Tribal Politics in Contemporary Jordan: The Case of the Hirak Movement

Yom, Sean

doi:10.3751/68.2.13

Cited by 47 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…He writes that these demands shattered "stereotypes that tribal Jordanians cared first and foremost about economic welfare." 10 Hassan Barari has maintained that any real reform effort has to target the gerrymandered parliament "at the heart of Jordan's political struggle." 11 Scholarly literature on Jordan invariably stresses that the most pressing issue faced by Jordanians is the absence of real democracy and political representation.…”

Section: T H E J O R Da N I a N P O P U L A R M Ov E M E N Tmentioning

confidence: 98%

Troubling the Political: Women in the Jordanian Day-Waged Labor Movement

Ababneh¹

2016

Int. J. Middle East Stud.

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The Jordanian Day-Waged Labor Movement (DWLM) played a central role in the Jordanian Popular Movement (al-Hirak al-Sha bi al-Urduni), commonly referred to as Hirak, from 2011 to the end of 2012. The large number of women who were active and took on leading roles in the DWLM contrasts with the absence of women's rights organizations in the Hirak. I argue that the DWLM was able to attract so many women because it developed a discourse and flexible structure that understood women to be embedded within communities and prioritized their economic needs. By studying this discourse and structure, it is possible to learn important lessons about genderinclusive political and institutional reform.In late 2010, I attended a workshop at the Royal Cultural Center in Amman on women's civil and political rights in Jordan. The audience of about fifty people included the most prominent women's rights activists in Jordan, most of whom were from middle-and upper middle-class backgrounds and lived in West Amman. At the end of the questionand-answer session, a man with a heavy rural accent, who looked as if he did not fit in, stood up to make an intervention. At the time I could not identify him, but I later learned that he was Muhammad Snayd, the spokesperson and leader of the DayWaged Labor Movement (DWLM, or Hirak Ummal al-Muyawama). Snayd asked the esteemed women of the audience why they had not joined a recent sleep-in organized by the DWLM in front of the Royal Court, which attracted over twenty female day-waged workers. The women and men of the DWLM had been protesting their low salaries and the fact that labor laws did not apply to them (see below). "Where were you?" Snayd asked. He wondered out loud why the audience before him, supposedly made up of women's rights activists, had not come out to support these women, who had mustered the courage to leave their families overnight despite being from so-called tribal, and thus arguably conservative, backgrounds. "These are women from the governorates. 1 Where were you? Why didn't you support them?" he asked.I could not get Snayd's intervention out of my mind. How was it possible for women from the governorates, or any Jordanian women for that matter, to spend a night away from home with male colleagues? Did their families consent? I wanted to find out more about these women, who had arguably participated in one of the most culturally radical Sara Ababneh is an Assistant Professor and Researcher at

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Section: T H E J O R Da N I a N P O P U L A R M Ov E M E N Tmentioning

confidence: 98%

Troubling the Political: Women in the Jordanian Day-Waged Labor Movement

Ababneh¹

2016

Int. J. Middle East Stud.

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“…24 According to Sean Yom, "Younger tribal Jordanians utilized politics rather than economics to anchor their concerns about their changing relations with the Hashemite state.... By enshrining popular participation and political openness, rural communities would have a new way to engage the regime and protect their interests on a level playing field with the urban classes of Amman." 25 The regime's response to these calls for democracy was a series of what opponents called cosmetic reforms, with an emphasis on participation and accountability. 26 Recent economic hardship has also played a role in the drive for decentralization.…”

Section: Political Economy and Reformmentioning

confidence: 99%

Centralized Decentralization: Subnational Governance in Jordan

Elliott

Ciesielski²,

Birkholz

2018

Middle East Policy

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“…It is important to account for the local specificities of the aims of social actors and their moral claims, as long-time ethnographers of Egypt like Farha Ghannam (2012) and Lila Abu Lughod (2012) warned from the beginning of the Arab Spring. While Jordan has seen its own ḥirāk (movements), self consciously embracing just such a globalised paradigm of bottomup activism, even those facets of these ḥirāk most imitative of foreign prece dents have ironically been forced to emphasise their own tribal character as a means of bolstering their authenticity (Yom 2014).…”

Section: Understanding New Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Cutting the Face: Kinship, State and Social Media Conflict in Networked Jordan

Hughes¹

2018

Preprint

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The local uptake of new media in the Middle East is shaped by deep histories of imperialism, state building, resistance and accommodation. In contemporary Jordan, social media is simultaneously encouraging identifcation with tribes and undermining their gerontocratic power structures. Senior men stress their own importance as guarantors (‘faces’), who restore order following conflicts, promising to pay their rivals a large surety if their kin break the truce. Yet, ‘cutting the face’ (breaking truces) remains an alternative, one often facilitated by new technologies that allow people to challenge pre-existing structures of communication and authority. However, the experiences of journalists and other social media mavens suggest that the liberatory promise of the new technology may not be enough to prevent its reintegration into older patterns of social control.

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Tribal Politics in Contemporary Jordan: The Case of the Hirak Movement

Cited by 47 publications

References 30 publications

Troubling the Political: Women in the Jordanian Day-Waged Labor Movement

Troubling the Political: Women in the Jordanian Day-Waged Labor Movement

Centralized Decentralization: Subnational Governance in Jordan

Cutting the Face: Kinship, State and Social Media Conflict in Networked Jordan

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