Against the backdrop of the remarkable stability of authoritarian rule in Jordan and given Jordan’s position as one of the main recipients of US and European democracy promotion funds worldwide this presentation investigates the question of what US and European democracy promoters in Jordan do when they promote democracy. It provides an ethnographically-informed critique of the kind of liberal worldviews that underlie US and European attempts at democracy promotion and explores the often unintended and contradictory consequences of these. Through analysis of a considerable range of original empirical material, it demonstrates how the interaction of a highly functionalist understanding of supposedly universal ideas of democracy with the local political context of Jordan (re-)produces seeming moral hierarchies, which then serve as an efficient rationale for an ongoing politics of control and intervention. The presentation seeks to challenge the vast body of normative literature on the topic, as well as critical literature which thus far predominantly focuses on either ideational or material factors in the reproduction of democracy promotion as a politics of domination, while however ignoring the forms of interaction between the two. In my work I deploy both discourse and political economy approaches, in order to demonstrate the ways in which US and European efforts at democracy promotion in Jordan produce political logics of control and intervention, and reinforce, rather than threaten authoritarian structures of power in the country, as well as deeply problematic assumptions of cultural difference. Discussing US and European attempts at democracy promotion in Jordan through a focus on practice, my argument is based on approximately 160 semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted in Jordan, Brussels and Washington DC, on access to confidential and/or thus far unpublished documents, on numerous Arabic sources and on participatory observation of various (non-)public events. In the presentation I summarize the key findings of my research. Responding to a positive evaluation of a book proposal submitted to Cambridge University Press last summer, I am about to submit a book manuscript based on my research.

The Middle East is marked by persistently high un- and underemployment, particularly amongst its youth and its university graduates. Notably, unemployment and working poverty as central factors behind the so-called Arab Spring have become even more pronounced in the post-Arab Spring era. In Jordan, much scholarly and practitioners’ attention is being paid to the challenging integration of Syrian refugees, also in its labor market, but little has been said about how measures against Jordan’s raging youth unemployment have adapted to recent trends. The proposed paper looks at Jordan’s policy measures against youth and graduate unemployment over the last decade (2008-2018). It asks not only how effective these measures have been but, especially, which logics have led to their inception, arguing that they were subject to political, not only economic, considerations. To what extent have, back in 2010, Arab Spring protests shifted the balance toward measures that tackle not only unemployment but are also meant to boost the Jordan monarchy’s legitimacy? How has the arrival of Syrian refugees, and with it the arrival of international relief agencies’ humanitarian aid, impacted local labor market policies? While giving in to these political constraints, to what degree could measure still take into account Jordan’s specific labor market challenges of public-private market segregation, brain drain and job creation statistically eaten up by migrant labor? Methodologically, the paper looks at 4-5 policy measures, identifying their main short-term and long-term goals (creating permanent vs. precarious employment) and public perceptions of their successes and shortcomings. Based on primary and secondary sources (with empirical data gathered through semi-structured interviews with policy makers, NGO and aid agency workers as well as persons affected by the labor policies in question), the research also looks for any evidence of roads not taken, i.e., measures that were never implemented or severely rewritten, in order to arrive at a new understanding of Jordan’s labor market.