To make sense of the spatial deployment of refugee flows during the Syrian civil war, current displacement needs to be studied in the context of longer mobility histories in the Levant. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Jordan with Syrian refugees originally from remote rural areas in the Homs and Aleppo governorates, this paper highlights continuities between pre-war circular migrations of Syrian peasants to Jordanian borderlands and more recent forced relocations to the same area. By asking how old and new mobilities constitute social relations among Syrian refugees and with their Jordanian hosts, it therefore suggests applying the transnationalism paradigm to the study of the displaced. While drawing inspiration from the “mobility turn” in social sciences, the paper is far from romanticizing mobility nor equating the mobile with the powerful. Rather, it paints a nuanced picture of mobility as an ambivalent lifeline for disenfranchised rural populations in times of peace and conflict. Prior to 2011, seasonal mobility of men and entire families kept precarious rural livelihoods in Syria afloat, while creating a subaltern transnational space under the radar of Jordanian immigration authorities. After the onset of the Syrian civil war, cross-border employment connections oriented flight trajectories and survival tactics in exile. However, research on remittance patterns and refugee labour shows that the closing of borders and humanitarian action have also reconfigured transnational networks. Ultimately, this paper thus argues for rethinking the relationship between power, territory and movement. It shows how violent power relations – conflict, but also more longstanding economic marginalization – put subaltern populations in place, but also into forced movement, and how the latter employ mobility, but also waiting strategies to survive and resist.