A country of approximately 4 million citizens, Lebanon is home to over half a million Asian and black African migrant workers concentrated in its capital city of Beirut. An estimated one quarter of Lebanese households employ a live-in female migrant domestic worker on a full time basis. Over the last decade, many of these women have fled domestic confinement to enter Lebanon’s informal labour market, and have recently been joined by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing war across the country’s eastern border. This dissertation examines the social worlds of these migrant workers. It demonstrates that non-Arab migrant workers in Beirut are not simply temporary workers, but constitute a specific subject category structured by socioeconomic relations that determine the possibility of their life in the city. Specifically, it argues that migrant workers in Beirut are subjects denied recognition, and who therefore lie outside the nation-state, while having forged an urban belonging inside the city. I demonstrate this by examining migrant workers’ interactions with the joint nexus of citizen-state authority, their experiences of time in both labour and rest, their modes of receiving address and inhabiting speech in the Arabic language, and their intimate and collective relations in the city. Together with growing numbers of male Syrian refugees, migrant workers in Beirut have created an urban underground that has transformed both what and who it means to live in the city today. This dissertation offers an ethnographic map of these transformations.

This dissertation concentrates on a circular labor migration from the provincial towns of the Kurdish region in southeastern Turkey, to rural areas of western Turkey. Each year, an estimated one and a half million workers migrate west with their families for several months to work in rural jobs such as farm labor, sharecropping, forestation, and charcoal making. Based on a total of sixteen months of ethnographic research between October 2014 and August 2016, following the migrant workers between their hometowns and work sites, this dissertation uses this labor practice as an ethnographic lens to analyze both the socio-political conditions under which this labor practice is shaped, and the material practices through which economic surplus is produced, managed, and distributed. Exploring the everyday life in the hometowns of the migrant workers, it investigates the racialized and regionally-divided class formation in Turkey, which heavily relies on labor migration from the Kurdish region. These power relations are also reproduced in western worksites through racialized and securitized practices of labor discipline and labor control. In this labor regime, the Kurdish family not only fulfills functions of social security and social reproduction, but also directly becomes the unit of production and the social hub through which relations of production are organized. However, the temporary character of this labor practice also allows the Kurdish migrant workers to construct a life in their hometowns that is not entirely determined by the structures of political domination and exploitation but is shaped through kinship, neighborhood politics, and everyday relations of multiple subjectivities to their material surroundings.