In humanitarian and policy circles, the well-meaning but deeply flawed phrase “giving voice to the voiceless” is still common. But the truth is that no one is truly voiceless. What makes people unheard is not their silence, but the structures built to ignore them. When it comes to displacement in Lebanon, my home country and the focus of my research, this silencing is systemic.
More than one million people were forced to flee their homes when the latest armed conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which began in October 2023, escalated into heavy Israeli airstrikes on different regions of Lebanon in September 2024 as well as an invasion of part of south Lebanon. It “officially ended” (although bombing is still regular) with a ceasefire in late November last year.
Many of those who were displaced needed – and still need – aid. But displaced people are not just sources of need or objects of protection. When given the time, trust, and tools to tell their stories on their own terms, they articulate far more than loss. They map out systems of exclusion. They document strategies of survival. They remember, resist, imagine, and critique. Their stories are not just moving – they are instructive. They are not a supplement to humanitarian work, but its most reliable compass.
Without these stories, you get decontextualised statistics, oversimplified narratives of crisis and victimhood, and the routine reduction of personal accounts to poignant anecdotes in press releases and reports that decorate, rather than direct, humanitarian programming.
That’s why participatory storytelling like The Lebanon Displacement Diaries is not a side project or a communications tool. It is a necessity for any humanitarian system that claims to be accountable to the people it serves.
When voice isn’t power
Governments, aid agencies, and NGOs often speak of the importance of “listening to communities.” Tools like focus group discussions, feedback loops, and needs assessments are designed to include displaced voices – ostensibly to better plan assistance programmes and find out if they are working.
But too often, these mechanisms are extractive by design. They collect stories only to funnel them through institutional frameworks, stripping them of context, flattening complexity, and validating plans that were already in motion.
In Lebanon, I have seen this dynamic play out repeatedly. Migrant women share harrowing accounts of sexual violence, only for programmes to bypass the systemic enablers of that violence. Refugee youth articulate their dreams for the future, only for those hopes to be sidelined by donor-driven short-termism. Migrant domestic workers, displaced and shelterless, are not factored into shelter planning at all. The problem is not that people are silent – it is that their voices are stripped of political weight, de-linked from any power to shape outcomes.
Participatory storytelling disrupts this pattern. It insists that narrative is not just illustrative – it is directive. It calls for people to be treated not as subjects to be studied or helped, but as co-authors of the very frameworks that govern their lives. In this model, voice is not bestowed. It is respected, shared, and acted upon.
I saw the power of this shift in two recent research projects I led with LGBTQI+ refugees and IDPs in Lebanon. Participants were not simply asked to recount their experiences, instead they helped shape the research itself. They prioritised the questions, the mediums of expression, and how their stories would circulate. Some told their stories through fiction, others through photography. As one participant said to me: “If I have to tell my story again, at least this time, it’s mine”.
When displaced individuals define how they are represented – and when those representations inform humanitarian design – story becomes strategy, and lived experience becomes a source of critique and a tool for reimagining systems. It also brings us closer to the messy, multifaceted realities that humanitarian actors often seek to serve – but rarely centre.
Whose stories count?
Displacement is rarely a single rupture. It is an ongoing negotiation with grief, survival, identity, and systems that were not built to accommodate complexity.
In Lebanon, I have sat down with individuals whose lives fall outside humanitarian categories: a Bangladeshi woman running an informal shelter for fellow migrant domestic workers; a queer Syrian man forced to move for the fourth time; an internally displaced Lebanese farmer returning to find his fields destroyed by white phosphorus. These stories are messy, layered, and unapologetically political. They don’t lend themselves to tidy summaries or pre-packaged programme logic.
Labels like “refugee,” “migrant,” “IDP,” or “host community” become bureaucratic silos, erasing the lived realities of those who exist at the intersections.
Yet, in most humanitarian programming, complexity is treated as excess. Crisis language flattens the texture of people’s lives. Labels like “refugee,” “migrant,” “IDP,” or “host community” become bureaucratic silos, erasing the lived realities of those who exist at the intersections. Stateless mothers, undocumented queer youth, disabled caregivers – people whose experiences defy categorisation – are often sidelined not because they’re hard to reach, but because their stories do not fit the system’s script.
I once worked with a group of stateless Palestinian-Syrian youth who rejected the label of “traumatised.” One of them told me, “We’re not always fleeing. We’re choosing where to go, who to trust, how to survive”. Their reframing was a refusal to be positioned solely as victims.
By moving beyond inclusion and toward authorship, this is what participatory storytelling enables. It does not just ask people to share; it asks them to define. It does not just record experience; it reshapes it into insight, strategy, and critique. But for this to happen, humanitarian actors must be willing to let go of narrative control. They must make space for stories that complicate their assumptions, that do not resolve cleanly, that implicate the very systems meant to offer support.
Whose stories count – and who gets to tell them – is not a neutral question. It is a matter of power. And until displaced people are authors of the humanitarian narrative – not just characters in it – aid responses will remain partial, performative, and incomplete.
What this means for aid planners, NGOs, and governments
If humanitarian actors are genuinely committed to inclusion, participatory storytelling must move from the margins to the core of programme design. It should be embedded across all phases of response – assessment, design, implementation, and evaluation – not as a communications tool, but as a structural commitment to power-sharing.
This shift begins with different questions. Not just “What do people need?”, but also: “Who defines the problem?”; “Whose priorities shape the response?”; and “Who gets to frame what counts as a solution?”.
It requires budgeting for slow, iterative processes that allow for reflection, co-creation, and revision. It means working with local organisations, informal networks, and community leaders not just as implementers or outreach channels, but as design partners and knowledge holders.
At the policy level, participation must go beyond one-off consultations. It must be built into how funding decisions are made, how programmes are held accountable, and how narratives are communicated to the public. This calls for training humanitarian workers not only to conduct needs assessments, but to listen for complexity, contradiction, discomfort – and to recognise these not as problems, but as signals of where the system must evolve.
Displacement is not just about the loss of home. It is also about the loss of narrative control. Restoring that control – by honoring the right to self-representation – is not a luxury, and it is not optional. It is a fundamental responsibility for any humanitarian actor claiming to work in service of dignity and justice.
Towards an ethic of humanitarian listening
In every displacement context I have worked in, one truth holds: Displaced people are already narrating their lives. The question is whether anyone is truly listening – and whether they are prepared to act on what they hear.
If humanitarian systems are to remain relevant, they must go beyond showcasing these voices. They must be reshaped by them.
The Lebanon Displacement Diaries reminds us what becomes possible when narrative space is opened without condition. We meet people not just surviving war and loss, but actively refusing to be reduced to them: a father mourning the walnut tree he tended for decades; a young woman carrying her nargileh pipe into exile, believing she’d be back within days; a domestic worker taking only her Bible before sleeping on the sidewalk. These are not just stories. They are counter-narratives – quiet acts of resistance that challenge who gets to be seen and on whose terms.
If humanitarian systems are to remain relevant, they must go beyond showcasing these voices. They must be reshaped by them. That means listening beyond categories, accepting contradiction, and creating space not only for displaced people to speak, but to speak back to aid systems, institutions, and the frameworks that have too often spoken over them.
Participatory storytelling is not an accessory to effective humanitarian practice. It is central to a humanitarian ethic of listening that understands narrative as a site of power, not just empathy. Restoring narrative control to displaced people is not a symbolic gesture. It is a responsibility.
