Solastalgia and nostalgia: the role of emotional bonds to place in refugee and host community interactions

While sustainable solutions to protracted refugee situations remain elusive, conditions for refugees and their host communities can deteriorate. Drawing from environmental psychology, we apply a place attachment framework to analyse wellbeing and refugee-host interactions in protracted situations to inform alternative interventions. Based in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, we carried out qualitative interviews on place attachment with Syrian and Palestinian refugees from Syria who had fled the conflict in Syria, and their Lebanese and Palestinian host communities. Results show a rural host population with strong place identity experiencing, we suggest, solastalgia due to refugee-related place change. Strong place identity contributed to anti-refugee sentiment as a form of place protective behaviour. Syrian refugees had no secure base in Lebanon but rather nostalgia for Syria. This was driven, in part, by immobility preventing meaningful interactions with locals in surrounding areas. Palestinian refugees from Syria, doubly displaced, were increasingly defined by the Palestinian dimension of their identity. Palestinian refugee hosts articulated a lack of a secure base in Lebanon but also a sense of loss at the changes occurring. A place attachment framing highlights pathways to ameliorate some of the mental health impacts of protracted displacement and remove barriers to social cohesion.