From May 2018 until January 2020, I lived with eight young men (shabab), formerly middle-class Syrians who shared space, expenses, and homemaking responsibilities in a small apartment in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley. Although they were displaced as teenagers by the Syrian civil war, the shabab never registered with the UNHCR or sought assistance from NGOs. They lived ordinary lives on Lebanon’s urban margins, hustling to make ends meet and send money home through shifting combinations of day labor in the skilled trades, restaurant work, and small entrepreneurial ventures. Yet there was a key difference between this tight-knit group of friends and the generations of Syrian men before them who labored in the most grueling jobs at the heart of the Lebanese economy: their homes, families, and imagined futures were no longer a short drive away over an open border.

No Country for Young Men (under advance contract at the University of Chicago Press) follows the shabab as they come of age in exile, asking how they make tough decisions about their futures amidst dramatic deteriorations in their legal status and economic security. Migration scholars have argued that the liminal temporalities of ‘waiting’ are central to the experience and governance of displacement, yet there is little research on what refugees do when the viability of waiting breaks down. How do young refugees orient towards the future under severe conditions of material, legal, and psychological uncertainty? And how do they decide which projects to pursue and which to abandon in moments when adversity becomes unbearable?

I answer these questions by focusing on the eventful turning points that punctuate the experience of displacement, beginning in this case with a late-2018 campaign to regularize Syrian labor and businesses and continuing into the liquidity crisis that engulfed Lebanon the following year. These unexpected and destabilizing developments forced the shabab to start thinking about how to escape the country that offered them refuge, a frenetic process involving research on social media, disagreements with friends and relatives, the speculative work of imagining different lives in different places, and the practical labor of raising money, securing documents, and finding trustworthy brokers and smugglers. By early 2021, only one remained in Lebanon, while the rest had scattered between Libya, Egypt, Greece, and Syria with stints in Iraq, Turkey, and Sudan along the way.

No Country for Young Men follows these trajectories in real time, developing a novel theorization of refugee decision-making that moves past the prevailing emphasis on calculations of safety and risk. As the shabab plotted paths out of Lebanon, their dilemmas were structured by material factors including precarious work and restrictions on mobility, cultural discourses around fate (nasīb) and sustenance (rizq), the competing demands of self-realization and kinship, and the ghosts of potential past and future selves. Showing how they navigated questions of emplacement and mobility, I argue that moving a migratory plan from fantasy to actualization required two initial forms of interpretive labor: adjudicating between divergent desires, dreams, and obligations, and calculating at the unstable nexus of three currencies, across borders and legal regimes, and with ambiguous signs of divine intention. Lastly, actualizing a mobility project required a further step: a decisive commitment to pursue a plan with all available energy and a conviction bordering on recklessness given the potential consequences. How the shabab imagined and ultimately secured mobility despite closed borders, state repression, and an economic crisis that destroyed their livelihoods is the empirical puzzle and dramatic tension at the heart of this book.