Political stability is a normative label in Jordan: instead of describing an empirical reality, it is the political imperative hidden behind policies of reform initiated by the monarchy and Western donors. In this paper I argue that in the past two decades heritage has increasingly been instrumentalized by development actors and the Jordanian monarchy to secure this desired description of a stable oasis in the Middle East. Because of a lack of natural resources, development actors have turned to the over 11.000 archaeological and heritage sites to expand the tourism industry and bolster economic growth. This in an attempt to appease an increasingly frustrated population, which has taken to the streets in recent years to protest against the increased cost of living and lack of proper political representation. This research shows how crucial it is to examine the role of heritage in the broader political economy – specifically, how the past is employed by the both the Hashemite monarchy and international donors such as USAID and the European Union as a resource for maintaining political stability. By building on over 10 months of ethnographic field work in Jordan, archival research, and more than 80 interviews with development actors, I explore how places and pasts are made to fit in global tourism networks through infrastructures that also help maintain power/knowledge discourses. While the political contestation of heritage has been the subject of research since the 1990’s, most literature focuses primarily on contestation surrounding representation, taking ‘heritage’ as a given. This research rather examines the material instrumentalization of remnants of the past in development projects, making them into heritage in an attempt to maintain political stability.