Citizenship Spectrums: Misalignments of Nationality and Passports in Jordan

• In Event: Interrogations of Citizenship and Nationality in the Global South (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

What does citizenship look like for protracted refugees in a host state? How do host states navigate the contradictions of such a long-term, or even effectively permanent, temporary status? What are the implications of these long-term temporary statuses? This paper finds that states can disaggregate passport, nationality, and membership categories to respond more dynamically to protracted refugee situations. In turn, this disaggregation produces a spectrum of citizenship that can leave protracted refugees with ambiguous, “temporary” citizenship statuses for generations, which can include access to passports but not to nationality. This paper troubles rigid definitions of citizenship and finds that such definitions obscure the forms of membership and belonging held by groups who lack nationality but have lived in a host state for generations. Likewise, such definitions obscure state and global responsibility for protecting refugees, particularly from statelessness and access to education and healthcare. Overall, ambiguities in citizenship and protracted temporariness produce capricious, disaggregated rights as well as more precarious lives for refugees.

This paper uses Jordan’s extensive experience as a protracted refugee host state to examine its approach to citizenship, nationality, and passports for refugee groups over time. Jordan’s Palestinian refugees in particular provide an opportunity to study disjunctures in citizenship because Jordanian officials explicitly have framed policies toward them as temporary, even after fifty and seventy years. This analysis draws from extensive primary source data, including roughly 250 Jordanian laws, bylaws, and regulations, 800 files from the U.S. and British National Archives on Jordan’s internal affairs between 1946 and 1973, and 200 personal interviews with ministers, bureaucrats, and refugees, among others, conducted in Jordan between 2016 and 2019. Jordanian policies toward Palestinian refugee groups highlight how political uncertainty and promised temporariness can sustain spectrums of citizenship and ambiguous statuses.

Author

• Lillian Frost, Virginia Tech