Long considered at the periphery of Jordanian politics and economic development, northern towns like Mafraq and Ramtha have taken the center stage since the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011/2. The war had brought in thousands of Syrian refugees along with international aid organizations, development experts, state officials and technologies, and transformed the demographic, economic and urban landscape. Our paper presents initial findings from a 2-year-long research project in the Jordanian border zone with Syria combining ethnographic fieldwork and interviews on everyday life in the three northern towns of Irbid, Mafraq and Ramtha. While the war in Syria seems to be confined to the other side of the border, for the inhabitants of these towns, war has an everyday material and practical presence: disrupted economic livelihoods; the menacing figure of “refugees” whose “return” is uncertain; mortar shells that occasionally fall on their towns; a growing narcotics and arms trade, etc. We seek to chart this spectral presence of the Syrian war in Jordan and the margins of (dis-)order it creates viz. the Jordanian state and the operations of political economy, security, and social identity. While this spectral presence of war seems to undermine the power and authority of the state, it also allows their expansion into new domains and at different scales in way that blurs the distinction between order and disorder, state sovereignty and its other(s).