This collection contains English transcripts of twenty semi-structured interviews carried out in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon during July 2017. Four different groups of people were approached for interview: Syrian refugees, Palestinian Refugees from Syria, Lebanese host communities and Palestinian Refugees from Lebanon. The interviews took place with households living in informal tented settlements and privately-rented accommodation. We asked questions about sense of place, mobility and meaningful locations. We wanted to know whether and how respondents formed attachments to meaningful places, the characteristics of those places, and the feelings they evoked.Lebanon has absorbed over a million people fleeing the conflict in Syria. Weak governance and limited resources threaten the wellbeing of newly arrived populations and exacerbate tensions with host populations. The protracted nature of the Syrian conflict requires consideration of long term solutions to the refugee crisis. This project uses place attachment to understand: a) wellbeing in precarious mobile populations; and b) root causes of social tensions between newly-arrived and host populations. The research does this by testing hypotheses on the role of place attachment in building resilience and the role of place identity in causing social tensions. Thus the project can inform interventions to build positive resilience and social cohesion in displaced and host populations. Ultimately, the viability and relative merits of long term solutions will depend on the nature of the place attachments of those affected.

We carried out 45 semi-structured interviews over two weeks in July 2017 in the Bekaa Valley. This period of data collection was supplemented by two pilot visits in 2017, and follow up interviews in 2018, when research outcomes were also brought back to the respondents (in the form of a report and graphic novel in Arabic). Half of the interviews were with refugees from Syria (defined as anybody who had come from Syria under conditions of stress or duress since 2011) living in informal tented settlements or privately rented accommodation. The remainder of the interviews were with the local host population. Within the refugee respondents, half were Palestinian refugees from Syria (PRS) and within the host respondents, half were Palestinian refugees from Lebanon (PRL). Interviews took place in a town in the Bekaa Valley, which is close to the Syrian border and has experienced a four-fold increase in its population since the crisis began in Syria. Interviewees were identified in partnership with a local fixer, working closely with a local NGO. Of the 45 interviews, 20 were selected for transcription in Arabic, translation into English and subsequent analysis. We chose five from each sub-group (Syrian, PRS, Lebanese and PRL) balancing across gender, type of accommodation and socio-economic status.