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Waves of Protest and Activism in Jordan After the Arab Spring: Changing Protests and Changing State Responses
Abstract
Drawing on extensive field research and interviews with both protesters and government officials, this paper provides a comparative analysis of four main streams of protest in Jordan in the years after the regional Arab Spring: (1) The revival of activism in opposition to Jordan’s gas deal with Israel, (2) The 2018 Ramadan protests and general strike, (3) Protests in 2019 against the U.S. ‘Deal of the Century’, and (4) The 2019 teachers strike and the protests that followed. In each case I examine why the protests occurred, how the state responded, and how the tactics of both protesters and the state (including security forces) changed to meet the new challenge. The paper shows how activists have attempted to evolve and adjust their ‘protest repertoires’ to more effectively mobilize, persuade, and potentially change state policy, but it also shows that government tolerance has steadily declined in the post-Arab Spring era – especially since the 2018 mass protests and what many saw as a regional ‘Arab Spring 2.0’ (including especially in Algerian, Iraq, Lebanon, and Sudan). Jordan’s 2018 protests crossed ethnic, religious, class, gender, and geographic lines and led, I argue, to a series of “What if” questions at the highest levels of the Jordanian state. What if those protests had been about something more sensitive than taxes? What if this kind of nation-wide protest had coalesced into a movement against the regime itself? Influenced and worried by both regional and domestic waves of unrest, the Jordanian state has hardened already existing ‘red lines’ for activism, but also added new ones, creating an ever greater rift between state and society – a rift that dangerously resembles one from ten years ago: when protests exploded across the region, toppling multiple regimes.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Jordan
Sub Area
Middle East/Near East Studies