While scholarship on Arab nationalist mobilization in the 20th century has demonstrated openness to bottom-up approaches that center non-elite subjects, a predominant focus on statecraft remains in most of the literature on Pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s. By contrast, this paper focuses on Palestinian grassroots mobilization to reframe Pan-Arabism’s decline as a contingent and relative phenomenon, exploring instead the intersections between the waning of secular, populist, and transnational Pan-Arabism and the emergence of new mobilizing projects centered on class and the nation-state. This paper examines the rise and fall of Pan-Arabist political organizing in Palestinian refugee camps in mid-20th century Jordan and Lebanon. To do so, the paper presents two social biographies of activists associated with the Arab Nationalists’ Movement (ANM), the organizational predecessor of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). These twin social biographies draw upon extensive archival research in periodicals and party pamphlets, published collections of ANM-linked documents and memoirs of former cadres, and interviews with former associates of the Movement, to examine how regional and global political shifts intersected with quotidian pressures of class, region, family ties, and social networks in the lives of Palestinian refugees. This grounding in oral testimonies enables the paper to compensate for some of the archival destruction that has restricted the study of Palestinian popular politics, allowing the paper to explore the changing dynamics of mid-20th century political organizing despite the limited accessible archival traces left by banned movements like the ANM. Both social biographies highlight the role of ANM-linked institutions such as presses, clubs, and youth groups in recruiting members and mobilizing allies between the MAN’s founding in 1951 and its 1970 dissolution. Not only did these institutions shape the political culture of Palestinian refugee camps: the paper argues that they enabled the Movement to transform into a grassroots political force by expanding its social bases. The paper also interrogates the ANM’s early turn to guerilla struggle and the growing fragmentation between the Movement’s Palestinian, Jordanian, and Lebanese networks, showcasing how even ideologically grounded activists’ political choices reflected the structuring influence of nation-state boundaries and subjectivities of class, gender, locality, and sect.

Feminist scholars and activists have for many years pressured policy makers to address gender inequalities in their policy responses. As a result, gender is increasingly being mainstreamed into both humanitarian and development policies carried out by the United Nations as well as other donors. Drawing on field work in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey that included interviews with a range of international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as staff members from a variety of United Nations organizations, this paper explores the degree to which and how gender has been mainstreamed into the Syria response, with a particular focus on the 'livelihoods' component of the response, which focuses on income generation for refugees. The analysis focuses on the role that both local and global structural factors play in shaping the response, with comparisons being made across the three country contexts, as well as a broader focus on the importance of understanding existing outcomes in the context of neoliberal globalization. A related emphasis will be on challenges associated with the process of implementing a gender mainstreaming agenda in a context that is increasingly being defined as straddling the humanitarian and development divide, in light of the fact that the Syria crisis is nearing almost a decade. Whereas humanitarian approaches tend to be more short term and involve providing for refugees basic needs, because of the protracted nature of the crisis, more emphasis is now being placed on creating employment for example. This paper also will look at challenges that have arisen during this conflict, and how UN entities and donors have adjusted their approach over time with an emphasis on how both NGOs and UN entities have tackled pressures to ‘gender mainstream’ in a political context that is highly fraught.

The international development community in Jordan is focused on increasing women’s role in the labor force through information and communication technology (ICT) enabled home-based businesses and sharing economy applications because ICT-enabled economic participation allows women the flexibility to work from home on their schedules, overcoming restrictions to movement and limitations on time due to expectations about their role as homemaker-caregiver. Based on ten months of fieldwork in the Kingdom from 2018-2019 and three additional months of fieldwork in summer 2020, the paper examines the role of ICT-enabled economic participation in women’s actualized empowerment. The research broadly reveals that engaging with ICT-enabled work has numerous intangible benefits for women’s empowerment and changing perceptions of the value of women’s work in Jordanian society. However, the research shows that it is challenging to assess the direct, quantifiable economic benefits of women’s ICT-enabled work. It shows that ICTs provide a minimal amount of support for women’s home-based businesses and microenterprises, but that access to and use of ICTs in and of itself for these economic activities is not sufficient to overcome the numerous structural obstacles to women’s economic participation. The paper recommends that future development interventions seek to transform the enabling environment for women’s economic participation in Jordan and address the myriad of problems constraining women’s economic participation, including gender and social norms and inadequate transportation, logistics, and financial technology (fintech) infrastructure. To do this, it recommends a comprehensive approach to support women’s economic participation in Jordan, whereby ICTs can be a component of enabling women’s economic participation and market access, but where multiple interventions are necessary to change the environment that limits women in Jordan and limits the expected benefits from their economic participation.

Authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are oft-regarded as suppressive of the possibility for public deliberation, and especially of women’s participation in such discussions. In recent years, however, scholars have endeavored to challenge the narrative of such contexts as necessarily quelling spaces for civil expression and have therefore illustrated the existence of associational life within such states. As a result, the concept of state feminism has been variably applied by scholars to understand the alliances between national policy entities and female activists, an analytic move that is particularly evident in research concerning the circulation of empowerment discourses within authoritarian, postcolonial environments. Yet that formulation disregards the complex engagements between civil society institutions – namely, non-government women’s organizations – and emergent forms of transnational governance. In response, this paper examines how such associations interact with international development interventions, and suggests that development feminism provides a new framework through which those entanglements and their effects can be critically analyzed. Drawing upon thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between September 2018 and December 2019 in Amman, Jordan with three non-governmental women’s organizations located in the capital’s urban core, this paper offers a discussion of how the female members of those associations act within the third-sector created by international donor funding, and the implications of those practices on the shape of women’s organizational activism in Jordan. That is, this paper explores the implications of non-governmental women’s organizations’ adaptations to and envelopment within international development machineries. This paper argues that despite its professionalized equivocality, the possibility manifested in the logics of development constitutes a powerful imaginary for civil society, one that has become central to the operation of non-governmental women’s organizations in postcolonial spaces. In doing so, this paper moves away from discussions of the national state’s symbolic commitments to ‘women’s interests’ to center the relationships between non-governmental women’s organizations and international development institutions in the arrangement of civil society. [314 / 400]