In the Neighborhood of War: Everyday specters of (dis-)order in Jordan
Panel 094, 2016 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 18 at 5:45 pm
Panel Description
In popular geo-political imaginaries of the Middle East, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan seems to hold a peculiar position. On the one hand, it is often referred to as "an oasis" or "a bastion" of "peace, security and stability" in "a turbulent region." On the other hand, it is sometimes referred to as an uncertain, precarious state: a country of refugees, lacking a long-standing urban culture, tribal, with limited natural resources and plagued by rampant corruption. In a way, it seems that Jordan has always existed in the neighborhood of war (the wars with Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973; the Lebanese civil war 1975-1990; the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003; the ongoing Syrian war), it is always on the verge of collapse (in 1957, 1970 and during the Arab uprisings), but not really quite there. This specific status, however, speaks as much of geopolitics as of modern, liberal imaginaries of politics and "the political" resting as they are on the distinction between peace and war, order and disorder.
The papers of this panel take this peculiar position of Jordan within political imaginaries as an opportunity to explore how specters of peace and war, order and disorder structure everyday lives in Jordan and beyond. We explore how disorder haunts the present as a trace, a past that needs to be overcome or made justice to (e.g. in the life of refugees) justifying various short-term and long-term humanitarian interventions; how it haunts the present as a possible future (civil war, regional war, terrorist threats) and grounds various kinds of state interventions in the name of security and public order. We investigate how peace and prosperity too haunt the present --for example, through legal reforms, economic investment, reconstruction or development projects. We also seek to interrogate these long-standing distinctions to explore the various ways in which war can also be experienced as orderly and promising, and how the maintenance of peace and order can also be experienced as stifling and restricting, as something to be overcome. Our aim is to open up the study of these founding distinctions to empirical inquiry and investigate how they structure everyday life materially and practically. Jordan's marginal position between order and disorder, peace and war offers an excellent vantage point to do so.
The Jordanian Day-Waged Labor Movement (DWLM) played a central role in the Jordanian Popular Movement (al-Hirak al-Shaʿbi al-Urduni), commonly referred to as Hirak, from 2011 to the end of 2012. The large number of women who were active and took on leading roles in the DWLM contrasts with the absence of women’s rights organizations in the Hirak. I argue that the DWLM was able to attract so many women because it developed a discourse and flexible structure that approached women as part of communities and that prioritized their economic needs. Important lessons about gender inclusive institutional reform can be learned from studying the DWLM’s unique discourse and structure.
Long considered at the periphery of Jordanian politics and economic development, northern towns like Mafraq and Ramtha have taken the center stage since the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011/2. The war had brought in thousands of Syrian refugees along with international aid organizations, development experts, state officials and technologies, and transformed the demographic, economic and urban landscape.
Our paper presents initial findings from a 2-year-long research project in the Jordanian border zone with Syria combining ethnographic fieldwork and interviews on everyday life in the three northern towns of Irbid, Mafraq and Ramtha. While the war in Syria seems to be confined to the other side of the border, for the inhabitants of these towns, war has an everyday material and practical presence: disrupted economic livelihoods; the menacing figure of “refugees” whose “return” is uncertain; mortar shells that occasionally fall on their towns; a growing narcotics and arms trade, etc. We seek to chart this spectral presence of the Syrian war in Jordan and the margins of (dis-)order it creates viz. the Jordanian state and the operations of political economy, security, and social identity. While this spectral presence of war seems to undermine the power and authority of the state, it also allows their expansion into new domains and at different scales in way that blurs the distinction between order and disorder, state sovereignty and its other(s).
Official national and international discourses label Syrian refugee migrations into Jordan as a crisis and catastrophe. These discourses both structure Jordan as a benevolent protector of refugees fleeing war and violence, as well as serve the basis upon which Jordanian and international interventions are based. Such interventions are critical in the lives of Syrians in exile within urban Jordan, as it is through them that they obtain legal status and necessities for life. It is also through these discourses and interventions that Jordan and the international community attempt to make sense of Syrian refugees. However, this is not a one-way process as Syrians use these moments to imagine and make sense of themselves. This paper explores the development and performance of an emergent human rights-based discourse utilized among Syrians residing in Amman, Jordan. While this discourse may be originating from interactions between Syrian "refugees" and national Jordanian and international governmental and humanitarian organizations--interactions in which refuges are "informed" of their legal rights and status in exile--this paper argues that such discourse is being translated in a process of "vernacularization" by Syrians. As members of these Syrian communities speak among and between each other, they interpret and make this rights-talk their own, thereby asserting their continued humanity and place in both Jordan and the larger global community. This talk permeates all facets of life, emerges in a variety of forms, and takes a multitude of shapes: ranging from conversations regarding the meaning of "refugee," meta-discursive debates on the Arabic language, the telling of jokes, to Internet banter and memes. Based upon 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Syrian and Jordanian residents of Amman, this paper utilizes anthropological and linguistic theories to explore this discourse and its broader meaning, ultimately interrogating what the use of this language says about how Syrians experience the Jordanian nation and make order out of the disorder of life in exile from Syria.
While Amman is typically described a transit station within the broader post-2003 Iraqi diaspora, about 100,000 Iraqis now call the city home and have no plans to either immigrate abroad as refugees or return to their home country. This impermanent residence is especially challenging for young people, who refer to their condition as hadiga (literally “a garden.”) In this paper, I describe the distinctive practices of hadiga, characterizing it as an orientation to urban space and time through which attachment to both host nation and homeland are negotiated. The impression of Jordan’s static stability and the chaos of events in Iraq is contrasted with traversals of the disorderly landscape of the West Amman, where Iraqi restaurants and cafes in turn reference the collective memory of Baghdad as a modernist utopia. Through ethnographic description of these scales of order and eventfulness, the paper demonstrates how temporalized processes of urban settlement illuminate broader transformations in sociality arising from mass migration in the region.
