The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies weekly seminar on 27 January 2021 hosted Rania Mansour, Professor in the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies’ Social Work Program, to present a lecture on “The Role of the Specialist in Social Work on Refugee Issues in Lebanon: Experience from Realities in the Field”. Presenting her research framework of social work with refugees in times of crisis and with refugees in Lebanon in particular, Mansour initially highlighted the interactive nature of specialized academic research monitoring refugee needs and developments in its close linkage with field level interventions: an interaction that ensures academic research is based on clearly defined indicators serving the development of intervention programs and achievement of the desired program goals, fruitful for students of social work during phases of their training as well as for informing the practical application of research findings.

Dr. Mansour then recounted how her research project into the experience of professional social work practitioners in Lebanon aimed to examine the different and complex micro, mezzo and macro levels of social work interventions seeking to address and solve the problems faced by refugees in Lebanon, noting that Lebanon has never signed the “Geneva Convention” (the 1951 United Nations Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees).

 Following these prefatory remarks, Dr. Mansour detailed the range of innovative roles, missions, and intervention methods observed in social work specialists working in local and international governmental and non-governmental social agencies. These encompass, inter alia, preparation of work plans and strategic courses of action that can redress the omission from clear systems of social welfare and protection of refugee individuals and families – as well as the egregious absence of refugee and host communities from the process of planning itself. She then presented a selection of feasible and appropriate proposals to address and overcome the challenging difficulties facing practitioners in the field.