Negotiating Crisis: International Aid and Refugee Policy in Jordan

Under the guise of resilience: The EU approach to migration and forced displacement in Jordan and Lebanon

“…For crisis-affected states, the EU's turn to resilience-building provides an opportunity to leverage their position as refugee-hosting countries to obtain international assistance that directly benefits their own development-to the possible detriment of refugees (Arar, 2017;Kelberer, 2017;Tsourapas, 2019). Nonetheless, the refugee crisis has exacerbated long-standing structural challenges, and both countries have seen growing public discontentment.…”

“…Moreover, it did not establish refugee camps, but instead highlighted "the fact that Iraqi refugees lived entirely among the local population and directly affected the host community" (Kelberer, 2017, p. 158)-pressing for aid budgets to be transferred directly to the government. As will become clear, this tendency to leverage its position as a refugee-hosting state to increase access to international aid can also be observed in the current crisis (Arar, 2017;Kelberer, 2017).…”

“…Jordan is familiar with hosting refugees: Since the second half of the previous century, the country received significant numbers of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees. During the Iraqi crisis, Jordan restricted and relaxed its refugee policy dependent on the contributions it could elicit from the international community (Kelberer, 2017). Moreover, it did not establish refugee camps, but instead highlighted "the fact that Iraqi refugees lived entirely among the local population and directly affected the host community" (Kelberer, 2017, p. 158)-pressing for aid budgets to be transferred directly to the government.…”

“…The 2016 EU-Jordan Compact, under which the government of Jordan commits to opening up the labor market for Syrian refugees, came as a surprise. Kelberer (2017) notes that "[a]s recently as June 2015, mention of work rights in even informal conversations with government ministries could lead to an abrupt end to meetings" (p. 150). Moreover, "the public's broad perception that Syrian refugees are stealing Jordanian jobs provides the government with little incentive to offer formal opportunities for Syrian employment" (Francis, 2015, p. 24).…”

‘Life Is Tight Here’

“…Throughout the interviews, the women often spoke at length about the impact of economic hardship on nearly every aspect of their lives. This in itself is, of course, unsurprising; the financial struggles displaced Syrians face in Jordan and around the globe have been well documented (Chatty 2017;Kelberer 2017;UNICEF 2020). Yet these narratives also point to the ways in which the material reality of precarity shapes embodied experience and how, in turn, bodily experiences of constraint (ḍīq), immobility (al-waḍ' dāqir) and material scarcity (ḥirmān) are associated with the truncated temporal horizon that characterises displacement.…”