About

Rawan Arar is a faculty member at the Law, Societies & Justice department at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on refugee issues, human rights, and the role of law in providing support and access to rights for refugees. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Jordan, including 175 interviews with Syrian refugees, Jordanian citizens, UN officials, and government representatives, as well as a four-year ethnography with 16 months of research. Arar's background includes an undergraduate degree from the University of Texas San Antonio, a Masters in women’s and gender studies at UT Austin, and a PhD in sociology from UC San Diego. Her personal and academic background—Palestinian, Jordanian, and American—has significantly influenced her research interests. She is currently working on turning her dissertation into a book and is interested in how laws and policies impact refugees' access to rights. As a sociologist, she emphasizes the importance of engaging with people's voices and experiences in her teaching and research. She will be leading a seminar on refugee issues, with a focus on the Middle East and international policy, and aims to incorporate her extensive hands-on experience into her classroom.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Law
• Psychology
• Political economy
• Anthropology
• Geography
• Aesthetics
• Development economics
• Economic geography
• Economics

Selected publications

• Refugee Resettlement as an Institution

  2026-04-03

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Refugee Systems

  2026-04-09

  reference-entrySenior author

  Summary Forced displacement is a global phenomenon that cannot be fully understood without considering connections across countries of origin, transit, and destination. A refugee system is both (a) a social phenomenon made up of those connections, and (b) an analytical approach toward understanding displacement that builds upon systems theories, most notably Akin Mabogunje’s elaboration of a migration system. The value of a systems approach becomes clear when it is juxtaposed with siloed approaches. Silos in knowledge about displacement emerge from organizational practices, academic fields, and types of law. Scholars and practitioners in these areas inform relevant knowledge about displacement, including the types of questions asked, evidence gathered, and insights generated. Siloed approaches may achieve important goals but are limited by political or practical constraints. A systems approach reveals what silos hide and, in doing so, illuminates how siloed approaches may obscure reality and reinforce inequality. A systems approach encourages scholars to consider the source of inputs into how people make decisions about whether they will flee, when they will leave, and where they will go. The new economics of displacement, which builds from the new economics of labor migration, incorporates a household-level analysis and breaks from siloed knowledge production that is primarily concerned with the individual. Silos are not stagnant. They change as incentive structures are rearranged and organizational mandates expand, which further supports the value of questioning how knowledge is produced and can be created differently.

  PublisherDOI

• Refugee resettlement as an institution

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2025-03-28 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Humanitarian Fiction: Examining the ‘Host’ in Refugee-Receiving Contexts

  Journal of Humanitarian Affairs · 2025-03-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  I interrogate the ‘host’ label within refugee studies, taking into consideration multiple scales of analysis from international rankings of states to individuals and communities. Critically examining who counts as a host – and who counts the hosts – has important implications for practitioners and scholars. Critiques of big picture assessments of ‘host state’ rankings invite scholars to consider how geopolitics shape recognition and erasure, in turn influencing broader understandings of global displacement and reception. The findings also draw from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations in Jordan with refugees, citizens and residents. I describe how individuals confront the refugee/host binary in their daily lives. I introduce the concept of humanitarian fiction to explain contemporary limitations of the ‘host’ designation. Analogous to the socio-legal examination of ‘legal fiction’, humanitarian fiction recognises that there is a gap between aid-informed knowledge production and empirical contradictions in studies of refugee displacement and reception.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Contrasting Trajectories of Incorporation: Refugee Integration and the Global South

  Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies · 2023 · 12 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  While the challenges of making a home in a foreign country are not unique to refugees in the Global South, their trajectories of integration in Southern host states often diverge from descriptions in the canonical literature on immigrant integration. What constitutes integration when newcomers share a language, cultural similarities, religious practices, and family ties with the receiving society? Drawing on ethnographic and interview data with Syrian refugees in Jordan, this article illustrates (a) the complexities that surface when refugees share similarities with members of the receiving community, (b) emerging axes of difference-making, and (c) distinct mechanisms linking humanitarian intervention with the facilitation and impediment of integration.

  PublisherDOI

• Contexts of Immigration and Diversity: Biopsychosocial Implications for Arab Americans

  Springer eBooks · 2023 · 1 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies
  PublisherDOI

• Migration and Displacement

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract This chapter shows why the large-scale movement of human populations in the MENA has manifest importance to states and societies across the region. Whether driven by economic concerns, violence, or some combination of the two, the migration of peoples—which, in its most tragic form, produces refugee crises—has become an indelible part of the regional landscape. The chapter traces the history of such migration prior to the Arab uprisings and locates the applicability of outside literatures to help understand the experiences of migrants and refugees. Research on the relationship between conflict and migration, labor migration, state-level governance of migration, global governance and international institutions, and the nexus between diasporas and states all receive close attention. The ethics of studying displaced communities also invokes discussion. Key debates, notable cases, and avenues for future research are hence mapped out in systematic detail.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding refugees

  2021-05-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The MENA region has a long history of forced migration. The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the drawing of new state boundaries, genocide, population transfers, colonization and decolonial struggles, and civil war have all catalyzed the involuntary movement of peoples across, into, and out of the region. Today, most of the world’s refugees flee from MENA countries and also find refuge there. The region hosts the majority of displaced Syrians (6.6 million) and Palestinians (5.7 million), who alone comprise almost half of the world’s UN-recognized refugees. Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon host more than 20 percent of the global refugee population. The experiences of refugees are shaped by how host states address urgent needs for food and shelter and also by how governments engage long-term challenges of protracted displacement and statelessness. How the region deals with these issues has far-reaching implications and touches upon the movement of refugees in the Global North as well as the operations of international aid organizations.

  PublisherDOI

• What Happens When the United States Stops Taking in Refugees?

  Contexts · 2019-05-01 · 27 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Most of the world’s 25.4 million refugees have been displaced for five or more years. A sharp curtailment in refugee arrivals to the United States, then, isn’t just a national decision, but a global disruption.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Sociology of Refugee Migration

  Annual Review of Sociology · 2018-04-05 · 319 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Theorization in the sociology of migration and the field of refugee studies has been retarded by a path-dependent division that we argue should be broken down by greater mutual engagement. Excavating the construction of the refugee category reveals how unwarranted assumptions shape contemporary disputes about the scale of refugee crises, appropriate policy responses, and suitable research tools. Empirical studies of how violence interacts with economic and other factors shaping mobility offer lessons for both fields. Adapting existing theories that may not appear immediately applicable, such as household economy approaches, helps explain refugees’ decision-making processes. At a macro level, world systems theory sheds light on the interactive policies around refugees across states of origin, mass hosting, asylum, transit, and resettlement. Finally, focusing on the integration of refugees in the Global South reveals a pattern that poses major challenges to theories of assimilation and citizenship developed in settler states of the Global North.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nedal H. Arar

  4 shared

• Lucy Panoyan

  Audie L. Murphy Memorial VA Hospital

  4 shared

• Hanna E. Abboud

  4 shared

• Shuko Lee

  South Texas Veterans Health Care System

  4 shared

• David Fitzgerald

  University of California System

  2 shared

• David Cook‐Martín

  University of Colorado Boulder

  1 shared

• Chad Justin Valasek

  1 shared

• Noora Lori

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., sociology

  University of California San Diego