On February 3, 2017 the EU and the UN-backed Libyan government agreed to a deal whereby Libya would prevent irregular migration to Europe, establish temporary refugee within its borders to screen asylum-seekers, and ‘voluntarily’ repatriate refugees wiling to return to their countries of origin. In exchange, EU funding would be used to support Libya’s struggling coastguard. The deal overlooked gross human rights violations toward migrants in Libya that have been documented by international organizations (UNICEF 2017), as well as previous violent and deadly actions taken by the Libyan navy in violation of international law (BBC 2016), not to mention Libya’s lack of a functioning or cohesive government. The EU-Libya deal has received significant criticism from UN experts and human rights organizations (OHCHR 2017), especially after it was reported that EU-funding was used to fund a Libyan militia commander to combat irregular migration in exchange for cars, boats and the recognition of his force as a legitimate security body (Trew, Abdullah, and Kington 2017). Yet despite objections, the deal has been touted by European leaders as a success and a model to be emulated elsewhere. Agreements between European countries and migrant or refugee host states in the Middle East and North Africa are not new: the European Union and individual states have used the incentive of increased trade and visa access to compel neighboring Eastern European and North African countries to adopt policing measures and border controls to prevent migration over the last two decades. Yet in the wake of the 2015 European refugee ‘crisis,’ the stakes and power (im)balances between unwilling receiving countries in Europe and host countries of the Middle East have been renegotiated and reconstituted (Arar 2016). Drawing upon primary research in Egypt, Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon as well as recent policy documents and non-governmental reports, this paper uses a ‘migration diplomacy’ lens to examine and understand the new migration paradigm in the Mediterranean region as a whole. It provides insight into what a new paradigm means for MENA host states regarding economic, diplomatic, and security concerns, as well as the consequences for individual migrants and refugees at the heart of a new migration management regime.

This paper is about the social construction of the refugee story – the overarching global narrative that shapes knowledge production, scientific inquiry, and political action. Despite an established literature about the refugee story, the process of revealing how political interests influence knowledge production about refugees remains a contemporary and unfolding project. Who is given the platform to speak about refugee experiences? How are these refugee stories curated and amplified? The answers to these questions reveal how state interests and national differences among refugee populations influence the ascription of worthiness and access to rights. I argue that refugee hosting in Jordan is central to the social construction of the global refugee narrative. I demonstrate that since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, refugee stories are identified, produced, and curated from Jordan and used primarily to perpetuate the interests of powerful states in the Global North. I unravel the global refugee narrative in five steps and describe which refugee stories are told or intentionally excluded. This research is based on 175 interviews with Syrian refugees, Jordanian citizens, and UN, NGO, and Jordanian government officials collected in 2016 and 2017.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region currently hosts the largest number of refugees in the world, with massive flows of Syrians recently adding onto the prolonged displacement of Palestinian, Sahrawi, Iraqi, and Somali refugees. By United Nations standards, the Syrian refugees have now joined these other groups as protracted refugees (PRs), which are groups of 25,000 or more refugees with the same nationality living in the same country for at least five years (UNHCR 2014). This flow of people across borders and continued increase in PR populations raises serious questions about the content of state-society relations in MENA. Specifically, what does citizenship mean when millions are displaced and residing outside of their home state? How do PRs influence citizenship in their host state, and how can we capture the relationship between host states and PRs? Much research evaluates how states treat refugees as well as the impacts of these groups on the host state’s economy and foreign relations. However, this paper focuses on how refugees can influence host states’ social compacts and conceptions of citizenship. PRs challenge traditional notions of citizenship because they interact with the state much like citizens, demanding rights in exchange for fulfilling duties, but they lack citizenship status—and often any pathway to it. This situation demands a fresh examination of citizenship as well as the conceptual development of “noncitizenship” in these contexts. This paper describes noncitizenship and demonstrates its importance in explaining state-society relations. Specifically, I flesh out noncitizenship by pulling from the budding interdisciplinary literature on this concept (e.g., Tonkiss and Bloom 2015; Plotke 2014) as well as Arabic distinctions between “muwatana” and “jinsiyya” (Davis 2000). In addition, I engage evidence from Jordan’s policies over time toward two noncitizen PR groups, the Gazan and Syrian refugees. Jordan hosts the largest number of PRs in the world, making it a critical case to examine. The Gazan and Syrian case studies draw from 170 interviews I conducted from 2016–2017 in Jordan with government officials, activists, lawyers, and refugees. These cases highlight that the types of rights the Jordanian government offers noncitizen PRs reflects those offered to its own citizens. They also reveal some of the blurry lines in practice between citizen and noncitizen, along with the debates these lines raise. Altogether, this analysis demonstrates how noncitizenship challenges the boundaries of state citizenship and helps explicate broader state-society relations.

The uprisings of 2011 caused regimes across the MENA region to update their strategies for maintaining power. While initial readings of the mass demonstrations inspired hope for the possibility of democratization, the consolidation of regime control since the Arab Spring as well as subsequent violence and instability have reinforced the factors contributing to the region’s persistent authoritarianism. Islamist groups, for whom “victory was not an option” (Brown 2012) in the pre-2011 era, briefly achieved control over the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, and their travails were watched with interest by their neighbors. Arab regimes in Jordan, Morocco, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia did not experience the overthrow of a head of state, but have updated their strategies regarding state control of Islam. Since 2011, each of these monarchies has altered their policies towards Islamist opposition groups, as well as the official discourse regarding religion in general. The paper compares the strategies of these four Arab monarchies, focusing on the implications of the different choices made by each regime. The governments of Morocco and Saudi Arabia adopted a stance of promoting so-called “moderate Islam,” while the Jordanian regime has been engaged in less of this posturing than prior to 2011. Qatar had funded Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s initiatives allegedly dedicated to promoting the Quranic notion of wasatiah (~“moderation”), but in 2017 faced a blockade from Saudi Arabia and isolation from the rest of the GCC on the basis of sponsoring terrorism. The ways in which governments make use of notions such as moderation, authenticity, and religious authority express strategic maneuvering for both international religious soft power, as well as efforts to consolidate domestic control. Combining nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with government officials and Islamist groups in Jordan and Morocco with interviews with Emirati and Saudi officials, the paper offers insights into how the strategic use of official Islam has shifted in the post-2011 context.