With few exceptions, existing work on Jordanian protest politics focuses primarily on protests occurring in Amman and organized by Jordan’s opposition parties or civil society groups. This paper proposes to examine unconventional forms of protests undertaken by Jordanian youths from economically marginalized areas outside of the capital. These include marches and tent camps organized by unemployed Jordanian youths. A prominent example of this is a 60-day tent camp organized by unemployed activists in 2016 in the town of Dhiban, south of Amman. Another prominent example is a march to Amman organized by unemployed activists from Dhiban and Madaba in February 2019 to demand the right to work. This paper sheds light on three crucial, yet under-studied, aspects of contentious activism in Jordan. First, it highlights the transgressive tactics used by youth activists, often in contradistinction to the routine, formal avenues of contestation used by Jordan’s opposition parties and civil society groups. Second, it draws attention to economic marginalization as a key driver of protest, even in areas that have traditionally been strongholds of the Jordanian regime. Finally, this paper reveals the tensions that characterize Jordan’s ongoing protest scene, especially given the reluctance of Jordan’s formal opposition to support the mobilization of economically marginalized youths.

In the late nineteenth century and again in the mid-twentieth century, theorists debated the political role of the lumpenproletariat—small-time criminals, odd jobs workers, and the chronically unemployed. Karl Marx saw this disorganized group as a potential pawn of ruling elites and an impediment to revolution, while anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin, in contrast, believed that it was precisely lumpenproletarians’ lack of industrial discipline that made them natural insurgents. The 1960s saw a revival of this discussion, with Frantz Fanon hailing outsiders as a potent anti-colonial force and organizations like the Black Panther Party seeing them as a base for urban protest in the United States. Today, with employment around the world increasingly informal, flexible, part-time, and sub-contracted, fewer people belong to either the traditional working or middle class. More fall to the margins of society or into the murky gap between these groups. Amidst the ongoing revival of autocracy and threats to democracy globally, are these contemporary lumpenproletarians more likely to serve as enforcers or resistors of dictatorship? Under what conditions do they adopt one role over the other? This paper attempts a preliminary answer to these questions through analysis of protest and contention in Egypt and China. Both are authoritarian regimes with historically strong developmental states that have embraced neoliberalism in recent decades, leading to the expansion of their informal sectors. They have also both experienced different degrees of popular unrest. In China over the last two decades there has been persistent, if low-scale, resistance to state authority over issues like land and property rights, government abuses, and labor rights. Meanwhile, Egypt experience a democratic revolution in 2011 that ousted the long-standing dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, and then a counterrevolution in 2013 that restored military rule. We explore the role of lumpenproletarians in these various episodes of mobilization and resistance through analysis of survey data and original contentious event data sourced from each country. We find that though lumpenproletarians do often serve as “enforcers” – mobilizing on behalf of strongmen and quashing dissent – they also have the potential to join anti-government resistance, particularly over issues of government/police abuses and human rights violations. Moreover, we find that their resistance tends to be more violent than other groups’, and that they tend to target whatever government is currently in power – whether autocratic or democratic. As a result, lumpenproletarians tend to be equally available for mobilization toward revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ends.

Where party systems and state institutions are weak, social protest movements become a primary means by which citizens make redistributive demands on the state. This project examines determinants of state concessions to social protest movements, asking in particular how revolutions and regime transitions transform the logic of elite response to mobilization and, therefore, the likelihood that protest movements may result significant social policy interventions. I develop comparative case studies of parallel phosphate sector movements in Tunisia and Morocco. I use extensive interview and documentary evidence to trace each movement’s trajectory of mobilization, negotiation, and policy response through the critical juncture of the 2011 Arab Uprisings. I argue that “failed” revolutions – uprisings that do not succeed in catalyzing regime change, as in Morocco – amplify the threat perceptions of surviving elites vis-à-vis protest, lowering the threshold of mobilization at which elites will grant concessions to social protests. Surviving elites in Morocco used broad-based, social concessions to demobilize mass opposition while avoiding political reforms. In cases of successful democratizing revolution – as in Tunisia – elites no longer uniformly aim to demobilize protest movements in service of regime longevity. Instead, the imperatives of coalition building in a new democracy prompted Tunisian elites to undermine opponents' attempts at social negotiation and to channel exclusive concessions to smaller, well-organized protest groups who could lend political support. Resulting social policy concessions were few and ad hoc.

Labor movements demanding that regimes increase social spending or reverse cuts to it have long been a feature of MENA politics. But although such movements are well documented, the relationship between labor mobilization and distributional politics in the region remains understudied. This paper aims to advance the debate on who mobilizes for state resources, and why, in labor-abundant MENA countries through an analysis of original, fine-grained survey data on teacher mobilization in Jordan. More specifically, it investigates the puzzle of why groups like these teachers engage in highly disruptive contentious mobilization despite having long been considered to be regime insiders. The paper tests two (potentially complementary) hypotheses about mobilization by regime insiders. The first is that economic, demographic and technological changes have led these insiders to experience relative deprivation and motivated them to mobilize. The second is that changes in social networks have facilitated their mobilization.