Racist capital : the racialization of migrant labor under the Kafala system in Beirut

Abstract

This project builds on the assumption that everyday racism targeting migrant workers in Lebanon constitutes a form of structural violence resulting from the Kafala system and more broadly, the consolidation of global capitalism and subsequent transformations in the global labor market. This operationalization of structural violence thus looks at racism as a microcosm of larger global and economic processes while remaining attentive to the various ways it materializes in the course of everyday life. This research is guided by questions about the inter-dynamics of law and society, with a specific focus on the process by which legal structures enable a process of racialization that manifests in everyday racist patterns and practices. Employing an ethnographic investigation of the legal system governing migrant work, I explore how racism in Lebanon is linked to structures of power that materialize through the dynamics of the Kafala System and Lebanese labor law, and the larger global processes of accumulation and dispossession under global capitalism. In doing so, I aim to provide a better understanding of the processes through which migrant workers are racialized, inferiorized and exploited through embodied, socio-economic conceptualizations of race.