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“The Government Cannot Be Solved, We’re Improving the Country in Other Ways“: The Moral Economy of Self-Reliance and Ambivalent Attachments in Jordan’s Youthscape
Abstract
Scholars of Jordan and the wider Middle East have used the concept of the moral economy to analyze why, when, and how citizens resist the state. Yet, these accounts fail to explain Jordan's overall pattern whereby the regime, despite continual resistance, repeatedly violates moral economies of rights to subsistence and state provisions without encountering mounting existential challenges. This paper argues that to explain this pattern, we must pay attention to how citizens today navigate diverse moral economies, including a moral economy of self-reliance. The regime routinely states that youth must detach themselves from state care. In a speech, the Crown Prince said, "We live in an era of self-reliance (ʿitmād ʿala al-nafs). Today, there are no public sector jobs ready to absorb this generation." Moreover, the moral economy of self-reliance operates independently of regime discourse in social grammars and notions of Jordanian culture, such as the "culture of shame," which posits that youth prefer to depend on their families rather than taking up jobs considered insufficiently respectable. Drawing on data from ethnography and interviews in regime-organized NGOs (GONGOs) targeting youth, the paper illustrates how even youth deeply critical of the regime often recover a sense of moral rectitude in volunteering and entrepreneurial initiatives where they can redeem themselves as useful citizens amidst economic obsolescence. What is more, youth reject charges that they excessively shun certain occupations seen as insufficiently honorable or desirable (the so-called "culture of shame"). Even Jordanian social movements and their activists, who are at the forefront of articulating the state-centered moral economies, are maneuvering criticism that it is immoral to seek to reestablish a parasitic relationship with the government. This paper contributes to making sense of the evolution of state-society relations in post-welfare autocracies. While many Jordanians continue to resist the state's abandonment of state provisions, youth who face expulsion from labor markets and from respectable avenues to adulthood not only blame the lack of state care but also establish new paths to social respectability and belonging amidst uncertainty. These findings affect how we understand modes of compliance and resistance in contemporary autocracies while helping to rethink the concept of the moral economy beyond simple formulations as being shaped exogenously of the hegemonic forces it seeks to resist.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Jordan
Sub Area
None