Women’s empowerment, broadly construed, is an integral part of Jordan’s neoliberal development strategy. Historically, the women’s movement in Jordan - an amalgamation of activists, journalists, and members of women’s organizations - has pursued women’s empowerment through contentious politics and radical activism aimed at challenging the state and inequitable policies and practices. In its current form, however, the movement relies on donor funding from many of the regime’s development partners (e.g., the UN, USAID, and the EU) and struggles to maintain autonomy from the state. As a result, much of the women’s movement activism becomes entangled with development initiatives that coincide with the regime’s goals. In situating women’s empowerment at the center of these development campaigns, women’s activism risks becoming an extension of the state, rather than a challenge to it. This paper examines the consequences of embedding women’s activism within state-sanctioned development campaigns and contends that this move serves to depoliticize the women’s movement in Jordan. In contrast with the movement’s historical struggles against militarism, (neo)colonialism, civil rights abuses, and inequitable development schemes that disproportionately affect women (i.e., structural adjustment programs), the women’s movement is now intimately wedded to and practically reliant on the state’s development ambitions. By qualitatively tracing changes in the state-women’s movement-development relationship, this paper argues that current structural and institutional arrangements have deradicalized and depoliticized a lot of women’s activism in the kingdom. As further evidence of this phenomenon, the paper includes an analysis of government action on women’s rights in contrast to government repression of other human rights (e.g., due process and freedom of speech) to show how advancements for women are understood as bolstering state development, while advancements on other rights are deemed state security threats. This paper helps us understand some of the constraints on and limits to civil society in authoritarian regimes and explains how neoliberal development strategies can undermine activism in the Middle East.

In view of neoliberalism’s repeated, predictable failures in realizing market-delivered welfare gains in the Middle East, the layered resilience of her development orthodoxy and orthopraxy across the region continues to puzzle many observers. Indeed, in Jordan’s case – despite the Uprisings of 2010-2011 and later mobilizations representing Arab publics’ rather tactile refutation of the neoliberal social project - whether speaking of the relevant International Financial Institutions, the Hashemite-blessed Economic Policy Council, or the actors reputedly representative of the Islamist alternative (chiefly, the Islamic Action Front), today, the reproduction and thoughtless incantation of the neoliberal policy paradigm proceeds afoot. How can we explain this outcome? Certainly, the capacity of neoliberalism’s institutional voices to eternally extend the horizon of their teleology provides part of the answer. To this effect, post-factum relitigations of once celebrated reformers like Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Hussein can be superficially convincing, hoodwinking acts of revisionism whereby absolution for Arab de-development, corruption, and cronyism can be delivered to IFIs and western governments through the cynical and extemporaneous foisting of responsibility for such pathologies onto the shoulders of yesteryear’s autocrats alone. Rendering failures endogenous and personalist, the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of global neoliberalism more generally can be laundered and obscured. Having done so, post-2011 policymakers can offer the same medicine while promising this time will be different. Grounded in policy translation studies, through content and discourse analyses as well as non-structured interviews, this paper will scrutinize how and why the neoliberal policy paradigm endures and evolves in Jordan. Tracing the linkages – discursive, institutional, and social – connecting IFIs, elite policymaking circles, and the IAF, I will first attempt to establish the sociology of neoliberal hegemony and the processes through which it localizes in this context. Having done so – and now borrowing from a number of critical, heterodox approaches to comparative capitalism research - I will explain why these policies only portend more social dislocation in Jordan while simultaneously presenting acute threats to the political and economic health of the nation as well.

Jordan’s recent push to market outdoor adventures in its deserts and wadis relies on a pastoral trope of authenticity more than 2,000 years old. However, it also participates in a contemporary dynamic that repackages the wilderness as the site of highest value in nature, and then admits only a select few to its carefully choreographed authentic pleasures. These journeys into Jordan’s wadis and deserts suggest the prospect of journeys both exotic and ecologically sound. As such, they enable those who depend on the tourist trade to counter what has been a dismal run of years in the number of foreign visitors to the kingdom. In the words of one participant of the AdventureNEXT convention, held last spring at the Dead Sea: this new/old marketing language permits Jordan to change the narrative. It is no longer a dangerous Middle Eastern destination, but rather an exotic adventure destination (Jordan Times, May 19, 2017). Pastoral has long held out the dream of escaping the regimentation and surveillance of the court, or the city. The promise of a life of authenticity, lived close to the land, offers an implied, ironic, critique of the very conditions that produce both the pastoral and its audience. It is no surprise, then, that the global reach of capital makes this wilderness pastoral initiative possible in Jordan— with its trained guides, hospitality support, structure of insurance, and worldwide marketing. As described, these packages depend on posting the right people in the right spaces, and excluding those who do not belong to the carefully constructed narrative of authentic encounter with indigenous nature and culture. Who belongs in Jordan’s wild spaces? Tourists, of course. And their local Bedouin guides, despite their Jeeps and ATVs. The ability to purchase authentic contact is capital’s message. This message is a marked contrast to the small space of subversion the pastoral still allows to those who for financial or political reasons cannot leave Jordan, and who, like maroons and other adventurers of old, resort to internal wild spaces in the hope of respite from centers of power.

Globally, the woman is often seen as the center of the rural family. She fulfills the role of caretaker and housekeeper and, in the national imaginary, the rural woman is often the protector of heritage. Recently in Jordan, as a result of an international and governmental push for rural development, there has been an increase in women’s businesses selling traditionally homemade goods. These women’s businesses can be seen at nearly any outdoor market or festival in Jordan. Some common products include soaps, spices, dairy products, baked goods, full meals, olive oil, pickles, jams, and handicrafts. However the process of transitioning from domestic work to the formal economy is not as simple as earning money for previously unpaid labor. Instead, women must learn how to engage with and navigate a new network of customers, business consultants, and government agencies in order to get their products from house to market. While work on women’s entrepreneurial labor has argued that projects should be evaluated based on women’s goals and perspectives, further work is needed to understand how women are obtaining these goals through different structures and business strategies. By calling attention to the larger structures with which women engage, this paper asks, how does producing local traditional foods, largely for urban consumers, change the nature of women’s labor and affect rural livelihoods? This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with women’s rural food businesses and organizations in order to examine how women structure their businesses within the context of their social, economic, and governmental networks. Through this investigation, I argue that although women often see their work as supporting a traditional rural lifestyle, production for distant customers necessitates several changes. Women must learn how to produce for different people’s tastes, how to market their goods and communicate quality and safety, and how to balance this work with their other roles and expectations. Furthermore, I found that women whose businesses or organizations involve intermittent donors, faced a larger pressure to find ways to expand the business. Meanwhile, women with sole control over the businesses had fewer pressures for expansion. These findings provide a more nuanced understanding of the outcomes of rural development plans supporting women’s businesses, in their various forms.