UNRWA as a “Phantom Sovereign” Governance Practices in Lebanon Published in S. Hanafi, L. Takkenberg and L. Hilal (Eds.) UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees: From Relief and Works to Human Development. Routledge (2014) Sari Hanafi, Professor, American University of Beirut "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country." Lenin speech at the Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, Moscow, 4 December 1920 1 Parallel to Lenin’s quote, and projecting the former Soviet Union to a refugee camp, I would say that a good governance system in a camp should also be composed by a power and service provision: ideally power will stem from the community (such as political factions for the political issues and popular committees for administrative and municipal issues) with services provided by humanitarian organizations and host authorities because they are a refugee population. However, given that popular committees are often dysfunctional and host authorities ignore this population, UNRWA cannot afford to become a mere service provider. During the past two decades, governing a nation or a city or a camp has been shown to require decentralization of the governance system and involvement of many actors. As Michel Foucault (1990) reminds us, what is important is not the formal power that stems from the exercise of sovereignty but rather the effects of power that a governmental technology generates. While UNRWA generally presents itself as a mere provider of services, it is de facto much more than that. This constitutes the major hypothesis I formulate for this chapter. The chapter investigates the role that UNRWA plays in camp governance, specifically in the administrative and municipal realm, not in the political domain. Because of its mandate, a humanitarian organization like UNRWA has historically understood its role as a temporary relief provider to a temporary group of victims, carefully avoiding taking on a wider governing role. At the same time, most refugees have effectively assigned UNRWA a key role, holding it responsible for problems in the camps that go well beyond the realm of its mandate. This generates frequent misunderstandings that characterize the current status quo. (Misselwitz and Hanafi 2010) I shall begin by analyzing the complex reality of camp governance, which forms the point of departure for our analysis: who governs the camps? And why does UNRWA constitute a “phantom sovereignty”? 1 Lenin's famous plan of electrification of Russia (GOELRO Plan) was born in 1920, under conditions of utter ruin and starvation.