Written by David Lagarde, published in Anthology Hypotheses 15th February – This field report is part of a project of doctoral research into the networks and dynamics of Syrian exile to Jordan. This research is based on longitudinal monitoring of an ordinary group of refugees from Deir Mqaren – a village in the Rif Dimashq Governorate – and its aim is to analyze and understand the population’s “diasporization” process. Another of its objectives is to show how cross-border trade circulation initiated by the men of Deir Mqaren during the Ottoman era has influenced the migratory paths taken by all the families of the village since 2011. From the 1990s up to the conflict in Syria, the main source of revenues of the inhabitants of Deir Mqaren came from the sale of foodstuffs (dried fruits, nuts and “traditional” sweet products) that the merchants of the village bought in Damascus to sell on in Lebanon and Jordan. However in 2011, the increase of fighting in Syria considerably perturbed this trade which had been based on fluid, unhindered circulation between Deir Mqaren and the surrounding countries. From the start of 2012 onwards, this situation led a growing number of such traders to move permanently to the towns they had previously only visited to sell their merchandise so that they could work there on a permanent basis. In the following months, the regime’s increasing bombing in the Deir Mqaren area led their wives and children to join them but after a temporary stay in Lebanon and Jordan many families preferred to continue their journey to more distant destinations, particularly Germany.

Thanks to communication tools like Whatsapp and Facebook, I managed to stay in contact with some of the refugees I met during my surveys in Jordan in 2014 and 2015. In July 2016, I went to Dortmund in Germany where a family from Deir Mqaren lives. I had kept in touch with them since our first meeting in Amman two years earlier and used participant observation methods to find out about their new daily lives, particularly their representations and habits in their home area. The main ambition of this article is above all to allow my hosts to express themselves. Their stories published in this article are not supposed to be representative of the situation of all Syrian refugees in Germany. The idea is instead to shed new light on the installation of a population from a rural area in an urban environment – a subject which has been covered little in studies of Syrian refugees until now.

Read the whole article here