In my paper, I will discuss the concept of women’s citizenship in Jordan in the context of political ‘empowerment’ programmes in international development. These programmes aim to encourage Jordanian women’s civic engagement, for instance their involvement in local development processes, their advocacy towards state institutions, their involvement in political parties, or their taking on leadership roles in community development. These are then labelled ‘citizen empowerment’ projects, leading me to ask, what kind of making-into-citizens do these organisations conceive for the participants? Guided by an understanding of citizenship and political subjectivity in the context of governmentality, I want to look at how Jordanian women are implicated in discourses around citizenship and empowerment. I argue that these development interventions aim to produce docile citizens as governable subjects, but also create structures of political optimism for these women which turn cruel as they wear out politically desiring citizens. Based on qualitative research with multiple organisations in Jordan and Europe, I will discuss how women’s citizenship is constructed, imagined, and negotiated in a neoliberal context outside of the global north, with a particular focus on how non-Jordanian development organisations construct Jordanian women’s citizenship for the participants in ‘empowerment’ projects. This allows me to de-centre the state in studying citizenship and focus on other actors implicated in experiences of lived citizenship by way of interrogating the functions and implications of development discourses and practices originating from development actors situated in the global north rather than its recipients in the global south. In my paper, I will therefore critically investigate the traveling of political categories such as citizenship from the global north to the global south through development work and the implications of constructing political categories such as citizenship for women in the global south.