone and Suber 2019).

Palestinian refugees’ exposure to violence is compounded by the Lebanese refusal to integrate them into Lebanese society (Sayigh 1995b). In Lebanon, the state leadership actively works against Palestinian community building. In an international interview in 1999, Prime Minister Rafic Hairiri said, “Lebanon will never, ever integrate Palestinians. They will not receive civic, or economic rights, or even work permits. Integration would take the Palestinians off the shoulders of the international agency which has supported them since 1948” (Cooley 1999). The economic isolation of Palestinian refugees has been codified through work restrictions and impositions against property ownership outside the refugee camps. Palestinian political parties like the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) also oppose tawtin.

Palestinians in Lebanon, unlike those living in Jordan, were not issued passports. Obtaining alternative travel documents is often difficult. Lebanon's 1964 and 1995 laws outline the rights and responsibilities of foreigners to live and work in Lebanon, but Palestinians are considered a special case. A 2002 law forbade Palestinians from owning land or buying property in Lebanon (Christoff 2004).

Even though these laws have been amended, the majority of Palestinians lack access to legal employment in Lebanon (Chaaban et al. 2016). These conditions have encouraged young Palestinians to leave the camps to seek economic opportunities. In a recent survey, a college-educated twenty-three-year-old Palestinian engineer from Nahr al-Bared wrote:

There is nothing for me here in Nahr al-Bared camp. I could go to Beirut like my brother and work as an illegal laborer in a restaurant. Maybe I become a waiter and make a pittance . . . but then I am always fearful of getting ripped off by my boss and working like a dog. I would barely be able to make enough to feed myself. I can't save enough to afford my own place and get married. It is not a real life worth living. So I came up with a different plan. I borrowed money from my [second] cousin, who digitally sent me money to buy a passage to Turkey. From Turkey I will try to make it to Croatia or even Germany. I am a trained engineer with skills, and I have drive. I want to make it and use my God-given talents. I want a good life too. Why shouldn't I want a good life just because I am Palestinian? I am willing to risk my life to live with some dignity. (S-16)?

However, leaving the camps for diaspora scouts means leaving the family and village networks that remain essential for individual and community survival (Levitt 2001; Hajj 2016). Moreover, as the flow of remittances dwindles over time, those left behind in the camps no longer benefit from the opportunities discovered by the diaspora scouts (Jacobsen 2005, Levitt 2001).

Certain community strategies can overcome the fracturing of ties. The Palestinian diaspora, especially the young, is shaped, according to one observer, by the “crucible of globalization with its attendant mass migration, dislocation culture, and technological advances that allow people to remain connected to multiple places” (Abu el-Haj 2015, 43). This process is less about Palestinians figuring out how to negotiate between cultures than about how they have developed discourses and practices of belonging across transnational social fields.

Palestinians, like members of many Arab communities, most certainly enculturate with societies they have migrated to, but they often maintain connections across transnational social fields too (Gualtieri 2019; Lybarger 2020). In Arab Routes (2019), Sarah Gualtieri examines the rich presence of Syrians in California. The cover of her book shows a quintessential California muscle-man beach scene with a Syrian ice-cream store “hidden” in plain sight. Arabs are a normal part of the American landscape.’ Other scholars have identified myriad ways in which transnational migrants can engender sustainable forms of diasporic cultural production and creatively navigate the complexity of living in transnational social fields (Abu el-Haj 2015, 30; Appadurai 1996; Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1999; Fouron and Glick Schiller 2002; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004; Levitt and Waters 2002; Ong 1999).

Some communities manage to overcome remittance decay through strategies like altruism, social pressures, and diaspora scouts (Levitt 2001). Researchers have observed that “the [home] community notices who sends and who does not, and remittances are a way to exhibit connections, prove that relatives are cared for, and maintain contact with the country of origin” (Koser and Van Hear 2003, 62). ICTs may serve as one means of overcoming geographic limitations, connecting refugees with their diaspora community, and inspiring economic remittances. Of course, fulfilling economic aspirations will not serve as a cure-all for the challenges faced by Palestinian refugees, but the continued flow of remittances to the camps is a critical aspect of refugee community building.

ICTS AND COMMUNITY BUILDING

Long before the internet, scholars argued that “new” media lowered information costs, empowered everyday citizens, and strengthened the public sphere. Jürgen Habermas (1962) argued that the printing press helped democratize Europe by providing space for discussion and agreement among engaged citizens even before states had consolidated democracies. However, the emergence of new media alone does not spur individuals to action. Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) argue that information must be repeatedly shared by engaged citizens and then echoed by other people to generate discussion. Widening the public sphere and motivating action requires the consumption and (re)production of information through the use of new media. The internet moves beyond earlier forms of media in that it enables individuals to produce as well as consume information in a decentralized manner, using non-state-run technologies like smartphones. Yochi Benkler refers to this new form of the information economy as a “networked information economy” (2006, 3). The existing scholarly record provides mixed perspectives on the potential of ICTs in building communities.

On the one hand, technology pessimists doubt that the use of ICTs will create empathetic individuals capable of consuming accurate information and translating that knowledge into activism. In recent years, a wave of scholarship has disputed the notion that ICTs are effective in countering the unequal distribution of power. In The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas (2018), Roberto Simanowski (2018) wonders if humanity is on the brink of relying on technology to solve socioeconomic and political ills. He reviews the algorithms programmed into driverless cars that remove elements of human agency and deliberation (including algorithms that make choices about potentially fatal collisions). He provocatively describes smartphone zombies (or “smombies”) who remove themselves from the physical world to the parallel universe of social media networks and thereby lose their awareness and agency for finding solutions to the real problems our world is facing. According to these theories, refugee and diaspora members immersed in digital technologies would not be capable of making personal connections that could overcome the brokenness in which they are embedded.