Jordan’s long history of refugee reception has brought with it a pervasive dependence on international institutions, most notably the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Today, Jordan is a hub for hundreds of international humanitarian organizations that operate inside the country and others that use Jordan as a home base for operations in the region (including operations in Syria and Iraq). The presence of these agencies is so pervasive that Jordan has become a humanitarian testing ground for innovating generalizable best practices. However, such a dominant presence of international organizations introduces challenges to governance and state authority. As these international institutions provide millions of refugees with access to education, health care, basic needs, and even employment, they must necessarily work with—and often against—government agencies. How do state officials practice, negotiate, and concede authority? What are the implications of these international institutions on state sovereignty? To answer these questions, I focus on the contemporary response to Syrian displacement (from 2011 to 2020), which necessarily includes addressing the evolving needs of other refugee groups as well. In this analysis, I draw from 16 months of ethnographic observations in Jordan over a four-year period from July 2014 to July 2018. I also use 175 interviews I conducted in Arabic and English with Syrian refugees, Jordanian citizens, and government, United Nations, and non-governmental organization officials. I find that state officials make short-term concessions as they pursue long-term interests. I contribute to the scholarship on state capacity by addressing how local decision-making practices involve international actors.

This paper assesses why states adopt policies toward refugees that say one thing in law while doing another in practice. States may offer more rights in practice than law; e.g., in 1968, noncitizen Palestinian refugees from Gaza received access to temporary Jordanian passports, despite the absence of a law concerning these passports. On the other hand, states may offer more rights in law than practice; e.g., in 1990, despite clear legal protections from nationality revocations, government officials revoked the nationality of many Palestinian-Jordanians living on the East Bank since 1967. Why would a state implement rights at certain times and not others? Diverging from existing literature on policy implementation, I argue that states may say one thing and do another, not because of limited capacity, but because it suits leaders’ interests. I find that competing pressures on executive political leaders from key regime supporters can drive the gap between law and implementation in refugee policies. Specifically, when the dominant stakeholders in a policy area—such as the largest foreign donor and strongest domestic security leaders—share similar policy preferences, it is easier for the leader to implement the law: a situation I describe as coherence. However, when these actors’ policy preferences differ, the leader can placate both sides by allowing the policy’s law and implementation to diverge, with the law pleasing one side and the implementation suiting the other: a situation I call intentional ambiguity. This paper leverages Jordan’s variation in refugee rights over time and across groups to present cases of coherence and intentional ambiguity in the civil and political rights of different Palestinian refugee groups, i.e., those who arrived on Jordan’s East Bank in: 1948, 1967 from the West Bank, and 1967 from the Gaza Strip. I use process tracing and extensive primary source data to code and analyze these policies. These data include over 800 British and American archival files on Jordan’s internal political affairs from 1946–73 that I compiled as well as over 200 interviews with ministers, security leaders, lawyers, refugees, and others that I conducted in English and Arabic during 14 months of fieldwork in Jordan from 2016–19. Overall, this paper contributes to the migration, citizenship, and policymaking literatures by revealing a political strategy hidden beneath apparent institutional weakness and highlighting the importance of examining rights in both law and practice to capture refugee experiences accurately.

In 2012, thousands of Syrian refugees began arriving in Jordan as a result of the Syrian Civil War. Refugee crises are generally predicted to strain services and potentially raise the threat of state-directed social action at the local level (Zhou 2019; Chambers 1986). Yet municipalities closest to the Syrian border have not crumbled under the pressures of hosting an additional population. Instead, many municipalities have embarked on development projects, and mayors touted their increased power and relationships with international actors during my interviews in 2018 and 2019. Simultaneously, mayors in municipalities with fewer refugees reported feeling neglected and struggling to meet constituent needs. What explains this divergent situation? How do local elected officials respond to refugee crises? Recent research has examined the utilization of refugees by developing state governments as a tool to bargain for political concessions and economic assistance on the international stage (Kelberer 2017; Tsourapas 2019). Yet there is limited research on the effects of refugee crises and international aid on political dynamics at the subnational level (Betts et. al 2017). I argue that in Jordan mayors actively utilize refugee presences to obtain fiscal assistance from international sources and achieve their policy objectives. I theorize that refugee presences disrupt existing distributive dynamics between local governments and the central state by introducing an additional actor—the international community—into the service provision landscape. I argue that assistance during refugee crises is distinct from development assistance, which is often coopted or redirected spatially by the central state, due to the threat of social unrest by citizens in refugee-hosting areas. Instead, humanitarian assistance becomes directly subject to the local politics of refugee-hosting municipalities and the agendas of mayors and local elites—whether corrupt or aimed at improving service provision. Simultaneously, aid allocation towards refugee-dense municipalities has bred resentment and an effort by mayors in less refugee-dense municipalities to inflate refugee presences to also extract assistance. To test my theory, I use process-tracing through more than 40 interviews with Jordanian mayors, central government officials, and international assistance providers, a quantitative dataset, and secondary source analysis over five months of fieldwork in 2018 and 2019. My research demonstrates the transformation of Syrian refugees into bargaining chips in both refugee-dense and refugee-scarce municipalities, and the transformation of spatial power relationships in a developing refugee-hosting country. By doing so, it fills a gap in the literature on the behavior of subnational actors during refugee crises.

Cash-for-work (CFW) has long been used as a short-term relief program that provides temporary cash assistance through jobs. In doing so, these programs invigorate local economies affected by natural and manmade disasters. However, aid actors ranging from the likes of the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) to Oxfam are using—and advocating for—these programs in protracted crisis contexts, like Jordan, where one would assume long-term, sustainable solutions might be more appropriate. This paper subsequently asks: What explains why organizations in Jordan’s aid sector are pursuing CFW programs in protracted conditions, and what are the effects of these programs on the communities and individuals they target? Drawing upon 95 interviews and 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork with aid workers employed in Jordan’s aid sector from 2017–2018, I find that aid organizations strategically use CFW to negotiate the domestic refugee context in terms of the uncertainties they face working as both “relief” and “development” actors in a protracted crisis situation and in an authoritarian landscape. CFW signals to donor and government actors that organizations are committed to investing in local economies in Jordan (i.e., providing “development”) but will maintain support for Syrian and other refugees—who are the main target groups of the program—despite the protracted context (i.e., providing “relief”). However, I also find that organizations’ attempts to use CFW to mediate competing interests among donors, beneficiaries, and the Jordanian government create particular forms of labor arrangements that exacerbate precarity among refugee and host communities in ways that often are unanticipated. I situate my findings in comparison to welfare-to-work programs in the United States and other democratic contexts. In doing so, I extend understandings of how the “welfare state” operates within ambiguous terrains of citizenship and in authoritarian landscapes. This paper therefore nuances explanations related to the sources and processes in aid operations that contribute to, and reproduce, social inequalities and hierarchies at the national and transnational levels.