About ARM
Anti-Racism Movement (ARM) organizes alongside migrant workers, including women domestic workers, living and working under the oppressive Kafala system. We work with migrant-led collectives to support their community organizing, collective action, self-advocacy and activism against systemic racism and injustice.

ARM’ main pillars of work include community building through our Migrant Community Center (MCC); working on advocacy, research, campaigning, supporting grassroots initiative building; and through offering legal counseling and casework.

Current Context
ARM has been dealing with various layers of crisis over the past year as a result of the ongoing Israeli Genocide in Palestine, with a slow escalation of aggressions in Lebanon, causing displacement and death over the past year.

On the 23rd of September, starting with an Israeli attack that exploded communication devices across multiple regions in the country, we have been seeing unprecedented escalation. This has expanded into daily raids across the country including in Beirut, killing hundreds of people and injuring thousands more. Mass displacement from the South of Lebanon is causing chaos and overwhelming most available services. We’re already hearing stories of migrant workers in need of shelter, food, transportation and evacuation support.

Expected Challenges and Emergency Response
For migrant communities, an already extremely precarious status in the country is now much more worrying due to the obvious racism in national response plans which often completely ignore the existence of migrant workers altogether, do not account for the barriers to access in mainstream humanitarian responses or offer any protection mechanisms.

Expected challenges for the coming period, based on learnings from previous crises include eviction threats, lack of access to information, abandonment and increased violence from employers, and challenges in finding inclusive shelters.

ARM is already seeing an increased demand on our casework services, a dire need for advocacy and campaigning to push for the inclusion of migrant workers in response plans, and varying needs from our community center members that will require us to adjust our every day work and response mechanisms.

Supporting ARM’s work is now more crucial than ever. You can read more about ARM’s story and values below, and you can check out the highlights of our work over the past year by reading our 2023 Annual Report here: https://armlebanon.org/annual-report-2023/

Our Story
ARM was launched in 2010 as a grassroots collective by young Lebanese feminist activists in collaboration with migrant workers and migrant domestic workers following a racist incident at one of Beirut’s most well-known private beach resorts. ARM activists, using a hidden camera, filmed the administration’s blatant acts of discrimination and segregation. Interest grew in this small volunteer-based movement, members increased, and our interventions grew in scope and scale. Later this year, ARM opened its first MCC and soon after, in 2012, registered officially as an NGO in Lebanon, with a growing staff team in order to increase its capacity to carry out wider operations to fight racist discrimination, abuse and exploitation in Lebanon.

ARM works to achieve social, economic and gender justice for all migrant workers and racialized groups in Lebanon. We recognize the significance of self-organizing and actively support Migrant Domestic Worker leadership in rights activism. A primary focus of ARM is women migrant domestic workers living and working under the oppressive Kafala System, which is used to recruit and hire foreign labor in Lebanon, Jordan and the Gulf states.

Our Values
We adopt a feminist ethics of care in our work, where we value attentiveness, responsibility, responsiveness, and compassion. We also privilege the voices of migrant workers in every aspect of our work. We use a social justice framework as the basis for our approach, upholding fundamental human rights for everyone in our communities. We value the expression and practice of solidarity among all marginalized communities as a necessary alliance against oppressive and unjust systems. We view our everyday work as political and always seek to address the larger social, economic, cultural and policy structures that enable discrimination, abuse, and rights violations. We value the importance of building safe and strong communities that sustain the activism and offer supportive social networks for migrants and their allies.