Based on over four years of ethnographic research with various groups that made up the Jordanian Popular Movement 2011/2012 (al-Hirak al Sha’bi al Urduni, Hirak in short) this paper examines the concept of economic sovereignty. Economic sovereignty was at the heart of popular demands in so called Arab Spring protests. I examine the discourse and practice of protestors in the Jordanian Hirak. I ask what we can learn from protestors in Jordan about the ability of people living in the global south to truly have sovereignty over the economic aspects of their life and the economic foreign policy of their countries. One of the core demands of protestors across the Arab world and in Jordan has been the ability of people to have -what I have termed- ‘economic sovereignty’. Yet, none of the literature on the ‘Arab Spring’ has been able to capture this core demand. In this paper I draw on the experiences of activists from different factions of the Jordanian Hirak to develop the concept of economic sovereignty. This paper contributes to the discussion started by David Held and others about the impossibility of democratic decision making at an age of globalization when most decisions are taken by non-state actors on the international level. Drawing on the discourse of protestors, I argue centrally that economic sovereignty needs to be theorized and understood for the people to be able to truly change the regime.

Since Jordan’s first effort in economic planning—the 5 Year Program for Economic Development (1962-1967)—policy elites have consistently defined external dependence as the most salient impediment to growth, prosperity, and national self-realization. Despite the consistency with which they have sounded this alarm, however, the policy responses produced by Jordanian planners have done little to extract Jordan from its dependent condition (and from the lower middle income trap this condition prefigures). Under King Abdullah, in fact, Jordan’s dependency has only worsened, as economic openness, business friendliness, and market-dominated trade, industrial, and investment policies have actually worsened Jordan’s terms of trade, decreased the complexity of its export basket, and left the government’s revenue strategy disproportionately reliant upon a regressive and punitive general sales tax regime. This paper will attempt to answer why Abdullah’s development and budgetary strategies have failed to deliver, both on their own terms and in terms of the larger social welfare of the Jordanian people. My argument will posit that the King’s neoliberal policy approach neglects the effects born of Jordan’s late development, of its bourgeoisie’s rent-seeking tendencies, and of its semi-peripheral position within the contemporary system of global capitalism. This neglect, in turn, insures that this market-oriented policy mix will reproduce Jordan’s dependency and underdevelopment. Using mixed methods and rigorous statistical analysis, I will first show why various FDI-dependent investment plans have primarily resulted in an influx of Gulf capital (the vast majority of which is allocated into speculative non-tradables), thereby failing to deliver the technological and knowledge-based transfers that were promised. Next turning to firm level analysis, I will demonstrate why the export-oriented enterprises being supported across a constellation of Special Economic Zones and Qualifying Industrial Zones produce neither high-sophistication goods nor decent jobs for Jordanians. Finally, combining historical class analysis with a statistical review of the investment behavior of Jordan’s domestic financial sector, I will show that the conservatism and rent-seeking tendencies of the bourgeoisie elite–an essential regime ally—continues through the present day. As banks and financial institutions continue to prefer the guaranteed (and healthy) returns of government bonds above risk-based, profit-seeking investment in productive sectors (especially in R+D), they deprive the economy of the capital needed to generate mass employment, high skilled jobs, and technological upgrading.

In Jordan, w?s?a is considered both a pervasive form of corruption, and an ordinary practice of interpersonal care, and a key modality for social and political ascendancy. On the one hand, Jordanians complain that w?s?a causes social injustice by undermining the rule of law, and giving unequal access to benefits and public resources to citizens who are, in principle, equal. On the other hand, even those who condemn w?s?a as a form of corruption and injustice, seek it to redress existing injustices. Similarly, despite its criminalization since 2006, there is a legal ambivalence around when w?s?a is to be considered a form of corruption, and when it is an ordinary social practice that does not constitute a criminal offense. This paper takes these moral ambivalences around w?s?a to revisit dominant understandings of social justice, both among Jordanians, and in social scientific literature. In this view relations of patronage and patrimonial authority are pitted against relations of citizenship and rational-legal authority, and the two are project as a teleological move into modernity, progress, and development. In this framework, w?s?a can signal anything from incomplete modernization, a modality of political domination, or an impediment to development. By contrast, I argue that moral and legal ambivalences around the practice of w?s?a are better understood as a structural contradiction within the rule of law itself, and its promise of equality. I develop my argument by way of ethnographic accounts several sites of political patronage, among members of parliament, the Royal Court, and the state bureaucracy, as well legal debates around the criminalization of the practice.

This paper analyses repertoires of claim-making in two provincial capitals in the Jordanian South. It addresses both the geographical unevenness of state capacity made evident in the cities of Ma‘an and Aqaba and the forms of contention that emerge in its wake. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, the paper examines routine discussions and extraordinary episodes of protest that address the quality and quantity of welfare services provided by Jordan’s state apparatus. After unpacking the administrative relationship of these cities to central institutions based in Amman, I attempt to show how ordinary citizens relate to the state through their rhetoric, protests and patterns of action regarding an ever-diminishing set of public services. Surprisingly, many see their marginalization not just as the product of a negligent, brutal or corrupt state but rather, as a direct product of its relative absence, by design or disregard. Drawing on the work of Lisa Wedeen and Michelle Obeid, I argue that the main product of this geographical unevenness is a general atmosphere of cynical ambivalence, or what Lauren Berlant (2011) terms cruel optimism, a collective ‘structure of feeling’ that permeates Jordanian politics (Williams 1977). The uneven exercise of state power engenders not simply failure, corruption or abandonment but a pervasive ambiguity that complicates practices of dissent in the Hashemite Kingdom. By actively denouncing certain governmental actions while demanding a more extensive set of benevolent interventions, these citizens can sometimes succeed in calling attention to their plight. Yet they also reinforce their reliance on the very institutions that foster their marginality. Crucially, claim-making in the Jordanian south entangles citizens in (re)producing the state, despite ample skepticism regarding its functions and operations. As a result, and notwithstanding their seemingly oppositional nature, claims on the state may very well work to reinforce the power relations ordinary citizens criticize and seek to contest.