While the majority of Syrian refugees are hosted in the Middle East, the question of sovereignty for major refugee receiving states is largely neglected by policymakers and academics. Like states in the Global North, Jordan has concerns over porous borders and international involvement, both of which are theorized to contribute to the erosion of state sovereignty. Jordan must simultaneously accept millions of refugees while maintaining final authority over internal and external affairs of the state. Given the challenges of refugee reception, how does Jordan maintain sovereignty? To answer this question, I build upon theoretical literature that identifies sovereignty as a social construct. I examine empirical questions that speak to the components of sovereignty including territory, authority, population, and recognition (Biersteker and Weber 1996). I operationalize Jordanian sovereignty by identifying policies, practices, and performances that permit the state to (a) maintain final authority, (b) define its territory, (c) create insiders and outsiders within its population, and (d) promote international recognition. Simultaneously, I consider bottom-up effects by analyzing how the quotidian actions of refugees and citizens influence the behaviors of government officials. Through in-depth interviews in Arabic and English with refugees, citizens, and UN and government officials, I investigate the effects of the “refugee burden” on Jordanian sovereignty.

Back and forth circulation between Jordan and Iraq has been an important aspect of the livelihood and, at times, a thwarted aspiration of many Iraqis displaced to Jordan before and after the 2003 change of regime in their home county. Even after seeking security and establishing a foothold in Jordan, including by claiming refugee status, individuals have been pursuing familial strategies and sought to access economic, professional, educational and other resources in Iraq. My presentation will first explore why cross-border mobility is important for displaced Iraqis, and why the relevant opportunity and security context they consider encompasses both Jordan and Iraq despite continued instability at home. To exert this dimension of their agency, people must negotiate different regimes of sovereignty and related legal statuses. I will therefore examine the web and intersections of legal and administrative constraints governing the movements of Iraqis between the two countries. These include Iraqi government policies on emigration and emigrants – particularly with relations to Iraqis living in Jordan or striving to exit Iraq towards Jordan; the domestic policies of Jordan on the entry, stay and work of Iraqis; and the humanitarian regime that categorizes many Iraqis in Jordan as refugees thereby frustrating their aspirations to move temporarily across the border with Iraq. That refugees may actively seek to maintain physical relations with their home country contradicts a conceptualization of refugeeness informed by international legal norms, a perspective prevalent across the social sciences. Thus, recognizing that refugees as agents may pursue security, livelihoods and futures concomitantly in their host and origin countries poses theoretical and methodological challenges which I will lay out in conclusion. This presentation will draw on fifteen years of research engagement with Iraqi migration, and include interviews with Iraqi refugees, migrants and non-migrants, government officials, and employees of humanitarian organizations in Jordan and Iraq, together with the examination of official documents.

The modern history of Jordan as a nation-state is deeply intertwined with its status as a host to major refugee movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Different systems of administrations and legal frameworks were constructed for different flows of refugees. The frameworks depended on the external and internal politics of the time, ethnic and religious relations between host and refugees, and the ability of refugees to blend in. Each system that was developed then became a model that was modified later with new refugee movements into, and new politics in, Jordan. Models include integration, separation, absorption, and exclusion: integration, meaning citizenship; separation, designating camps and distinct services for refugees; temporary absorption, signaling inclusion of refugees into public services but without citizenship; and exclusion, marking a clear limitation of public services and legal protections. Based on a review of refugee policies and historical sources, the paper shows how these models have shifted over time in light of national policies, international agreements and disagreements, and domestic considerations. Studying the policies over the passage of time from the creation of the state to the present allows us to see how Jordan, as it became independent from colonial rule and developed relations with surrounding states, moved from inclusive policies toward refugees to policies of separation and exclusion that allow refugees to live there, but not access agreed upon international norms for the displaced or become citizens. In 2015, Jordan was reported to have the second-highest per capita rate of refugees in the world, around 10% of its total population. Using over 250 interviews collected with Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian, Sudanese and Somali refugees in Jordan in the last seven years, this paper explicates the ways the current models act as exclusionary or based on a temporary absorption scheme. The experiences of these refugees in Jordan in the present reveals that the current models of refugee management that are in place are a result of international aid regimes and national policies that create hierarchies of aid based on nationality and citizenship. Coupled with and encouraged by international aid funding and programming targeting certain refugee populations, Jordan has developed varying policies toward refugees based on their nationality, revealing hierarchical and discriminatory treatment of refugees that are becoming the norm worldwide.

As Palestinian refugees in Jordan, ex-Gazans are an anomaly. Unlike Palestinian displaced in 1948, they never acquired Jordanian citizenship. Thus for the last 50 years, they have lived as stateless “foreign residents” with few opportunities for challenging their status. The lack of Jordanian nationality has limited their mobility socially, economically, and politically. As non-nationals they cannot, for example, own property, vote, or work in the public sector. While many ex-Gazans live as urban refugees spread throughout Amman, about 30,000 remain in the “Gaza” camp in the northern city of Jarash. Established after the 1967 War as a temporary shelter, the camp is now a sizable urban slum managed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and the Department of Palestinian Affairs. Compared with other Palestinian camps, the Gaza camp is marked by the poverty of its inhabitants and inadequate infrastructure. Situated as liminal subjects within what Ilana Feldman calls the humanitarian condition of long-term displacement, these refugees face considerable challenges in securing meaningful livelihoods. Through the analytic of mobility, this paper examines the everyday survival strategies of ex-Gaza refugees. Grounded in six months of ethnographic research in the Gaza camp including participant observation and in-depth interviews, this paper considers the agential capacities of stateless refugees as they understand, confront, and overcome the limits of non-national status. Rather than pursuing an analysis that privileges practices of encroachment or resistance, this paper focuses on the ordinary acts of repetition that constitute a meaningful life in a zone of abandonment. It argues that everyday life among long-term refugees reflects practical strategies of social and economic survival that enable particular forms of mobility. Where the routinization of life is fraught with the precariousness of statelessness, this paper argues that the simple ability to repeat social and economic practices represents an agential accomplishment. Moreover, this paper suggests that statelessness is not experienced in a singular way. In both the effects of statelessness and the strategies deployed to overcome them, particular iterations of gender are constituted and enacted. Statelessness thus intersects with the projects of masculinity and femininity in ways that give the reproduction of everyday life a distinctly gendered quality. By situating the analysis of mobility within the everyday practices of survival, this paper underscores how ordinary life reflects forms of agency beyond the registers of resistance and rupture.

As the presence of Syrian refugees in Jordan has moved from a context of emergency response to protracted displacement, humanitarian and governmental attention has increasingly focused on the issue of refugee livelihoods. Jordan announced its intention to ‘turn the refugee crisis into a development opportunity,’ and to allow Syrians residing in host communities to be formally integrated into the labor market. Camp residents, however, approximately 20 percent of registered Syrian refugees in the country, have largely been excluded from these schemes. This paper explores the economic opportunities, strategies and challenges of Syrian refugees living in a context of encampment in Jordan. In contrast to scholarship that explores refugee camps as spaces of exception, or as spaces of humanitarian care and control, this paper analyzes Jordan’s Syrian refugee camps as spaces of economic activity, and tools of economic policy. But rather than following economic analyses that debate whether refugees are a ‘burden’ or a ‘benefit’ to the host state, it explores the economic lives and aspirations of Syrian refugees and the strategies for economic livelihoods that they pursue in camps. It argues that Syrians’ attempts to exercise economic agency challenge the agendas of governmental and humanitarian actors in the camps, even challenging the very notion of what a camp ‘should’ be. The ensuing contestations reveal Jordanian governmental actors’ visions for a camp as a site of refugee passivity, and their attempts to align economic activity within the camps to suit governmental interests. Simultaneously, humanitarian agencies attempt to create camp spaces that are ‘innovative,’ ‘self-reliant’ and ‘entrepreneurial.’ Refugees’ attempts to live with economic dignity often proceed in spite of, rather than facilitated by, the projects of authorities. The application of a gendered lens, which recognizes that Syrian men and women are differently situated in, and hailed by, these agendas, offers deeper insights into the dynamics being explored. In particular, the contestations must be understood within a context in which work occupies a central, even defining, role in the construction of Syrian masculinities, which have been challenged by exile. This paper is based on twelve months of fieldwork in Jordan, which included extensive participant-observation in Za’tari Refugee Camp, and interviews with humanitarian actors, NGOs, and Syrian refugees residing in both camps and host communities.