Displacement as Heterotopic Space: The Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan

ABSTRACT

The idea of a sovereign territorial order dominates representations of space in International Relations through ubiquitous dichotomies such as international/domestic, inside/outside, and citizen/foreigner. Yet, phenomena of forced displacement question the perceptiveness of these binaries justifying an enquiry into the possibility of different accounts of the type of space that displacement constitutes. This essay revisits critically the Foucauldian concept of heterotopic space and proposes its redefinition. It then uses the revised concept for the reconstruction of the Syrian displacement crisis in Jordan. The objective is to show the validity of heterotopic space as a concept to represent the site that states, refugees, and international organisations constitute through their interactions in displacement response. The argument is that interpreting displacement as heterotopic space allows for a more credible representation of this phenomenon that supplants the assumptions of sovereign territoriality. This leads to an interpretation of displacement as an ‘other-space’ in its own capacity, thus offering an account that differs from displacement as liminality or as an exception to the territorial order.

Introduction

Since the beginning of the protests in Syria in 2011 and the conflict that ensued in 2012, Jordan has been the destination of more than half a million Syrian refugees. Syrian displacement to Jordan has activated a mechanism of response involving international organisations, state authorities, local society, NGOs, refugees, and third states, which has varied from phases of solidaristic reception to hostility and, more recently, to a form of relative stabilisation. Throughout these phases Syrians have been allowed to enter Jordan freely, then they have been stopped at the border; they have been forbidden to work legally and then they have been partly allowed to access the job market; they have been deprived of official documents, then they registered with local authorities or IGOs acquiring new documents, often they have to live without documentation risking arrest, then many of them have been re-registered. Some of them live in refugee camps, sometimes they have been forced into refugee camps such as al-Azraq, other times they have been forcibly repatriated, most of the time they rented private housing in urban areas. Their possibility to acquire a legal status has constantly shifted from one regulation to another, thousands of children were born to displaced couples, but their birth could not be registered, and they face a substantial risk of becoming stateless. Refugees have received aid in the form of cash and services and then also host communities have become the recipient of aid. In the latest phase, Syrians in Jordan have acquired a more formalised legal status with access to fundamental rights and services but neither they are citizens nor they can be described simply as foreigners, their status of refugees is recognised de facto by Jordan, which does not have a legal framework for refugee determination nor is a member of 1951 Refugee Convention.

Any reader familiar with displacement response dynamics will find this situation far from exceptional. Mass displacement is rarely responded to orderly, instead is shaped by contradicting forces, overlapping jurisdictions, opposite sentiments, clashing interests, as well as stark power asymmetries. Consequently, the space that displacement generates embodies these opposing dynamics and contradictions. The sovereign territorial order (Simmons and Goemans 2021) that dominates the contemporary international politics of space is not made for displacement. As it has been widely observed (Agamben 1998; Arendt 1951; Haddad 2008; Malkki 1992; Soguk 1999), displacement amounts to a fundamental disruption of this order because it unhinges its assumptions of territoriality, human sedentariness, the containing role of borders, and the ascription of peoples to national identities and territories, which would normally be the foundation of their rights as citizens. The dichotomies upon which this order relies (citizen-foreigner, inside-outside, national-international) (Soguk 1999; Walker 1993) can hardly help represent the situation of displaced populations, given that their existence is the demonstration of their limits, at best, or the certification of their obsolescence at worst.

This is what motivates the critical enquiry into territorial ideas of space that this essay undertakes with reference to the case of Syrians in Jordan. My argument is that forced displacement produces forms of space that transcend the norm of the sovereign territorial order. To account for this type of space it is necessary to move away from static and structural notions (epitomised by the sovereign territorial order) to concepts that are relational, socially, and historically constituted by interactions between all actors involved in displacement (Hyndman 2012; Massey 2005). Whereas the value of work done thus far, from the territorial trap critique (Agnew 1994) to border studies (C. Johnson et al. 2011; Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009), and critical geopolitics (Toal 1996) deserves full acknowledgement, this essay suggests that revisiting the concept of heterotopic space is another way to reconceptualise the site of displacement going beyond the assumptions of territoriality and differing from the notion of refugee space as liminal. Heterotopic space as generated by displacement, this essay will illustrate, is central and not the residue of territorial exceptions.

The essay begins by showing how the International Relations (IR) debate on space has made some progress in revising notions of space, but also highlighting that is still reliant on highly territorialised conceptions. Then, I engage critically with the Foucauldian origins of the concept of heterotopic space to develop a working definition. I illustrate the conceptual validity of heterotopic space by reconstructing the dynamics of the response to Syrian displacement in Jordan on the basis of fieldwork and interviews. The case study illustrates how forced displacement constitutes a crisis for territoriality and how interactions between refugees and all other actors involved in the crisis response led to the formation of a space that deviates from the principles of sovereign territoriality and fits with the idea of heterotopic space herein redefined.

Space as Territory in IR: Critical Perspectives

John Ruggie has observed that:

We are not very good as a discipline [IR] at studying the possibility of fundamental discontinuity in the international system; that is, at addressing the question of whether the modern system of states may be yielding in some instances to postmodern forms of configuring political space. We lack even an adequate vocabulary; and what we cannot describe, we cannot explain.

(Ruggie 1993, 144)

Indeed, space in the IR theory debate has been an overlooked subject, notwithstanding the fact that is one of its fundamental assumptions (Agnew 1994; 54; Gazit 2018; Kadercan 2015).

Alternative to state-centric and territorialised conceptions of space in IR exist, but they have hardly changed the fundamental way of thinking about space. For example, theories of imperialism consider empire a deterritorialised entity with no centre (Barkawi and Laffey 2002; Hardt and Negri 2016) and regionalism (Acharya 2011; Buzan and Waever 2004) shifts the focus from the state to states conglomerates. Yet, in the first case, the analysis remains concerned with dynamics regarding the modalities of power, whereas regionalism does not question the state-centric territorial nature of space fundamentally.¹

Even after John Agnew’s ‘territorial trap’ critique (Agnew 1994), the mainstream IR debate has remained dominated by state-centric and territorialist accounts of space (Agnew 2010) but two trends have emerged: the historicization of space and a deeper questioning of borders. The longue durée studies of Elden (2013), Branch (2013), and Charles Maier (2016) epitomise research devoted to the historicization of spatial forms of power and territorialisation. Elden (2013) offers a genealogical reconstruction of the territorialisation of power from a Foucauldian perspective whereby ‘Territory is itself a process, made and remade, shaped and shaping, active and reactive’ (Elden 2013, 17). Branch’s (2013) historical analysis of cartography shows how the territorialisation of the modern state is a processual long-term development that, although originating from spatially diffused and overlapping forms of power, only in modern times has morphed into territorial sovereignty. Maier (2016) claims that territory is not avulse from history but part of it, borders represent the factor making territory a ‘domain in which geographic space is ordered by certain rules or properties that are ascribed to it’. (Kratochwil 1986; Maier 2016; 7; see also Sassen 2006)

The idea that territory is one of many possible spatial forms that power can take, converge with the debate on border studies (Johnson et al. 2011; Kolossov 2005; C. Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009) and widely resonates with the broader considerations that have been developed in critical geopolitics (Moisio and Paasi 2013; Tuathail 1999).² Much of these considerations originate from the observation that, pace globalisation theories, borders have been proliferating beyond their traditional location at the edge of territory thus making these not simply linear entities marking territory but a form of space per se. Hence, the rise of border space toponomastic such as borderlands, borderscapes, borderzones, or frontiers (Balibar 2009; Brambilla 2015; Dell’Agnese and Amilhat Szary 2015; Peña 2021; Readman, Radding Murrieta, and Carl Bryant 2014) each with different nuances in meaning and function. But if borders are space, and not simply something in between one site and another, this entails that they can be seen as practices, processes, or performances of political action (Paasi 1998). Bordering, in this sense, can manifest territorially or non-territorially through practices such as border offshoring, the implementation of extraterritoriality principles, or the adoption of remote border control policies, as well as through conventional forms of border control such as policing or bureaucracies such as visas and documentation requirements (Brown 2010; FitzGerald 2019; Longo 2017; Tennis 2019).

This leads to two main considerations. The first is that dominant accounts of space in IR take the sovereign territorial order as fait accompli thus reifying spatial binaries that place people either inside (domestic) or outside (international) space, and ascribing them to categories such as citizens or foreigners (or refugees, migrants, aliens etc.), or by representing borders either as open or closed (Zehfuss 2020) and so on. This uncritical acceptance of a territorialist assumption fails to give adequate consideration to the notion that the spatial forms of power are part of history and not above it. This has important consequences for the study of mobility and, in our case, displacement, because the dominance of ‘territorialist epistemology’ (Albert, Jacobson, and Lapid 2001, 8) prevents considering the possibility that displacement can constitute a form of space and, instead, perpetuates a notion of space that makes mobility toxic for the sovereign territorial order. This is what in turn prompts the re-entrenchment of sovereignties and territorialities through hard bordering practices, the constitutions of fortresses-states, and the policing of borders through technology, violence, or bureaucracy (Andersson 2014; Brown 2010; Jones 2016; Longo 2017).

The second consideration is that, on this basis, ideas such as borderlands, borderscapes, or borderlands that tend to identify the liminal spaces produced by border practices could be considered representations of the space that people’s mobility and states’ reactions to it generate thus filling the conceptual gap that is caused by dominant territorialist epistemologies.³ Yet, although the merit of these conceptions in problematising borders and territoriality is undeniable, such ideas have limitations in accounting for the nature of displacement as space. They tend to conceptualise the space of displacement as liminal, because they interpret it as forms of in-betweenness from one territory to another. This makes the spatial condition of displaced population peripheral and consequently, perhaps inadvertently, perpetuates the centrality of the state as the sole space-maker. Second, and relatedly, borders as the core focus of enquiry clearly have the benefits of generating critical thinking but tends to underestimate the role of people in constituting space. This essay, instead, contends that phenomena of mass displacement generate a space that can be interpreted not as a residual fissure in the sovereign territorial order⁴ (i.e., as liminality, borderland, etc.) but as an autonomous form of space. This, then, motivates the question of whether the concept of heterotopic space can be a way to represent adequately the space that is produced by displacement.

Heterotopic Space Beyond Foucault

The word heterotopic originates from the combination of the ancient Greek words heteros and topos (loosely translated, respectively, as ‘other’ and ‘space’) and has been in use at least since the end of the nineteenth century in medicine to describe phenomena occurring away from their usual biological location.⁵ The term has begun to circulate in social and political thinking through the work of Michel Foucault who used it at least since 1966.⁶ Foucault sees heterotopias in contrast with utopias and defines these as:

Real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.

(Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 3–4)

Seven principles (Table 1) define heterotopia.⁷ Foucault begins by referring to heterotopias as places of crisis or deviation; by this he means spaces in which the person experiences a transition, for example, from childhood to adolescence (school), from adolescence to adulthood (military service), or celibacy to married life (the honeymoon). A deviation heterotopia, instead, is a space like the prison or the psychiatric institution where a person is relegated for deviating from the canons of presumed normalcy. The list continues and includes other elements identifying heterotopic space as mutable in meaning and function. A heterotopic space furthermore contains different places and times simultaneously and the examples are theatres or museums where different places and times converge into one. Finally, heterotopias presuppose a regulation of access, and they function as compensation for the failures of utopias (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 4–9).

Table 1 definitional elements of Heterotopia with related examples according to Foucault (1986).

Definitional elements of Heterotopia	Examples used by Foucault
1. Crisis	Adolescence -> boarding school, military service, honeymoon
2. Deviation	Psychiatric condition -> Psychiatric institution, prison
3. Mutable meaning/function	Function of the cemetery changing from central to peripheral location in cities.
4. Convergence of different spaces	Spaces converging into one space: -> Theatre, Cinema, Zoological Garden
5. Convergence of different times	Spaces in which different times coexist simultaneously -> Festivals or Museum/Libraries (also referred to as heterochronias)
6. Access regulation	Places presupposing system of opening and closing -> Hammams, Saunas, or Motel Rooms
7. Function of compensation or illusion for the failure of utopias	Colonies (e.g., Puritans colonies in North America or Jesuits colonies in South America) are heterotopias of compensation, brothels, ships are heterotopies of illusion. They compensate for the failure of utopias or create an illusion of their possibility.

Whereas acknowledgement of the Foucauldian origins of heterotopia is due, this definition raises a number of issues besides its lack of clarity (Palladino and Miller 2015, 1). David Harvey considers heterotopia a convoluted idea referring to a residual spatial category to which any form of space can be ascribed (Harvey 2000a, 538). None of its definitional elements justifies a distinction from conventional spaces, thus making it a ‘banality’. He continues, pointing out that this concept relies on Kantian assumptions about space as absolute and ‘undialectical’, and therefore is incompatible with a relational idea of space (Harvey 2007, 41–47). Arun Saldanha makes a similar point and claims that Foucault understood heterotopia from structuralist assumptions. According to him, what makes heterotopia implausible is that ‘Foucault seems to believe he has access to the hidden structures of society, which designate some spaces as absolutely other’ (Saldanha 2008, 2088 Orig. Emph.).

Notwithstanding this, heterotopia as an analytical category has continued to diffuse, especially to interpret the connection between space and people’s movement. In one of the most analytical operationalisations, Mark Salter analyses the airport as a heterotopic space connecting the national and the international, therefore juxtaposing multiple spaces in a single space simultaneously. The airport, then, is a ‘rite of passage’ from the national to the international or vice versa, where sovereignty exercises its capacity to exclude or include people within its territory, thus containing individuals potentially deviating from the rules of the sovereign territorial order (Salter 2007, 52).

Heterotopic space has gained currency also in studies of forced migration, where it represents spaces that result from the interactions between migrants and the institutions governing their lives and mobility. In these cases, the notion of crisis and deviation heterotopias prevails. As Peter Johnson observes: ‘Modern heterotopian sites relate more to separating out some form of deviation rather than marking a stage in life’. (Johnson 2006, 76) Michel Agier refers to heterotopia in Managing the Undesirables when he says that refugees are ‘imprisoned outside’ and camps are ‘out-places’ embodying an extraterritorial and extra-national fiction to which refugees are relegated (Agier 2010, 181–182). According to him, the world’s displaced population dwells in an ‘ensemble of margins and precarious spaces’ which he calls ‘heterotopies’ (Agier 2018, 14, 24).

Through the lens of heterotopia, Olga Lafazani interprets the encampment of migrants in the port of Patras (Lafazani 2013), whereas Pugliese (2009) has resorted to heterotopia in his analysis of Lampedusa (Italy) and Christmas Island (Australia) as spaces simultaneously embodying the contradiction of tourist destinations and centres for the detention of migrants. For Boedeltje (2012) the EU contributes to a utopic spreading of European values but, in reality, the establishment of refugee camps amounts to ‘the embodiment of the impossibility of a smooth common European space’, thus becoming a type of ‘heterotopia of deviation’ (2012, 10).

Notwithstanding its hard-to-define character, heterotopic space appeals analytical approaches to space and displacement because it fills a conceptual gap by representing space in a way that questions territorialist epistemology and accounts for the spatial condition of displacement transcending the conventional binaries that define the sovereign territorial order. Displacement as heterotopic space disarticulates dichotomies of inside and outside, citizen and foreigner, or national and international as no other conceptualisation has, thus far, succeeded to do and makes legible spaces that would otherwise be accounted for only approximately through territorialist approaches.

In the interest of greater accessibility and clarity of its meaning, I suggest a working definition of heterotopic space more parsimonious than Foucault’s, mindful of its critiques, and cognisant of its current uses. A space is heterotopic when the interactions that constitute it deviate from the dominant spatial order and therefore question its core defining elements. With reference to the case of the sovereign territorial order, then, a heterotopic space materialises when interactions constitute a site showing that territoriality is in crisis and its defining elements such as the dichotomies of inside and outside, national and international, citizen and foreigner blur or loose significance. A heterotopic space, then emerges when a dominant ordering of space is in crisis, or anyway in a phase of uncertainty in this sense is an ‘other-space’ because it constitutes and alternative spatial order to the one that is present or about to end. This does not necessarily mean that it is only related to displacement (as we have seen above heterotopia is used in many other contexts) but in the case of this analysis we take displacement as our focus of enquiry.

The case study that follows will be an illustration of how displacement, and responses to displacement can generate a type of other-space that fits the definition of heterotopia.

Heterotopic Space in Practice: The Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan

Methodology

The following case analyses the interactions between the actors involved in a large displacement crisis to illustrate the ‘conceptual validity’ (George and Bennett 2005, 64) of heterotopic space in representing the type of space that is constituted in the wake of these events. Jordan serves as a ‘crucial case’ (George and Bennett 2005, 88) because its history of country of arrival for hundreds of thousands of refugees at least since 1948 (Chatelard 2010) makes it an ideal context to deploy this concept. I develop a reconstruction of three main phases of the crisis between 2011 and early 2019. The reconstruction highlights how refugees, the host government, society, international organisations, and thirds countries⁸ have woven relations constituting an other-space that reflects the working definition mentioned above. In each phase and the conclusion, I contrast the space that Syrian refugees inhabit to the idea of heterotopic space to show the extent to which it can be considered a heterotopic space. This is an inductive within-case methodology, which does not aim to justify grand generalisations but illustrates why the adoption of heterotopic space as an analytical concept accounts for displacement as a space that binary ideas of territory cannot persuasively represent. Notwithstanding some similarities with more formalised process-tracing methodologies, I do not expect to identify mechanisms of causality through this analysis, instead this approach ‘interprets’ (Pouliot 2014) a set of relational practices as constitutive of a heterotopic space.

Data Collection and the Author’s Positionality

The analysis is based on documentary research and two research visits to Jordan in 2016 and 2017.⁹ I carried out 27 technical-level semi-structured interviews with governmental officials, humanitarian operators, and civil society actors. The sample of interviewees was selected on the basis of the expertise of the potential interviewee, their availability to share information, and the relevance of their role in the policy response to Syrian displacement. The interviews were based on a set of questions that asked to reconstruct retrospectively the process of policy-development of responses to Syrian displacement in Jordan. The researcher has let interviewees reconstruct their narrative autonomously by asking only some initial questions and then asked to clarify or disambiguate information that was missing or inconsistent with other accounts. The author has visited Zaʿatari refugee camp and met informally with Syrian refugees outside camps in Amman, Irbid, and al-Mafraq. I also visited premises providing services to refugees such as hospitals and registration centres. The purpose of this in-field research was to collect information, consolidate data already present in reports (triangulation), develop a chronological narrative of events, and acquire an in-person perception of the conditions of the displaced population and the host society. All the meetings were held under conditions of anonymity. Although the persons involved are not quoted directly in the text, all the information gathered was instrumental to reconstructing the dynamics of response to Syrian displacement in Jordan. An anonymised list of the interviewees and meetings is reported in the references section.

The author’s positionality is also to be considered. I am a white male scholar coming from a western societal and academic context. Field research has been useful in bridging, at least minimally, the positional gap between desk-based research relying on public domain material and the life conditions of Syrians in Jordan. By no means, this can address the issue of positionality fully. Readers are invited to take into consideration that this remains the account of a researcher with a specific background and a subjectivity that cannot be fully neutralised and made ‘objective’. I do not intend to portray this account as ‘speaking on behalf’ of refugees or officials involved in displacement. Some of the field research has been facilitated by a refugee living at the time in Jordan as a gatekeeper who has helped in developing contacts with local organisations and helped with some of the visit logistics. A social anthropologist has facilitated contacts during the author’s visits in the town of al-Mafraq.¹⁰ Jordanian government officials have shared their experience and thoughts about Syrian displacement to Jordan, but the author has always been careful in taking into account that their views were almost entirely shaped by their belonging to a regime that is highly centralised and undemocratic. Jordanian officials facilitated the visit to the Zaʿatari refugee camp, but the author was allowed to access the camp only escorted by a policeman. I did have brief exchanges with refugees resident in Zaʿatari refugee camp, but these were clearly not the proper conditions for an interview given the presence of a policeman at my side. In all my meetings, I introduced my work explaining the method and purpose of the research and by trying to stimulate a two-way conversation wherein all those involved could interact, tell their stories, and share their feedback openly.

Phase 1 (2011–2013): Crisis of and Deviation from the Territorial Order

Since the beginning of the uprisings and the conflict that ensued in Syria in 2011, Jordan has been among the main destinations for Syrians to flee. The government together with international non-governmental organisations, especially the UNHCR, have been the main actors involved in the response to their displacement. Local society too, through informal networks and local administrative entities such as the municipalities, has played a role as the context within which refugees have relocated and established their presence. Third states, and actors like the EU, have influenced the policy response to Syrian displacement primarily as donors of the funds that supported the operations.

Jordan is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, but in 1998 signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the UNHCR.¹¹ The MOU includes the definition of a refugee from the 1951 convention and establishes conditions under which the UNHCR and Jordan operate when responding to forced displacement (excluding Palestinians). It allows the UNHCR to register refugees and establishes a set of rights to be granted to them. It also highlights the responsibility of the UNHCR and the refugees to respect Jordanian law.

Domestic legal provisions do not regulate the determination of refugee status,¹² nor the conditions of their permanence within Jordanian territory. Therefore, the Syrians that entered Jordan, regardless of their motivation, are subjected to ordinary legislation regulating the presence of foreigners on Jordanian soil. This legislation is particularly permissive towards Arabs from bordering countries who do not need a visa and can stay for an unlimited amount of time, as long as they cross the border through official crossing points.¹³

Soon after the beginning of the crisis, however, Syrian refugees were screened upon entry by the Jordanian security forces, and hundreds of thousands of them had their documents confiscated.¹⁴ Not all of them could make it to Jordan. Palestinians were pushed back or, at a later stage, were concentrated in a facility known as Cyber City near the Syrian Jordanian border.¹⁵ Furthermore, some of the younger Syrian men were not allowed to cross the border as they were deemed potential combatants (Human Rights Watch 2013).

Once given clearance by the Jordanian military forces at the border, the Syrians could then register with UNHCR through the registration centre in Zaʿatari, a small town close to the Syrian Jordanian border.¹⁶ When in possession of a ‘Proof of Registration Document’ they could then record their presence with the Jordanian Ministry of Interior (MoI), which issued them an MoI Service Card.¹⁷

The UNHCR provided Syrians with an Asylum Seeker Certificate (ASC)¹⁸ valid for six months¹⁹ subject to renewal, this made them ‘persons of concern’ under the mandate of its protection. Notwithstanding these measures, an unknown number of Syrians crossed the border informally avoiding screening and registration procedures.

In 2012, the UNHCR and the international community persuaded the initially reluctant Jordanian Government to establish the first refugee camp in Zaʿatari. In this early phase, the camp was relatively open, and its residents could move in and out, although their formal residence remained registered with the camp administration. So-called ‘bailout’ and ‘sponsorship’ systems were in place permitting those in the camp to relocate outside when an external individual supported their application either as an economic sponsor or as a relative of the person/family resident in the camp.²⁰ Encampment, nevertheless, concerns only a minority of the displaced Syrian population, the majority of which rent small and often substandard accommodation in urban centres.²¹

A further aspect concerns the Syrians’ right to work. As stated in the MOU, refugees’ right to work is regulated by the ordinary law of Jordan, which forbids foreign workers to access key economic sectors. Labour-intensive and low-skilled sectors such as construction and agriculture are open, but the prospective employer is supposed to have a business licence to hire employees. If the employees are foreigners, they need a working permit from the Ministry of Labour, which is bureaucratically complex and expensive. Syrian businessmen can hire a quota of Syrian workers within their companies, but this is a statistically minor phenomenon. Some important sectors like tourism are difficult to access, because Syrian workers are not given security clearance to work in this sector and, as a result, they often ended up working informally (Razzaz 2017, 120).

The interactions between refugees, the government, and international organisations can be interpreted as the convergence of three lines of action. The first is the decision of Syrians to relocate to Jordan. The second is the Jordanian government’s policy to let Syrians cross the border, the framing of refugees in the domestic legislation, the enacting of ad hoc measures such as security screening, confiscation of documents, and the provision of the MOI Service Card. The third is UNHCR’s action which, within the framework of the MOU, mediates between the Jordanian state, refugees, and the donor countries, while issuing contracts to INGOs and NGOs for the provision of services and defining the international status of Syrians through the ASC.

As a result, actors establish practices and norms which constitute a shared space. The MOI Service Card and the ASC formalise this space bureaucratically with their capacity of conferring status to Syrians in front of Jordanian and international institutions and recognising a set of fundamental entitlements and giving access to services.²²

Such space finds its foundations in a crisis of the territorial order whereby the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, destabilised the assumption of a static association between people and territory in Syria and Jordan. In these conditions, it becomes increasingly difficult to rely on a sharply territorial understanding of space. That Syrians were forced to leave their territory is indicative of how the state has collapsed and failed to control territory and the capacity to contain people. That Jordan kept its borders open to Syrians shows how a state can be unwilling or incapable of controlling the movement of displaced populations through borders.

Interviewees have described this phase as the ‘honeymoon’ phase because of the (at least official) welcoming stance towards refugees and indicated how refugees were identified primarily as ‘brothers’.²³ Not only does displacement question the state’s territorial order but states themselves can also deviate from its norms and assumptions when social and political conditions lead to this stance.²⁴ This first phase of the crisis, then, is indicative of the formation of a space that questions the sovereign territorial order by establishing relations that disarticulate inside and outside or citizen and foreigner binaries and generating a site that begins to reflects our definition of heterotopic space.

Yet, this phase of crisis and reconfiguration of space has lasted only for a few years and an attempt to re-establish the norm of state territoriality followed.

Phase 2 (2013–2015): The Failed Restoration of Sovereign Territoriality

If the initial phase marks a dissolution of territoriality through displacement, the second phase is characterised by three phenomena: the closure of borders with Syria, harsher measures towards refugees’ residence conditions and movement, and greater influence of third states in shaping the response to the crisis.

From mid-2013, the situation changed significantly in regional and domestic terms. New actors in the conflict in Syria, the recriminations of host communities and local administrations in Jordan, and changes in perception from a short to a long-term crisis precipitated a new approach to the situation from the Jordanian government.

The most important development is the de facto closure of borders, which began in mid-2013. Reports emerged that Syrians trying to cross in northern Jordan as early as the first half of 2013 were turned back or kept waiting for a long time. Since then, the number of refugees accessing Jordanian territory dropped dramatically and the presence of Syrians registered as refugees in Jordan stabilised. Syrians attempting to enter Jordan were pushed from the crossing points in the north towards the north-eastern crossing areas, thus travelling through a harsh desert environment exposed to the violence of militias operating in that part of Syria (Human Rights Watch 2013).

Once they arrived in the eastern region, only few of them could cross into Jordan because the border was closed also there eventually. Tens of thousands of refugees were contained in a border area between the two states known as the Berm, close to the Rukhban crossing point. The Rukhban Camp was subsequently declared by the Jordanian authorities off-limits, which then barred access to humanitarian organisations due to presumed security threats (Lund 2018; Syrians for Truth and Justice 2017). The result was the formation of an informal settlement of tens of thousands of displaced persons with no services or assistance on a land strip suspended between Jordan and Syria.

In addition to the camp of Zaʿatari, the camp of al-Azraq was opened in April 2014 in a desert region in the east of the country. As opposed to Zaʿatari, which had remained a relatively open camp until then, al-Azraq has higher security measures and certain zones are, in effect, detention facilities (Staton 2016).

The government has never officially acknowledged the border closure with Syria, but this has been the case according to multiple reports and interviews with the author.²⁵ This was determined by developments in the conflict in Syria, which saw the advancement of factions representing a potential threat to Jordanian stability. Interviewees have mentioned the execution of Jordanian air force pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh by ISIS in January 2015 as a turning point sparking outrage among Jordanians then demanding the closure of borders for increased security.²⁶ A security incident in the city of Karak in December 2016, further heightened the alert and the demands for closed borders.²⁷ In addition to this, the Jordanian government has been increasingly under the pressure of local administrations which began to consider refugee presence problematic for infrastructural costs and the provision of services like waste management, water sanitation, and education.²⁸

As a result, the government began to revise its refugee policies in an attempt of separating the refugee space from the citizen space. Among other things, access to healthcare was made more expensive (Amnesty International 2016). Freedom of movement was restricted, especially for those without official documents who, since July 2014, were considered ineligible to acquire new documentation and were resettled in the al-Azraq camp when Jordanian forces stopped them (NRC, and IHRC 2016, 8, 30). When the author visited a refugee family some of its members said that they were reluctant to go out of their house if not for urgent matters and anyway only in the vicinity of the house. Their reason was that they had document that were either expired or were forged and they feared arrest, relocation to a camp or even repatriation.²⁹

The possibility to move in and out of camps was restricted too. When the author visited Zaʿatari in April 2016, a new perimetral fence and a ditch were being built making it more difficult to leave or enter the camp informally.³⁰ The ‘bailout’ system was suspended in early 2015 and the only possibility to leave the camp legally was with a short-term work permit that required residence in the camp at night time (NRC, and IHRC 2016, 8).

Authorities also began to crack down on Syrian workers and, in some cases, those employed without permits were arrested and even forcibly repatriated (Human Rights Watch 2017). In 2015, the World Food Programme was forced to cut essential aid to Syrians in Jordan due to a lack of funding, further exacerbating the situation in terms of food security (World Food Programme 2015).

The status of newborn children also emerged as a major issue. Refugee parents often lacked the documents required to register the birth of their child, on some occasions local religious authorities did not officially recognise their marriage, or parents were afraid to contact Syrian authorities to acquire new documents or to register the new birth. As a result, the births of thousands of children have not been registered causing the risk of statelessness (NRC, and IHRC 2016).

The harshening of Jordanian policies towards refugees, in this phase, brought two interrelated consequences at the international level: the increased proactivity of third states and the expansion of the scope of operations for international organisations from humanitarian to developmental and humanitarian.

Concerned by the potential repercussions of the crisis on their own countries, Western states adopted a supportive stance towards host governments in the region including Jordan. Increased support was seen to contain displacement within the region and avoid secondary migratory movement towards European countries. Western states’ support materialised in several international conferences, in which governments committed to billions of dollars of grants and loans to support the response to the refugee crisis as a way to externalise migration management.³¹

International organisations, on the other hand, had to respond to Jordan’s harsher measures and the interests of Western donors to create more sustainable conditions for long-term displacement. A regional coordination system among the countries affected by the Syrian refugee crisis was established in December 2015 as the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan (3RP). This plan shifted the operational paradigm from a sole humanitarian focus on the displaced population to developmental programmes that also target the host communities.³² As a result, also agencies such as UNDP were involved in the response to deliver development projects in addition to humanitarian support.

In the end, two main opposing trajectories of action characterise this phase. First, the closure of borders and the harsher conditions for refugees concerning status, mobility, and access to services, were an attempt of the government to distance the refugee population from the host community by reinstating a sharper distinction between citizens and foreigners and – as concerns the border closures – from inside and outside Jordan. Second, such measures led to the reactions of third states and international organisations. Responding to Jordanian demands for greater international support (Tsourapas 2019), international actors expanded the focus of action from refugees-only to refugees and host society. Importantly for this analysis, the distinction between citizen and refugee became less obvious if we consider for example that the condition of the displaced population was equated to that of Jordanian citizens. Ali (2021, 16–19) observes how these policies have blurred distinctions between host and refugee societies. Similarly, the 3RP and the international conferences sponsoring the regional containment of the crisis established a direct connection between Syrian presence and developmental assistance to the host society.

The result is that the space constituted by refugees, international actors, and domestic institutions, continues to shape up in a way that reflects heterotopic space by challenging the assumptions of territoriality and the sovereign territorial order at large. Notwithstanding the attempt to reinstate a territorialised normality, Syrian refugees’ space becomes the opposite, mutating into a site where the domestic and the international, the citizen and the refugee, mingle, converge, and merge superseding the central binaries of the territorial order. The distinction between ‘citizen’ and ‘displaced’, now both recipient of aid programmes, is increasingly tenuous, the crisis is regionalised through the 3RP, and the closer interdependency of domestic political agendas in Europe, the Middle East, and Jordan highlights how displacement has become a space of convergence where internal and international politics overlap and become undistinguishable. The space of displacement in Jordan has become an other-space where the standard binaries of the territorial order inside and outside, domestic and international, or citizen and foreigner faded away making it then a heterotopic space. This path continues in the third phase, during which these dynamics go through a phase of bureaucratic formalisation and consolidation.

Phase 3 (2015–2019): Consolidating Refugee Heterotopic Space

The greater formalisation of refugee space in Jordan during this phase originates from two main processes: the re-registration of Syrians and the issuing of job permits.

Since 2015, the Jordanian authorities have undertaken an Urban Verification Exercise (UVE) promoted and supported by the UNHCR whereby all Syrians in the country as displaced individuals were asked to approach Jordanian authorities with a set of documents to obtain a new MOI Card. This card was a technologically advanced plastic card containing biographic and biometric information (including an iris scan record) that granted access to basic services such as education, or healthcare, among others.

For Syrians, this was an opportunity to acquire better documentation on their status and access services more easily. This was important to them because not having regular documentation had increasingly led to deportations to the camp of al-Azraq or even forced repatriation (Human Rights Watch 2017).

The Jordanian government agreed to the UVE. It was an opportunity to acquire data about Syrian refugees and facilitated the acquisition of biometric information. The UNHCR favoured this procedure considering its protection mandate so that a more formalised status for Syrians could guarantee higher standards of protection, greater access to services, and less arbitrariness through a more consolidate documentary and legal status. On various occasions, interviewees have observed that one of the major organisational problems of the crisis has been the counting of Syrians who were in Jordan for humanitarian reasons, given the discrepancy between governmental and UN figures.³³

Furthermore, as mentioned above, tens of thousands of refugees’ documents were confiscated at the border crossing; as part of the UVE, most of these documents were returned thus contributing to better documentation of identity for the refugee population (UNHCR 2019c). Simultaneous to the UVE was the introduction of chip-and-pin payment cards to substitute food vouchers (UNHCR 2017). The large displaced population living out of camps has rendered the delivery of aid more difficult and cash aid is considered more efficient to address their needs (UNHCR 2019b).³⁴

The second important development of this phase was the possibility for Syrian refugees to acquire a working permit from the Ministry of Labour. Until then, legal access to the job market has been hindered by the need for expensive permits and bureaucratic obstacles which caused informality, exploitation, and corruption (Tobin and Alahmed 2019). For a long time, the government had not been willing to facilitate Syrian refugees’ employment because of its presumed repercussions on the local population, where the unemployment rate is estimated at around 12–14% (Razzaz 2017, 25). The Jordanian government was also asking for third states or international organisations to pay for the job permits of Syrians as a condition for them to be allowed to work, a request that was not well received by donors.³⁵ Yet, Syrian labour was already being used informally and Syrians were not competing in the job market with Jordanians, who generally have higher qualifications and are attracted by sectors with better employment conditions (Razzaz 2017, 24). The government, eventually, accepted to issue the permits, the king even made an unlikely commitment claiming that for each job to a refugee there would have been five jobs for Jordanians thus showing how the issue was seen as one of competing interests between the local population and refugees (Sweis 2016).

What led to the decision to allow for Syrian legal access to the job market eventually was pressure coming from international organisations and third states.³⁶ Syrians likely saw this as a possibility to regularise their working position also because the government was beginning to sanction those who were found working without a permit. Third states saw refugees’ access to the job market to make them less dependent on the aid they were mostly paying for.

The role of international actors is epitomised by the London Conference of 2016, when an agreement was reached (the so-called Jordan Compact) whereby the EU would have relaxed trade conditions for Jordanian manufacturing industries thus stimulating export and foreign investment in the Jordanian economy. In exchange for this, the Jordanian Government would have eased the conditions of employment for Syrians by issuing up to two hundred thousand work permits for free. As a condition, a fifteen per cent quota of Syrian refugees should be employed within Jordanian Special Economic Zones and other industrial areas (Council of the European Union 2016).

The compact was eventually approved, and the Ministry of Labour in January 2019 was reporting the figure of 139,000 work permits (UNHCR 2019), but it is unclear whether this corresponds to the number of refugees that have obtained a regular job, or whether an individual could have taken out more than one permit for different jobs, or whether workers’ sponsors (kāfyl) have benefitted from this system (Razzaz 2017, 12).

The result of these procedures was that both the UVE and the establishment of agreements like the Jordan Compact consolidated the relations constituting displacement as a heterotopic space. International actors, domestic forces, and refugees established relations amounting to a space where the categories of domestic and international and inside and outside have lost significance. The UVE has been a process that progressively made the status of Syrian refugees documented and formalised but this does not mean that they can be considered simply ‘within’ Jordan, they are neither migrants nor citizens, and more commonly fall in the definition of de facto refugees (Turner 2022), meaning that they are recognised as refugees by international actors according to international standards but not in legal terms by the domestic authority. Refugee space becomes a type of other-space where the significance of the international territorial order wanes and a different form of space that supersedes territoriality’s distinctive elements emerges. Similarly, the partial and conditional integration of Syrians in the labour market responds to dynamics that mix international factors, such as the quest for refugees’ self-sustenance, and domestic factors including the issue of unemployment and competition with the autochthonous work force. This compromise between international pressure and domestic restrictions confirms how refugee space is a site where migrant or citizen are not words that can account for the actual condition of displaced entirely, instead the status of de facto refugee, becomes an ad hoc label (Janmyr and Mourad 2018) placing refugees in a site neither inside nor outside Jordan.

Syrian displacement to Jordan exemplifies a crisis of the sovereign territorial order because it illustrates how it deviated from its core characterising elements by failing to fulfil conditions of existence such as the association of people to a territory, upholding the distinction between domestic and international, and blurring rather than reinforcing the categories of citizen and foreigner. Displacement generates a condition that ‘unbundles’ people from conventional forms of territorialised space; the responses we witness in Jordan, attempt to simultaneously patch up a crumbling territorial order and mediate between the conflicting agendas of the actors involved. This results in the type of interactions that have been reconstructed in this account and that can be better interpreted as a heterotopic space because it radically questions the assumptions of territoriality and its foundations and constitutes a different form of space that cannot be mapped through the lenses of the territorial order.

Conclusions: Displacement as Heterotopic Space

After a decade of displacement, how can we account for the situation of 6.8 million Syrians out of their country? The same question can be raised for refugee populations that have been in displacement for much longer elsewhere and yet inhabit spaces that escape definitions based on the binaries of the sovereign territorial order. For example, the 5.6 million Palestinians registered with UNRWA, the 2.6 million Afghan refugees, the 4.1 million Venezuelans, the 2.2 million South Sudanese, and 1.1 million refugees from Myanmar, or the estimated 10 million stateless people, to mention some examples.³⁷

Should we rely solely on a territorialist epistemology, an account of the spatial condition of displacement would be limited to a conceptual toolkit based on dichotomies such as citizen and foreigner, inside and outside, open or closed.

The possibility to think of the space generated by mass displacement as a space in itself is prevented by an idea of territoriality that saturates the international order and excludes alternative or complementary conceptions. This means that the territorialist approach that dominates IR cannot represent adequately displacement, in fact its state-centric assumptions perpetuate displacement discursively relegating displaced people to a state of exception or, in the best case, to a form of liminality.

Instead, the contention of this essay is that, if we aim for a more perceptive understanding of displacement and space at large, there is a need to go beyond the idea that displaced people inhabit a sort of ‘junkyard’ for the broken parts of the sovereign territorial order. I have shown through a reconstruction of the response to Syrian displacement in Jordan, that displacement produces relations and interactions that are contradictive, hybrid, and constantly revised to negotiate the space to which a displaced population is assigned to. The case of Syrian displacement to Jordan illustrates how the crisis of territoriality caused by the Syrian conflict has unsettled the foundations of the people-territory-sovereignty order and produced an other-space where international and domestic dynamics interact and merge. These interactions produce an admittedly fuzzy site, unfinished and in-flux, which cannot be ‘read’ through a territorialist lens. The constant fluctuation and redefinition of the space of displacement that we witness in Jordan (and in most other displacement phenomena) through regulation, bureaucracy, aid, provision and withdrawal of services, attributions of legal or irregular status conflicting domestic and international standards, are only some of the examples showing how displacement becomes a site that escapes a conventional spatial definition. The merging of international and domestic forces, the blurring of inside and outside, the elusiveness of distinctions between migrant, refugee, stateless, or citizens point to the idea that displacement is a heterotopic space transcending the foundations of the sovereign territorial order, as in the definition elaborated in this essay.

Whereas territoriality represents space as an orderly condition whereby the end of one state marks the beginning of another, reconstructing phenomena of mass displacement illustrates that they generate forms of space that do not fit this neat mapping of space. There are reasons to recognise that displacement, for better or worse, constitutes space to the same extent citizens and territories do from the perspective of modern statehood. Furthermore, differently from ideas of displacement as forming liminal spaces (for example, Agier 2016; Haddad 2008), a heterotopic space is not liminal or peripheral to a territorial order, it becomes a replacement for a territoriality in crisis and carves out its centrality as it is shown by the density of interactions and the political contentiousness that this space acquires in the case of Jordan. The definition proposed in this discussion, furthermore, accounts for the processual and interactive nature of this type of space, and the case study has illustrated how such space is made by interactions that progressively define where refugees are by identifying their status and the limits and possibilities of their mobility in Jordan through documentation, regulation, and bureaucracy among other things. This, is consistent with the type of criticism that has been advanced by Saldanha (2008) and to an extent Harvey (2007) towards Foucauldian heterotopia as lacking a relational dimension, as observed by Massey (2005) space is a relational phenomenon and heterotopic space makes no exception. Yet, the Jordanian case illustrates that some Foucauldian aspects are retained, for example the heterotopic space of Syrian displacement emerges in conjunction with a crisis or a deviation from a dominant norm of territoriality and retains the characteristic of being a site in which different spaces converge simultaneously such as the international and domestic or the space of refugees and that of citizens.

In sum, the revisited concept of heterotopic space presented herein is an effort to advance IR understanding of space by acknowledging the site of displacement as the outcome of processes that deviate from dominant spatial ordering. Giving this space a name and a definition is a way to initiate a more adequate acknowledgement of the spatial condition of those who make and inhabit heterotopic space rather than perpetuating their exclusion.

Interviews and field visits (chronological order)

1. Senior UN official, working in the regional refugee crisis response sector, Amman (Jordan), 30 March 2016.

2. Senior official of the Ministry of Planning and Cooperation of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Amman (Jordan), 31 March 2016.

3. UN official working in the refugee crisis response sector, Amman (Jordan), 31 April 2016.

4. Senior academic specialised on refugees in Jordan, Amman (Jordan), 3 April 2016.

5. UN Official working in the refugee crisis response sector, Amman (Jordan), 4 April 2016.

6. Representative of an international human rights advocacy NGO, Amman (Jordan), 7 April 2016 and 11 June 2017.

7. Senior official of the Ministry of Planning and Cooperation of Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Amman (Jordan), 10 April 2016.

8. Country Director of an international NGO working in the refugee crisis response, Amman (Jordan), 11 April 2016.

9. Official of the Ministry for Municipal Affairs of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Amman (Jordan), 11 April 2016.

10. Senior UN official, working in the refugee crisis response sector, Amman (Jordan), 11 April 2016.

11. Senior UN official, working in the refugee crisis response sector, Amman (Jordan), 13 April 2016.

12. UN Public Relations Officer, Zaʿatari (Jordan), 13 April 2016.

13. Security official of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan working with refugee crisis response sector, Amman (Jordan), 13 April 2016.

14. Spokesperson for a UN humanitarian agency working in the refugee crisis response sector, Amman (Jordan) 14 April 2016.

15. Official of a local municipality near the Jordanian/Syrian border, 16 April 2016.

16. Free-lance senior journalist based in Jordan, Amman (Jordan), 17 April 2016.

17. Director of a local think tank, Amman (Jordan), 17 April 2016.

18. Senior UN Official, working in the refugee crisis response sector, Amman (Jordan), 19 April 2016.

19. Project Coordinator of an international NGO working in the refugee crisis response sector, Amman (Jordan), 20 April 2016.

20. Senior UN official, working in the refugee crisis response sector, Amman (Jordan), 21 April 2016.

21. Senior UN official, working in the refugee crisis response sector, Amman (Jordan), 10 June 2017.

22. Sheikh of a local tribe, Rabah al-Sarhan (Jordan), 11 June 2017.

Field visits

Field visit (1) in Zaʿatari Refugee Camp, under the supervision of the Ministry of Interior of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Zaʿatari (Jordan), 13 April 2016.

Field visit (2) in al-Mafraq in which the author has spoken to the local mayor and spent time with a refugee family in their house, al-Mafraq (Jordan), 16 April 2016.

Field visit (3) in Irbid, in which the author has visited the premises of structures providing services to refugees and local population managed by NGOs, Irbid (Jordan), 17 April 2016.

Field visit (4) in the border area of Jaber, Jaber (Jordan), 10 June 2017.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the support and collaboration that has received for research in Jordan in particular from Dr Hana el-Gallal, Dr Ann-Christin Zuntz (University of Edinburgh), and the Centre for British Research in the Levant of Amman. I have received also valuable feedback from the Migration Research Group of the University of Roskilde (Denmark) and at the online conference ‘Borders and Boundaries’ organised by Professor Beth Simmons (30 April–1 May 2020). The responsibility for any error in the article remains exclusively with the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The only exception to this is the European regional integration debate, which in fact interrogates principles of state sovereignty and territoriality. On Europe as a borderland see Balibar (2009).

2. See in particular the special issue of this journal dedicated to the geopolitics of changing state spaces: Geopolitics, Volume 18, Issue 2 (2013).

3. This is especially important in a context such as the Middle East, where literature on border spaces is abundant for its contrasted history of state-formation and colonialism (Del Sarto 2021; Ellis 2018; Meier 2018; Schofield 2018; Vignal 2017; Zartman 2010).

4. Think for example of how often the refugee spatial condition is primarily described as liminal. For example, see (Dillon 1999; Haddad 2008).

5. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the term has become known in the late nineteenth century and refers to phenomena such as ‘heterotopic bone formation’, whereby ossification takes place outside the skeleton. See also Hetherington (1997, viii).

6. According to some, Foucault did not officially publish his work on heterotopia, which was delivered as a lecture and released only posthumously. He probably did not deem the paper ready for publication at that point (Harvey 2000b). The word heterotopia was originally present in The order of things (1966) but eliminated in later editions. For a reconstruction of the history of the term and a useful discussion of its meaning in relation to other conceptualisations see P. Johnson (2006) and Palladino and Miller (2015).

7. Point 1 and 2 are bundled in the same category in Foucault’s definition.

8. By third countries I refer to all states that are neither the country of origin of refugees (Syria) nor the country of first arrival (Jordan) and that nevertheless play a role in the response to the crisis.

9. Field research and interviews were approved by the research ethics body of the author´s employer at the time of the research. Interviewees have given consent to the author to be interviewed. Their identity is protected by anonymity.

10. The author is grateful to Ann-Christine Zuntz for her advice and guidance during this visit. See also Zuntz’s work on labour, migration and displacement of Syrians to Jordan, among others (Zuntz 2021).

11. The cooperation agreement between the two entities signed in 1997 establishes the conditions of existence of the UNHCR in Jordan, see (UNHCR, and Government of Jordan 1997).

The MOU was slightly modified in 2014 to allow the UNHCR more time to register refugees (Malkawi 2014).

The original text of the MOU is not publicly available, an informal English translation is on file with the author (UNHCR, and Government of Jordan 1998).

12. The only exception is a constitutional article (Art. 2), which is limited to political refugees. The condition of political refugees is also addressed in articles 6 and 23 of the Law No. 24 of 1973 on Residence and Foreigners’ Affairs regulating the presence of foreigners in Jordan, (Government of Jordan 1973).

13. See in particular article 29 (e) of the Law 24 (1973) which states the exemptions from the provisions of the Residency Law 24 on the basis of bilateral agreements with Syria (UNHCR 2019).

14. Jordanian authorities have confiscated more than two hundred thousand documents, including passports and ‘family booklets’, belonging to about 150,000 individuals, leaving them without their original documents (NRC, and IHRC 2016).

15. This was confirmed by Interviewee 6 who also explained that the same dynamic took place during the displacement crisis from Iraq. According to the interview, Jordan is concerned that admitting more Palestinians will have the effect of creating a pull effect, but Jordan does now want to become a surrogate country for Palestine, an argument also known as Jordan ‘al-waṭan al-badyl’, literally the ‘replacement country’. Interviewee 10 also observed that while Syrians were expected to have a state to go back to, Palestinians do not, and therefore the Jordanian government saw the displacement of Syrians as likely to be solved by return, something that does not equally apply to Palestinians.

16. At a later stage, other registration centres were open in other locations including Rabah al-Sahran and Irbid and then expanded to other cities including Amman.

17. Interviewees 2, 6, and 20.

18. The refugees registered in refugee camps were given a ‘proof of registration document’, which could be subsequently changed into an Asylum Seeker Certificate (ASC) if the refugee left the camp’s premises.

19. At a later stage, the ASC validity was extended to 12 months.

20. Interviewee 16 has noted how this ‘open camp policy’ indicated that Jordan did not have a strong stance on separating local society and Syrians at least in this phase. An aspect that resonates also with observations from interviewee 22, who observed that refugees from Syrian had close connections with northern Jordanians in tribal and/or economic terms, and they were seen as ‘brothers’. Not by coincidence, UNHCR statistics show that more than forty per cent of the Syrian population comes from the city and province of Darʿā, just across the border and historically closely connected with the area of governorate of Irbid.

21. Interviewees 2 and 20. The case of Syrian refugees in Jordan is an example of how international agencies had to adapt to an extensive non-encamped refugee population and therefore implemented and further developed their out-of-camps policies. The UNHCR has been developing policies for non-camp refugee populations since 2009. Jordan and other states as Lebanon are among the most significant cases it has had to deal with until now.

22. The services provided include Infoline/Helpline offices, help desks and community support committees, registration; refugee status determination, resettlement, legal assistance, social services for women and children, healthcare, education, working in Jordan, complimentary pathways, reporting abuses.

23. Interviewee 10 and 18.

24. Lamis Abdelaaty illustrates how states policies towards refugees are far from a simple rejection or welcoming of refugees and depend on interstate relations and ethnic affinities (Abdelaaty 2021, 10).

25. Interviewees working for the Jordanian government have never stated the official closure of the border while other interviewees with international organisations and NGOs mentioned that the border was de facto closed after 2013. According to these accounts, some UN agencies advised the government to make the closure of border official to avoid people getting stuck at the border, but the government was reluctant to make this stance official apparently because it would have potentially damaged its public reputation. Interviewees 2, 6, and 18.

26. Interviewee 10.

27. Interviewee 21.

28. Interviewees 15, 17.

29. Field visit 2.

30. Author’s field visit 1.

31. Between 2017 and 2021 the EU and the UN have hosted five donor conferences in Brussels. In 2016 the UK and other partner states held the London Conference. Kuwait has hosted 3 conferences, between 2013 and 2015. All the conferences lead to pledges for billions of dollars in grants and donation aiming to support the humanitarian operations related to the Syrian conflict in Syria and the rest of the region.

32. See http://www.3rpsyriacrisis.org/>, accessed 2 May 2022.

33. Interviewees 18, 3.

34. There have been critical interpretations of these phenomena see Tazzioli (2019).

35. Interviewee 8.

36. For a critical analysis of this phenomenon see Turner (2019).

37. Data from UNHCR, Refugee Data Finder.