In my paper, I will discuss the concept of women’s citizenship in Jordan in the context of political ‘empowerment’ programmes in international development. These programmes aim to encourage Jordanian women’s civic engagement, for instance their involvement in local development processes, their advocacy towards state institutions, their involvement in political parties, or their taking on leadership roles in community development. These are then labelled ‘citizen empowerment’ projects, leading me to ask, what kind of making-into-citizens do these organisations conceive for the participants? Guided by an understanding of citizenship and political subjectivity in the context of governmentality, I want to look at how Jordanian women are implicated in discourses around citizenship and empowerment. I argue that these development interventions aim to produce docile citizens as governable subjects, but also create structures of political optimism for these women which turn cruel as they wear out politically desiring citizens. Based on qualitative research with multiple organisations in Jordan and Europe, I will discuss how women’s citizenship is constructed, imagined, and negotiated in a neoliberal context outside of the global north, with a particular focus on how non-Jordanian development organisations construct Jordanian women’s citizenship for the participants in ‘empowerment’ projects. This allows me to de-centre the state in studying citizenship and focus on other actors implicated in experiences of lived citizenship by way of interrogating the functions and implications of development discourses and practices originating from development actors situated in the global north rather than its recipients in the global south. In my paper, I will therefore critically investigate the traveling of political categories such as citizenship from the global north to the global south through development work and the implications of constructing political categories such as citizenship for women in the global south.

Political stability is a normative label in Jordan: instead of describing an empirical reality, it is the political imperative hidden behind policies of reform initiated by the monarchy and Western donors. In this paper I argue that in the past two decades heritage has increasingly been instrumentalized by development actors and the Jordanian monarchy to secure this desired description of a stable oasis in the Middle East. Because of a lack of natural resources, development actors have turned to the over 11.000 archaeological and heritage sites to expand the tourism industry and bolster economic growth. This in an attempt to appease an increasingly frustrated population, which has taken to the streets in recent years to protest against the increased cost of living and lack of proper political representation. This research shows how crucial it is to examine the role of heritage in the broader political economy – specifically, how the past is employed by the both the Hashemite monarchy and international donors such as USAID and the European Union as a resource for maintaining political stability. By building on over 10 months of ethnographic field work in Jordan, archival research, and more than 80 interviews with development actors, I explore how places and pasts are made to fit in global tourism networks through infrastructures that also help maintain power/knowledge discourses. While the political contestation of heritage has been the subject of research since the 1990’s, most literature focuses primarily on contestation surrounding representation, taking ‘heritage’ as a given. This research rather examines the material instrumentalization of remnants of the past in development projects, making them into heritage in an attempt to maintain political stability.

This paper situates current trends in American humanitarian aid in Iraq within a broader history of international minority protection, considering how Western powers created and continue to selectively apply minorities treaties and international conventions such as “Responsibility to Protect” to advance their interests both at home and abroad. Though presented as a way of defending the rights of disempowered entities, and often executed on the ground by idealist bureaucrats, this type of interference often contributes to pre-existing tensions between different groups within heterogeneous nations such as Iraq. Recent Trump administration actions to directly interfere in USAID allocation of funds to Christian communities in Iraq recall British moves to host Assyrian Christian refugees in Iraq during World War I and employ them in the colonial army known as the Levies. In both cases, Western economic and political policy aims in the country have coexisted and frequently overlapped with a simplistic dichotomy, one that views Iraq’s non-Muslim minorities in general, and Christians in particular, as a particularly-aggrieved population in need of special protection. The goal of this paper is to better understand (1) how foreign intervention in Iraq has created and exacerbated tensions between various ethnic and religious groups and (2) the roots and manifestations of favoritism towards particular groups. In addition to consulting the British archives and information from current media and research organizations as well as USAID reports, the authors conducted interviews with current and former U.S. government employees working in Iraq, and analyzed survey data on how the Iraqi population views U.S. foreign aid. While overall aid to Iraq decreased under the Trump administration, the newly launched Genocide Recovery and Persecution Response program allocated $354 million to ethnic minorities in the country who were targeted by ISIS, continuing a trend of geographic concentration in the distribution of aid in Iraq. Aspects of Trump administration policies may significantly shift with the change in presidential administrations, but the billions of dollars allocated under these recovery efforts will continue to influence developments and societal relationships within Iraq for years to come.

In the past few years, the role that development aid plays in negotiations on border politics that MENA countries undertake with the EU and its member states has attracted a great deal of attention in both academic and activist circles. The most widespread assumption is that MENA countries leverage on their status as ‘countries of origin’ and of ‘transit’ for migrant and refugee people to obtain additional development and humanitarian funding from their counterparts in the North, in reward for their engagement in border control cooperation. Building on border practice literature, this paper argues that such an assumption overlooks the variety of ways in which MENA countries maneuver aid to assert their power vis-à-vis the EU and its member states in border politics. Methodologically, the paper builds on extensive qualitative research conducted in Morocco between 2016 and 2019, specifically on the analysis of primary documents compiled by aid actors and interviews with Moroccan and European aid workers, representatives of Moroccan authorities and migrant people that benefit from development projects. I analyse the implementation of three different development projects to highlight three ways in which Moroccan authorities utilize aid as an instrument of border diplomacy: facilitation, if they actively collaborate with European states and international organisations to streamline the implementation of a certain development programme; negotiation, when they challenge the approach adopted by Global North actors in the allocation of aid; obstruction, in the case that they delay or prevent the implementation of a certain migration-related development project. I show how each of these tactics plays a specific role in the regulation of contentious issues in border control cooperation, thus complicating our understanding of Southern agency in aid diplomacy and migration containment more broadly.