UNDERSTANDING THE FIELD

Two factors that people consistently highlighted during my preliminary fieldwork in 2010 alerted me to the salience of this socioeconomic dimension: first, Iraqis, unlike other “traditional” refugees, possessed high levels of economic, educational, and social capital; and second, given this socioeconomic well-being, they had the ability to self-settle throughout Amman and avoid many traditional channels of assistance. I quickly realized that Iraqis lived throughout the city's variegated neighborhoods, from the upscale areas of ʿAbdun and Rabiya to the working-class areas of Marka al-Shimaliyya and al-Hashmi al-Shimali. Iraqis’ physical dispersal throughout the city did not neatly overlap with class: some who might have been able to live in upper- or middle-class areas opted for more humble accommodations to prolong their savings.

My doctoral research was mainly concerned with how Iraqis—as people who had experienced protracted instability prior to and after 2003—were rearticulating and reimagining notions of home in relation to Iraq, Jordan, and the potential resettlement countries in which many were hoping to end up. To explore this question, I included a wide range of Iraqis in my research: those who had arrived in Jordan prior to and after 2003; long-term residents of Jordan; medical tourists; and those officially registered for resettlement or aid with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Most of the Iraqis I met came from Baghdad, though some traced their origins to other parts of the country. Consisting of both men and women, they were relatively well educated: all had finished high school, and a number held doctorates. Given that most of them had left Iraq for Jordan after 2010, their final years in Iraq were characterized by greater stability than was the case for Iraqis who had fled the country amid the heightened sectarian violence of 2006–7.Footnote ⁴ While their socioeconomic status varied, many relied on their savings or on remittances from Iraq, and about half were employed. Although I was often told that most Iraqis in Jordan were Sunni, those I met were from different religious denominations, with many families having mixed religious and ethnic backgrounds.

Due to the dispersal of Iraqis throughout Amman, a location-centric ethnographic method was inappropriate. Instead, I opted to travel around, following different friends through the city, sometimes spending days at a time in one neighborhood, other times visiting several neighborhoods in a day. I traveled regularly to Marka al-Shimaliyya, al-Hashmi al-Shimali, Jabal al-Nuzha, and al-ʿAshrafiya in the city's east, as well as to Jabal al-Luwibda, al-Swifiya, ʿAbdun, al-Shmaysani, and the University of Jordan area in the western part of the city.Footnote ⁵ In 2010 I met an initial group of Iraqi families via local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other researchers. Many of these families were still in Amman when I returned in 2012 for long-term fieldwork, and they served as important contacts with the broader community. As a woman, I was generally able to access domestic space, particularly with families in which women were heads of household or men worked long hours. This access proved particularly important in an urban context where Iraqis had few public spaces in which to gather and meet. While exploring the lives of Iraqis in Amman, I also met their Jordanian neighbors and friends, and, after they started arriving in Jordan in early 2012, Syrians who settled in the same areas. My research methodology was grounded in participant observation, but also included detailed field diaries, activity logs, semistructured interviews with approximately fifty key informants (conducted twice with each informant), informal conversations, and interviews with UN and NGO staff as well as local and foreign scholars.Footnote ⁶

SITUATING DISPLACEMENT EXPERIENCES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

When I first started exploring home and displacement among Iraqis in Jordan, I had expected to be confronted more directly with, on the one hand, issues related to state practices such as detention, harassment, and deportation, or paperwork, fines, and border regulations, and, on the other hand, Arab understandings of hospitality and asylum. Instead, people spoke to me about class, wealth, and economic struggle. I was struck by the extent to which socioeconomic concerns figured into people's experiences and understandings of displacement.

In attempting to disentangle displacement experiences, many scholars have focused on the significance of a statist–humanitarian paradigm that emphasizes the particularity of refugee marginalization and loss.Footnote ⁷ This scholarship has conceptualized refugee existence as a form of “bare life” stripped of rights and suspended in a state of exception,Footnote ⁸ and explored the ways in which refugees are a foil through which new juridico-political categories of belonging and citizenship are formulated.Footnote ⁹ In understanding refugees as people out of place—legally, physically, and often existentially—this literature has highlighted the biopolitical mechanisms and apparatuses with which states define, manage, and marginalize them; the creation of physical and social boundaries; and the powerlessness and resilience of refugees in the face of such forms of exclusion.Footnote ¹⁰ This statist-humanitarian paradigm has become increasingly important in Jordan because the country has been positioned internationally as a containment zone for regional migration and has consequently witnessed the expansion of a formalized international refugee apparatus on its territory.Footnote ¹¹ In the case of Jordan, attention has therefore been paid to increasingly selective border regulations;Footnote ¹² legal limitations placed on access to the formal labor market;Footnote ¹³ the threat and implementation of deportation;Footnote ¹⁴ and the mobilization of moral panic tied to global discourses framing the refugee as an inherent threat to national order.Footnote ¹⁵

Scholars working on the Middle East have also highlighted the salience of a regionalist paradigm that emphasizes both a long history of mobility and hospitality as well as historical and transregional forms of belonging that successfully vie with official nationalisms.Footnote ¹⁶ Critically interrogating the salience of the “refugee” category in a context where “forms and forces of regionalism”—or historical and enduring sentiments, identities, and linkages across current forms of territorialization—remain strong, these scholars have tempered the broader focus on biopower in studies of displacement.Footnote ¹⁷ As affective and physical linkages, these regionalisms, such as Arabism, Islam, labor migration, pilgrimage routes, kinship ties, and tribal and sectarian affiliations, among others, generate territorialities and subjectivities that do not necessarily coincide with those of nation-states.Footnote ¹⁸ Scholars have therefore argued that in a region of multiple supra- and substate identifications, states and societies have often received displaced individuals as fellow Arabs, coreligionists, or guests (ḍuyūf).Footnote ¹⁹ Moreover, displaced persons themselves have not necessarily or even primarily articulated their identities and claims as “refugees” (lājʾīn), often expressing them in multiple local registers.Footnote ²⁰ In light of this concern for situating displacement within its regional specificity, recent scholarship on the Iraqi and Syrian displacements has highlighted how places of exile are conceptualized and experienced as familiar;Footnote ²¹ how displacement has overlain long-established cross-border labor migration routes;Footnote ²² how Arabism and religious identities, of both states and individuals, have shaped migration trajectories;Footnote ²³ and how regional understandings of hospitality and asylum have enabled refugees to self-settle in new places.Footnote ²⁴ This regionalist paradigm has been particularly important for research on Jordan, a country with intense movements into and across its territory. Since 1878, when the Ottomans chose to resettle Circassian refugees from the Russian Empire in the area comprising present-day Amman, Jordan has seen the arrival, transit, and resettlement of myriad ethnic, national, and religious communities.Footnote ²⁵ This focus on connection over fragmentation has troubled ahistorical and state-centric notions of belonging, as well as more recent biopolitical engagements that retain an interest in the externality of the refugee.

In conversation with these perspectives, other scholars have recently shown how socioeconomic factors are encroaching on experiences of displacement. In her study of Palestinian refugees in Shatila camp, Lebanon, Diana Allan explores the dissonance between a traditional nationalist narrative and a harsh contemporary economic reality that is unmaking and remaking the grounds for collective belonging.Footnote ²⁶ She details how the economic is taken up in refugee subjectivity, how it is animating new understandings of the political, and how it is expanding traditional understandings of solidarity and dependency. In Jordan, where a division of labor exists between Palestinian-Jordanians, who dominate the private sector, and East Bank Jordanians, who populate the public sector, identity has long had an economic dimension. However, neoliberal reforms have greatly amplified and transformed the economic character of identity. Luigi Achilli has argued that despite being spaces of strong collective identity grounded in shared socioeconomic marginalization, Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan are characterized by powerful economic cleavages that profoundly influence life trajectories, intracamp relations, and collective and individual subjectivities.Footnote ²⁷ In the case of Iraqis in Jordan, Géraldine Chatelard has demonstrated that class and professional identities have been central to Iraqis’ ability to build relationships with previously established Iraqis and Jordanians.Footnote ²⁸ These studies reveal how socioeconomic circumstances have influenced, intersected with, and stood apart from other factors influencing displacement, such as state policies or regional legacies of hospitality and transborder connection.

This article builds upon this recent scholarship by showing that Jordanians and Iraqis often addressed the presence of refugees in Jordan in a socioeconomic rather than a nationalist or regionalist register—a framing that was important in defining experiences of displacement for all those affected by it. I conceptualize this socioeconomic imaginary through the metaphor of “hunger” in order to: first, highlight my interlocutors’ conception of everyday life in neoliberal Jordan as one of depredation in which, as an elderly Iraqi woman described it, “people eat people” to attain their own well-being; second, suggest that such a context of depredation generated a “field of ethical indeterminacy”Footnote ²⁹ where people were preoccupied with questions of what was right, good, and valuable, and regularly evaluated, judged, and censured their own actions and those of others;Footnote ³⁰ third, demonstrate that understanding all refugee situations through the lens of xenophobia emphasizes the salience of state biopower and nationalist identification, while downplaying the role of socioeconomic conditions in displacement experiences. In Jordan, then, anti-Iraqi (and anti-Syrian) rhetoric emerged not as some local permutation of a globalized antirefugee and antiforeigner discourse, but rather as a defense of a life lived in hunger. In making this argument, I am not suggesting that socioeconomic status displaced state policies or national and regional identifications. In fact, hierarchies of class are only one form of stratification, and in the Middle East they have often overlapped with those of religion, sect, ethnicity, legal status, family, or tribe.Footnote ³¹ However, socioeconomic status is not merely derivative of these other hierarchies or a proxy for them. In Jordan, a country that has undergone severe neoliberal restructuring, the importance of socioeconomic status as a hierarchy that acts in concert with but is also independent from other stratifications is becoming increasingly clear, and its effects on experiences of displacement demand a fuller accounting.

WORLDS APART: LIFE AMID NEOLIBERAL RESTRUCTURING IN JORDAN

Majid, a second-generation Palestinian-Jordanian who had lived in Amman all his life, was in his mid-thirties when I first met him. He lived largely month to month, and, being a single man, shared a flat with his friends. Having worked as a waiter for over a decade, he now wanted to set up his own small food shop. When I asked him about the logistics of his new project, he explained that he needed to hire at least two other workers to help him. He then added, “I will hire a Syrian to work with me in the evening shift.” I asked him why he had not considered hiring a Jordanian. “Of course, I am not against this,” he remarked, “but a Jordanian wouldn't work for only JD 200 [per month] and for such a long shift. He would ask for JD 350, and I can't afford that.”Footnote ³² I then inquired whether the exclusion of Jordanians from such jobs may have been a factor in recent tensions between host communities and refugees. Fixing his eyes on me intently, Majid shook his head and replied,

Making a throwing gesture with his hands, as though scattering bills over the living room floor, he continued: “But if someone else goes to the bank and asks for a loan for a car, they [the bank employees] will give it directly. The system gives you money to consume, but it doesn't give you money to produce anything.” Majid sighed and lit a cigarette.

Whereas popular discourse in Jordan at the time attached blame for the country's many economic woes to the presence of thousands of refugees, Majid clearly did not see Iraqis and Syrians as the problem. He instead faulted “the system.” The issue, in his view, was less that this system was corrupt than that it consistently rewarded certain goals over others as part of its normal functioning. Thus, as Majid described, banks were willing to lend money to support consumption but not to support productive activity such as opening a small shop. Majid's observation can be read as a critique of Jordan's broader neoliberal restructuring undertaken since the late 1980s. This restructuring has involved lifting of subsidies on basic foods and petrol, privatization of public services, and reduction of government spending.Footnote ³³ Overlapping with a decline in trade with Iraq and the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian-Jordanians after the 1991 Gulf War, these economic changes ushered in widespread poverty.Footnote ³⁴

Due to the common perception that Jordan is a rentier economy fundamentally dependent on foreign income sources—particularly foreign aid—these changes have also led to a sense among citizens and outsiders alike that the Jordanian state is predatory.Footnote ³⁵ Foreign aid to Jordan steadily increased in the 1990s, but following the 2003 Iraq War aid flows rose dramatically to an estimated $750 million annually.Footnote ³⁶ Although half of this aid was allocated to military expenditures, the state generally sought to frame it as a social good necessary to support ordinary Jordanians and to offset the many deleterious effects of the Iraq War, particularly the “refugee burden.” Despite this attempt to cast the aid as beneficial to Jordanians, it was routinely described far less charitably. Echoing the words of many, a Jordanian working with an international agency said that Jordan “profited off the misery of its neighbors.” Similarly, a Jordanian economist described the country as “nasty” and criticized the Jordanian state for its attempt to use Iraqis to capture international funds, its preference for wealthier Iraqi refugees, and its 2004 changes to land laws, which gave foreigners the right to purchase land—a move widely understood as motivated by the desire to capture Iraqi capital.Footnote ³⁷

Neoliberalism in Jordan has also precipitated extensive alterations to Amman's physical landscape as the city's infrastructure has grown and evolved to accommodate and facilitate foreign investment.Footnote ³⁸ Importantly, neoliberal reforms have had the effect of creating new cosmopolitan spaces that have profoundly influenced local understandings of wealth and well-being.Footnote ³⁹ Such spaces produce a shared experience of consumption among people of different backgrounds, providing the grounds for emergent and alternate forms of solidarity that extend beyond family, tribe, and nationality, and that prioritize a “middle-class orientation.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Whereas neoliberal discourses have heralded consumption as key to prosperity and a measure of wealth, Majid viewed it as the main impediment to the achievement of a prosperous life. As he pointed out, “People want to have shiny streets, fireworks, and everything new and big buildings. And shopping, even shopping festivals, is this an important thing in life? And having nice cars like a Ferrari. First produce a Ferrari, then buy one!” He paused before adding, “I heard a speech the other day by someone in the government.” “What did he say?” I asked. Smiling mockingly, Majid answered, “We are a great country, and the percentage of young people here with an idea for a new initiative is higher than the percentage of young people in the US.” Majid let out a peal of laughter before concluding, “The only problem is nothing will change here in Jordan. They don't allow us to do anything even if we have dreams.” Although consumption may have become a measure of wealth and well-being in Jordan, catalyzing more inclusive forms of sociality, clearly it has not completely submerged alternate understandings of value or perceptions of social divisions.Footnote ⁴¹ Some scholars have cautioned that growing inequalities are becoming increasingly visible and harder to mask, generating considerable discontent.Footnote ⁴² Majid explicitly expressed this sentiment to me during one of our conversations:

Majid described the rich and poor in geographic terms that allowed for no connections between them. For him, the issue was no longer one of hierarchies, for even hierarchies assume some form of relation, even if unequal, between people. The rich live elsewhere entirely, on another planet, disconnected from the travails of the less well off. From this other planet, they prey on earth, generating hunger—a deprivation of food and dignity—that pushes people into ethically troubling situations where they feel compelled to surrender what they most value.

This sense of the rich as a disconnected elite owes much to the ways in which neoliberal reforms were implemented in Jordan. These reforms aggressively promoted economic rights tied to neoliberal understandings of growth and well-being, namely, foreign investment and consumerism, over political and social rights.Footnote ⁴³ In parallel, the government undertook a process of political liberalization. Marked by the return of parliamentary life in the early 1990s, this process allowed business elites to influence government by lobbying parliamentary members and forming coalitions based on interest rather than wāṣṭa.Footnote ⁴⁴ Wāṣṭa describes the use of horizontal and vertical social networks, often based on family, friendship, or patronage, to “influence the distribution of advantages and resources.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Although it may involve a direct exchange of money or gifts, it is understood less as an economic relationship than as a social one that binds together giver and taker.Footnote ⁴⁶ This social aspect of wāṣṭa stands in contrast to Majid's characterization of the rich—one best understood in terms of the neoliberal shifts in how advantage and privilege are obtained and deployed in Jordan. In Majid's view, the wealthy are not those with connections, but rather those without them, or those whose power is desocialized. Although wealthy individuals certainly still benefit from wāṣṭa under neoliberal reforms, Majid's focus on disconnection indicates that he was not concerned with how some people unfairly work the system, but instead with how the social disconnection inherent to the system itself prioritizes goals that do not benefit everyone. He contrasted the time and effort he invested in trying to get a bank loan and the stakes at play—his attempt to secure a livelihood—to the ease with which the rich could access the same loan to purchase something seemingly unnecessary such as a car. In contrast to an understanding of the rich based solely on a sterile calculation of monetary wealth, Majid's view combined material well-being with three other elements: a specific set of suspect moral values; a material sensibility that he interpreted as wasteful, frivolous, and against the common good; and a disconnection from society.

“You know,” Majid finally told me, “if I wanted to, I could also do things illegally. I could go tomorrow and be rich, take advantage, join the intelligence services [mukhabarat]. However, my principles are not for sale.” After an unusually long pause, he added, “Yet . . .” In contrast to his depiction of the rich, Majid positioned himself as someone who steadfastly refused to succumb to an ethically compromised position. This refusal was grounded in a desire not to “take advantage,” not to engage in self-interested behavior. Majid's view of other and self was based on agency, framing actions as intentional rather than merely accidental: whereas he opted not to “feed off” of others, the rich chose to do so. Yet, despite his good intentions, Majid acknowledged that the destabilizations provoked by hunger could transform unthinkable decisions into conceivable ones.

In contrast to this world of easy wealth, then, stood another world in which hunger dominated—figuratively and literally. The intensity of efforts to survive hunger, both as a struggle for survival and as a striving for what was valuable, was raised even more forcefully by Rana, a Palestinian-Jordanian lawyer who works on women's rights issues. The first time I met with her, I was ushered into her office where I found her with two teenage brothers. They had lost their father at a young age and their mother—obligated to prostitute herself in order to support a family of six by herself—had fallen victim to an acid attack that eventually killed her. Husam, as the eldest brother, became the breadwinner. He earned five dinars a day but was left with only three if he chose to ride public transportation to and from work. Sometimes he endured the over one hour walk both ways to save those two dinars. “How do they live on five dinars a day?” I asked incredulously. “They don't,” Rana replied tersely, “they starve.” She paused and then added, “And yet, a few weeks ago he came to see me to show me an old jewelry box filled with faux bijoux that he had bought for his sisters. He was proud of it. People need a space where they have dignity.” Husam chose to reinscribe a space of hunger—powerfully evidenced by his mother's prostitution—with life-affirming relations that resisted the degradations and humiliation it imposed. He did so both by securing his family's physical survival and by symbolically reaffirming the social grounds of human life.

Heavily inflected by socioeconomics, the space that Syrians and Iraqis entered was one where Jordanians without resources felt alternately trapped or compelled to flee—a plight that echoed that of refugees themselves—and where compromises that undermined life were both made and resisted. In this space, the presence of Iraqi and Syrian refugees was not framed by Majid as inherently threatening. In his mind, they were principally victims rather than destabilizers of the system, another commodity from which wealth was extracted—or consumed—by greedy elites. Only when they approximated the ethically suspect depredation of the wealthy were Iraqis and Syrians subject to social sanction. Whatever negative impact they were seen to have, Iraqis and subsequently Syrians were often recognized not in nationalist, religious, or other terms, but through this already established and widely circulating socioeconomic register that evoked an increasingly visible fracture in Jordan. When recognized as predatory—as individuals who took at the expense of others—they were seen as legitimate targets of the sort of critique that Majid and others leveled against Jordanians and the Jordanian state.

NO SUCH THING AS A RICH REFUGEE

Soaring above the Third Circle in Jabal Amman is the towering Le Royal Hotel. As one of the tallest buildings in a city of two- and three-story apartment blocks, the hotel is an emblematic materialization of the wealth many Jordanians thought Iraqis had brought with them.Footnote ⁴⁷ This feeling was expressed by Salwa, a second-generation Palestinian-Jordanian who had worked with various NGOs at the height of the Iraqi refugee influx in 2006–7. As she explained:

Similar sentiments were expressed vis-à-vis Syrians, though, given their more humble financial means, in less strident terms. When I visited a local NGO in the working-class neighborhood of al-Hashmi al-Shimali in mid-2012, for instance, I met Abu Mazhar, an elderly Jordanian from al-Mafraq who worked to collect financial and in-kind support for Syrians in northern Jordan. Despite expressing strong solidarity with Syrians, he argued there were only about 3,000 “real” Syrian refugees in Jordan, even as UNHCR registration figures at the time had reached over 20,000.Footnote ⁴⁸ When I asked him about this discrepancy, he explained that “someone with a laptop and two mobile phones is not a refugee.” For Abu Mazhar, a refugee was someone not merely forced to flee her country and unable to return. A refugee also had to be completely destitute. This conflation between the refugee and poverty, lack of agency, and dependence was pervasive in Jordan at the time of my research.Footnote ⁴⁹ That the refugee was recognized in these terms, which have come under sustained critique in the refugee literature, was due to several factors. The most important of these was Jordan's policy of selectively easing residence and visa procedures in order to facilitate the entry of wealthy Iraqis who could bring capital into the country. Françoise De Bel-Air has characterized this policy as “segmented assimilation,” where specific subgroups from within a displaced population are welcomed, “composing a transversal, globalized elite, involved in consumption and select leisure infrastructure.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Such segmented assimilation can be thought of in relation to Aihwa Ong's claim that neoliberalism creates “gradations of citizen rights and benefits,”Footnote ⁵¹ in order to argue that neoliberalism similarly generates gradations of “refugeeness.”

Bassam had arrived in Amman from Baghdad in 2010. He first settled in the working-class area of al-Hashmi al-Shimali with a friend before moving into a smaller flat in Marka al-Shimaliyya. By 2013, he was still waiting for the decision on his resettlement case. A few years prior to his departure from Iraq he had earned a business degree in Baghdad and had owned his own shop. In Amman, by contrast, he had not been able to find much work other than the odd temporary job with NGOs or researchers. Dejected at his prospects, he told me,

Like Majid, Bassam spoke to the powerful disconnection between the rich and others and its corrosive social effects. He contrasted his inability to secure his physical health with the ability and expectation of the Iraqi businessman and doctor to organize the logistical, as opposed to substantive, aspects of lives at their leisure. He also contrasted the care he showed for his friend Nada, which came at the expense of his own well-being, with the seeming carelessness of Iraqis whose empathic horizons did not extend beyond themselves. Their attitude toward resettlement, which was a rare opportunity, was seen as a profound lapse in gratitude, proof of detachment from the struggles of supposed cocitizens. Bassam therefore agreed with Jordanian public opinion that such individuals were not refugees, presenting an argument that was pervasive among Iraqis: that the right to resettlement should be determined based on the capacity to live in the present rather than on what had been endured in Iraq. For instance, Lana, a lawyer and mother of three from Baghdad, complained bitterly of repeatedly having to tell her “persecution story,” and consistently questioned the relevance of such suffering in determining refugee status and resettlement. “Any person from Iraq saw everything,” she explained, “so it doesn't mean anything!” For Lana, the fact that experiences of hardship and violence in Iraq were widely shared meant that these could not be used to establish the refugee and resettlement rights of Iraqis in exile.

If wealthy Iraqis were judged as not needing resettlement, they were also judged as unworthy of it. During a visit with a fellow researcher to Umm ʿAliya, an elderly Iraqi woman who had already been living in the al-Hashmi al-Shimali neighborhood of Amman for close to eight years, a young Iraqi woman named Rim stopped by and joined us for coffee. Umm ʿAliya inquired after Rim's husband and Rim explained that he was now working as a driver for a wealthy Iraqi family living in Rabiya. Because the husband was always on call, they had decided to move into the wealthy family's converted garage so that Rim would no longer have to spend most of the week alone with her small baby in al-Hashmi al-Shimali. When I asked Rim who this wealthy Iraqi family was, she replied with a name, Umm Fuʾad, which none of us recognized. This surprised Rim, who explained that Umm Fuʾad was the wife of an Iraqi politician who had settled his family in Amman while he continued to live in Baghdad. “These people are very rich. They steal everything from the country, and they have their families live in Jordan in safety, security, and privilege. And many of them even apply for resettlement! They don't think about anything except enriching themselves.” Umm ʿAliya sighed heavily and nodded her head in agreement, adding, “This is our money! It is all injustice.”

The story of the wealthy politician who stays in Baghdad stealing money while his family lives in comfort in Amman was a common trope. Rim contrasted her precarious life in a retrofitted garage to this family's illegitimate wealth—stolen from her, from Umm ʿAliya, from all the people of Iraq. In so doing, she recognized these Iraqis not as fellow citizens who had fled instability in Iraq, but as predators who, like their Jordanian counterparts, built their lives by feeding off others. This accusation of theft from Iraq went hand in hand with an intense circulation of rumors within the Iraqi community about bribery (rashwa) at IOM. The story people told to me varied in some of its details, but its core was always the same. A Jordanian IOM employee had an Iraqi counterpart within the community. Together, they facilitated the advancement of certain files over others for those who could pay the hefty sum of JD 2,000.Footnote ⁵² As I was sitting with Maryam, an Iraqi friend whose family had been in Jordan since 2006, she explained in frustration, “So people who just came a month ago take this illegal route, and people like us who have been here for years and did everything legally are still waiting.”

The ability of the wealthy to move across borders with a degree of control and choice was a central component of the critique that Maryam, Rim, Lana, and Bassam leveled against them. Like Majid, their understanding of the rich had less to do with wealth per se than with the related ability to be free—or disconnected—from many of life's constraints and challenges. As a globalized elite with significant socioeconomic capital, wealthy Iraqis could exert “choice, flexibility, and focused movement” as they pursued their interests in ways that others could not.Footnote ⁵³ Whereas for Bassam and the others movement was construed as life enhancing, in the case of the wealthy they judged it as a form of greed: by applying for resettlement when they did not need it, wealthy Iraqis were seen as taking from others rather than asserting their rights as refugees. Luʾay, an Iraqi who worked with a local NGO, articulated this in explicit terms when I asked him why he had not yet traveled. In contrast to the cavalier attitude toward travel displayed by the businessman and doctor, Luʾay's actions speak to a different understanding of what responsibilities one should have for others. I had expected him to say that his resettlement file was still “pending,” in IOM parlance, but instead he replied, “Let others travel. My situation here is good. I have a residency permit. Others need to travel more than I do. They are more deserving than I am. I have the ability to resist living here.”

Luʾay challenged the dominant understanding of refugee rights which localizes the legitimacy of the refugee in losses and threats experienced in a country of origin rather than in capacities for living in the present. This privileging of the past over the present is the necessary consequence of a discourse that understands the refugee as suspended in a liminal state outside of normal life, where forms of suffering are derivative and secondary to those that precipitated entry into it. However, in Jordan Iraqis saw this “objective” allocation of resettlement opportunities based on suffering experienced in Iraq as another instantiation of the depredations of the rich rather than a just way of implementing rights. Refugee rights and resettlement were therefore paradoxically reconceptualized as increasing rather than decreasing the state of hunger in which people lived. Given that everyone had suffered in Iraq, Iraqis argued, such suffering could not be the grounds on which refugee rights were determined. Rather, resettlement opportunities should be distributed in a manner that sustained and supported living in the present.

SHARING LIFE IN HUNGER

Although some Iraqis were wealthy, many had limited savings that they spent strategically—buying an apartment if possible, but generally living in more popular neighborhoods. Yet even these Iraqis often had greater means than the Jordanians with whom they cohabited. A host of “privileges” extended to them as refugees by the international community accentuated this relative financial advantage. One morning Maryam and I were walking back from the market to her apartment in Marka al-Shimaliyya carrying a small bag of groceries containing a few tomatoes and cucumbers and half a kilogram of meat for her six children, husband, and in-laws when we ran into her Jordanian neighbor. Maryam had known the woman since moving into the next-door apartment a few weeks after arriving from Baghdad in 2006. Following the customary exchange of greetings, the woman complained about the difficult living conditions in the country, as well as the UN assistance that Iraqis and Syrians were receiving. She ended the conversation by saying, “We are dying and you are not. It is not right.” Once inside the apartment, Maryam, raising her hands in frustration, exclaimed, “We get such little money, it's nothing, just seventy Jordanian dinars per month, and it barely covers the rent!”Footnote ⁵⁴ Similar complaints about assistance to Iraqis focused on hospitals. In 2007, Iraqis (and, as they arrived in 2012, Syrians) were granted free access to government health services when not all Jordanians had formal public or private coverage that provided for such access.Footnote ⁵⁵ Salwa, who previously discussed stereotypes of Iraqis as wealthy, described the “friction” (al-iḥtikāk) this produced:

As Salwa suggested, people's complaints centered on the unfairness of Iraqis being granted privileges not afforded to Jordanians. These complaints were not articulated in a xenophobic register that sought to deny Iraqis rights based on their foreignness. Instead, they were indictments of a system that prevented many from securing viable and valuable lives. In other words, Jordanians did not seek to take away rights from Iraqis or deny them services, but rather held that rights and services should be distributed more fairly. In a geography mapped out along socioeconomic lines, with the wealthy living in a world apart, what was right was understood as that which did not increase the hunger of others—acts that did not seem to advance one person's life at the expense of that of another. In this context, UN assistance and free access to health care became ethically ambiguous and the site of contestation because they mimicked the suspect wealth and social disconnection of the rich. Like the ease with which a wealthy Jordanian could secure a bank loan for a car (while Majid's request for a loan was turned down), the benefits extended to Iraqis as refugees required no specific effort, making it seem as though Iraqis were taking advantage of others by consuming limited resources. As such, no matter how small their privilege vis-à-vis Jordanians may have been, many Iraqis came to be the targets of social disapproval. Although some scholars have suggested that the resentment against Iraqis stemmed alternately from their status as foreign nationals or refugees,Footnote ⁵⁶ this resentment was often due to their access, for reasons unclear to many Jordanians, to precious resources in a world of want.

It is in this context that I suggest we situate the many complaints that were circulating at the time about the ingratitude and expectations of Iraqis and even much poorer Syrians. Walid, a young Jordanian working for an international agency assisting refugees, discussed this issue when we met for lunch in September 2012. He had just returned from Zaʿatari camp in the North, where he had been working intensively for the previous few months. When I asked him about the situation there, he replied somewhat frustrated: “If the Jordanians complain about the Syrians, it's because the Syrians complain about everything.” He was adamant that the suffering of refugees had to be situated within the broader struggle for life that marked the lives of most Jordanians.Footnote ⁵⁷

In addition to Jordanians, such censure also came from other refugees. One afternoon I went to Hay Nazzal to visit Dana and Iyad, Iraqi siblings in their early forties. They had come to Jordan in 2007 with the intention of staying with their sister in Amman until the violence in Baghdad abated. When the situation did not improve, they decided to try their luck at resettlement. Although they often expressed frustration with their Jordanian neighbors, on that day they had just had a disagreement with the Syrian family that lived across the hall. The dispute broke out over what Dana and Iyad felt was the Syrians’ overuse of water, even though the two families did not share a common water tank. Exasperated, Iyad exclaimed, “You have to act in a way which is appropriate!” He explained that the dearth of water in Jordan meant that no one could consume it in unlimited fashion. As Dana and Iyad's confrontation with the Syrian family demonstrates, what was valued was the capacity to be appropriate to a situation, or to live within the limits that it imposed on everyone.Footnote ⁵⁸ Living beyond such limits in ways that undermined others very often led to vocal disapproval. This capacity to be appropriate to the needs of others was therefore a key measure for evaluating and judging people's actions as either contributing to or detracting from well-being. Dana and Iyad were similarly disapproving of other Iraqis in their midst. They had few relations outside of their family, and when I asked why, Dana provided an answer that many other Iraqis also voiced: “It is necessary for relations to be about interest here.” In addition to what she and her brother perceived as the “greedy looks” and “exploitative” nature of Jordanians, Dana argued “What is terrible now is that Iraqis are also taking advantage of other Iraqis. They have changed their attitudes. Not only because they are in exile, but because of the living situation. Exploitation is present. The Iraqis have become prey.” This ambivalence toward other Iraqis of similar economic means grew over the course of my fieldwork, as people's savings dwindled and as international aid shifted from Iraqis to Syrians.

To live together in Jordan, then, was a process whereby people—refugees and hosts—learned how to make fate viable.Footnote ⁵⁹ Living with others in a context of hunger required the capacity to work toward a valuable life within specific limits and in a manner that recognized the common ground on which people's lives unfolded. On one of my many visits to Maryam's home, she told me about her new Syrian neighbors—a woman with four children who lived with her brother's family in a two-bedroom flat a few stories above Maryam. “It's very hard for them. For us, the last seven days of the month are very hard. Even with the money that we receive from Iraq.” Maryam pulled out a one riyal banknote and continued: “You see this? This is all I have right now. So what about the Syrians?” She explained that the family was considering returning to Syria despite the war. “Let me tell you something about danger. Danger is there sometimes. Sometimes a bomb falls, sometimes no, sometimes there is an explosion, sometimes no. However, the rent, the rent you always have to pay, food you always have to have.” Maryam paused, as if troubled by her own words, and suddenly added, almost in defiance of the reality she had just depicted, “I will bring her milk. I will bring her milk for her little one who has been sick recently. I will go up later.” Although at first glance this may seem like a simple reenactment of traditional reciprocity, Maryam understood it as something more. For her, as for Iyad and Dana, the difficulty of life in Jordan had hardened Iraqis, “humiliated” them into becoming less generous and more self-interested people. She therefore framed her gesture as a capacity to wrestle with what she termed a “daily jihad” in which caring for others was central.

The idea of resisting the depredations of hunger was also evident in Majid's description of a Syrian who had stopped by his workplace to inquire about employment. Majid emphasized that, though he did not have to, he nevertheless mentioned and vouched for this man—a person of momentary acquaintance—when he spoke with his manager later in the day.

Majid's help was an act of solidarity towards individuals whose struggles he recognized, but, more importantly, it was also a way of showing the young Syrian men that living in this shared life of the “now” was a fate that could not be undone. He was suggesting, therefore, that this fate had to be borne willfully: they had to accept it, to understand what potentialities existed within its limits, and to strive to achieve them. By insisting on this, Majid implicitly framed waiting as a form of life that consumed one's capacities and that rejected the potentialities, however limited, of the present. His contention that refugees come to share life with Jordanians gestures to the idea that, legal categories notwithstanding, they must and eventually do exist from the moral spaces of humanitarianism and hospitality. To help the young Syrians understand this, Majid situated their hardship within a broader framework of everyday struggle—or hunger—that they shared with those around them.