Scholars of authoritarianism in the Middle East have long pursued two major concerns: macrolevel institutional and broad-based social movements. In his latest book, Jordan and the Arab Uprisings: Regime Survival and Politics Beyond the State, Curtis R. Ryan covers both phenomena and provides a rigorous account of why one of the world’s most seemingly unstable autocracies withstood, but also responded to, the recent gales of revolution in the region.

Establishing the research puzzle, Ryan notes that Jordan has been chronically “on the brink” for generations (p. 1). Indeed, given Jordan’s material conditions and anachronistic institutions, the ruling regime has persisted much longer than most social scientists might expect. After losing badly to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, King Hussein bin Talal (r. 1952–99) ruled for another three decades. That period included a serious economic recession (in the late 1980s) and the king’s decision to align with Iraq during the 1990–91 Gulf War. In the remainder of his reign, Hussein adroitly corrected course, signed a peace treaty with Israel, and launched Jordan toward a free-trade agreement with the United States. Hussein’s successor, King Abdullah II (r. 1999–present), closed the trade deal (in 2000) and continued his father’s neoliberal project. GDP grew rapidly during the 2000s. But when the Arab uprisings began, Jordan’s economy again lost steam. Unemployment crept up, nearing 20% in 2018, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Youth unemployment may be much higher.

Regional crises would seem to have only compounded Jordan’s fiscal burdens. The country has been at the epicenter of the human displacement crisis that began with the 2003 Iraq invasion and mushroomed after 2011 with the Syrian civil war. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees reported in February 2019 that Jordan was hosting more than 750,000 refugees, nearly 90% of them Syrians. Today only one other country, Lebanon, hosts more refugees on a per capita basis.

As for its political system, Jordan has defied expectations that monarchs cannot withstand modernity. Even among today’s kingdoms and emirates, however, the regime is an outlier. Michael Herb’s seminal work on monarchical durability established that it is dynastic monarchies, those that spread plum ministries and the chance to wear the crown among family members, that are most cohesive. By contrast, nondynastic monarchies, a category that includes both the fallen Pahlavi dynasty of Iran and the Jordanian case, are ripe for intra-elite conflict and regime breakdown. The tenures of Hussein and Abdullah II defy this pattern and make the Jordanian regime as long-lived as most dynastic monarchies.

To make sense of Jordan’s anomalous record, Ryan draws on decades of experience conducting fieldwork in the country and the wider region. His methodology makes extensive use of original interviews with Jordanians at all levels of the state and society, including the king and the queen consort, Rania al-Abdullah. Ryan also synthesizes and applies the vast secondary literature on comparative authoritarianism and Middle East politics. The result is a careful and compelling account of how the Jordanian regime operates amid multiple crises.

Ryan delivers this account across nine detailed chapters, each of which closes with a discussion of “continuity and change.” Chapters 1–4 situate Jordan’s recent protests and new social movements in comparative context. Jordan was not one of the half-dozen Arab countries that witnessed a sustained uprising in the Arab Spring (Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria). Ryan makes clear, however, that political scientists will miss a great deal if they dismiss Jordan as a moribund case where the people have unquestioningly accepted the status quo. Far from it—these chapters draw attention to the calls for reform articulated by long-standing political parties—such as the Islamic Action Front (a sibling organization to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood)—and new manifestations of contentious collection action; for example, the Jordanian Youth Movement or “Hirak.”

The middle section of the book—chapters 5–7—covers identity and institutional politics. CRS estimates that “Jordanians of Palestinian origin” make up a majority (perhaps even more than two-thirds) of the population. Yet, although the cleavage between those who trace their roots to Palestine and those who identify as “East Bank” Jordanians is salient, it is also fluid. Recalling fieldwork in 1989 and in 2010–11, Ryan notes that the “ethnicity” Jordanians assigned others was often endogenous to the political debate at hand, because “detractors… use identity issues to ‘change’ an opponent’s ethnicity to undermine that opponent’s legitimacy in Jordanian public life” (p. 106).

Elections have been no less mercurial. The opposition performed poorly in national polls in 2010, 2013, and 2016 because of a combination of rules benefiting pro-regime candidates and its own failure to mobilize broader constituencies. The upshot of these developments is that “reform,” the subject of chapter 7, consistently fell short of what the regime’s critics would consider “actual advancement or meaningful change” (p. 172).

If one were to distill the bottom-line finding from these rich empirics, it would be that Jordanians, in the aggregate, appear substantially more content than an outside observer might expect they would be, given the country’s demographic strains, political corruption, security state, and outmoded authority structures. This level of general satisfaction—which, Ryan stresses, ought not to be confused with quiescence—may have separated Jordan, and its vigorous protests, from the revolutionary situations in Tunisia and Egypt.

Such a proximate account, if persuasive, draws attention to more distal factors. In the book’s closing pages, one ex-official captures the conundrum of the Jordanian regime: “It’s not sustainable… it’s just sustained anyway” (p. 222). So why? Why, in the twenty-first century, is an absolutist-but-resource-poor monarchy relatively popular and remarkably stable?

Chapter 8, “War, Refugees, and Regional Insecurity,” points to one salient reason: “the politics of securitization” (p. 177). Here Ryan underscores the tremendous pressures the Jordanian regime has withstood over the past decade. The Syrian civil war and accompanying inflow of refugees placed severe “strains on Jordan’s economy, social services, water resources… especially in the context of an economic recession in a deeply indebted country” (p. 187). The rise of the Islamic State compounded the humanitarian challenge with a new military struggle.

These same challenges, however, delivered opportunities for the regime to collect rents from regional and western powers, chief among them the United States. According to CRS, Jordan enjoys one of the longest foreign aid relationships with Washington, receiving some $20 billion in US aid since the 1950s (two-thirds of which went to military aid). In 2019, Jordan ranked behind Afghanistan and Israel as the world’s third-largest recipient of foreign aid, economic and security. (These resource flows show no sign of abating; a 2018 memorandum of understanding stipulated Washington will “provide $1.275 billion per year in bilateral foreign assistance over a five-year period for a total of $6.375 billion [FY2018–FY2022].”) This ample material backstop invites further research, which one hopes Ryan and other astute Jordan watchers will undertake.