Mediated Lives: Waiting and Hope among Iraqi Refugees in Jordan 9781800733442

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Mediated Lives

FORCED MIGRATION General Editors: Tom Scott-Smith and Kirsten McConnachie This series, published in association with the Refugees Studies Centre, University of Oxford, reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the field and includes within its scope international law, anthropology, sociology, politics, international relations, geopolitics, social psychology and economics. Recent volumes: Volume 43 Mediated Lives: Waiting and Hope among Iraqi Refugees in Jordan Mirjam Twigt Volume 42 Outsiders: Memories of Migration to and from North Korea Markus Bell Volume 41 Latin America and Refugee Protection: Regimes, Logics and Challenges Edited by Liliana Lyra Jubilut, Marcia Vera Espinoza and Gabriela Mezzanotti Volume 40 Un-Settling Middle Eastern Refugees: Regimes of Exclusion and Inclusion in the Middle East, Europe, and North America Edited by Marcia C. Inhorn and Lucia Volk Volume 39 Structures of Protection? Rethinking Refugee Shelter Edited by Tom Scott-Smith and Mark E. Breeze

Volume 38 Refugee Resettlement: Power, Politics, and Humanitarian Governance Edited by Adèle Garnier, Liliana Lyra Jubilut and Kristin Bergtora Sandvik Volume 37 Gender, Violence, Refugees Edited by Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Ulrike Krause Volume 36 The Myth of Self-Reliance: Economic Lives inside a Liberian Refugee Camp Naohiko Omata Volume 35 Migration by Boat: Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion and Survival Lynda Mannik Volume 34 Making Ubumwe: Power, State and Camps in Rwanda’s Unity-Building Project Andrea Purdeková

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https//www.berghahnbooks.com/series/forced-migration

Mediated Lives WAITING

AND

HOPE

AMONG IRAQI

REFUGEES

Mirjam Twigt

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

IN JORDAN

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Mirjam Twigt All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Twigt, Mirjam, author. Title: Mediated Lives: Waiting and Hope among Iraqi Refugees in Jordan / Mirjam Twigt. Description: New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. | Series: Forced Migration; volume 43 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021039724 (print) | LCCN 2021039725 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800733435 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800733442 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Refugees—Iraq. | Refugees—Jordan—Amman. | Refugees— Social aspects—Iraq. | Refugees—Social aspects—Jordan—Amman. | Iraqis— Jordan—Amman—Social conditions. | Information technology—Social aspects—Jordan—Amman. | Digital media—Social aspects—Jordan—Amman. Classification: LCC HV640.5.I76 T85 2022 (print) | LCC HV640.5.I76 (ebook) | DDC 362.7/79140567—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039724 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039725 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-343-5 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-344-2 ebook

To Ibrahim, Taher, Mohamed and Oscar. I am so proud of you and so happy that I get to be part of your journey. For Anne-Maria. Welcome to this world! May our future be brighter.

Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on Translation and Transliteration

x

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction. Becoming and Being a (Dis)Connected Forced Migrant

1

1. ‘Life Is Like a Waiting Stop’: Situating Experiences of Iraqi Refugees in Jordan’s Temporary Protection Context

28

2. Hoping for Solutions in a ‘Surrogate State’

49

3. Tactics to Get ‘Unstuck’: Refugee Protests and Seeking Alternative Means to Travel

71

4. Prolonged Legal Uncertainties and Their Interaction with Virtual Home-Making Practices in Amman

83

5. The Mediation of Hope: Digital Technologies and Affective Affordances in Iraqi Refugee Households

103

6. Post-humanitarian Shifts in Jordan’s Protection Space

123

7. Fast-Forward to 2018: Technologies towards Accountability for UNHCR Jordan’s Persons of Concern

139

Conclusion. (Dis)Connectivity and the Politics of Hope

164

References

178

Index

209

Acknowledgements

‫ﻋﺬرين ﻣﻦ اﻟﺘﻘﺼري ﻓﺎﻧﺎ ﻟﺴﺖ ﰲ ﺑﻴﺘﻲ‬ I am sorry for my mistakes, for I am not in my home.

The above-mentioned comment was made by one of the many people whose lives and stories are central in this book. She had invited me for lunch and, as always, the food and the hospitality were amazing. It broke my heart – as often happened during encounters for this research and beyond – that she felt a need to apologise. But of course, this woman was not in her home as she had left that place when ISIS raided her village. In Jordan, she was making do and she must have felt her hospitality suffered as a result. I use this sentence here to express my gratitude towards all the Iraqi refugees I have met over the years who have been so generous with sharing their stories, not so temporary homes and meals with me – and to apologise that I am writing about your experiences. I am writing ‘out of place’. I hope that I have represented your stories and voices in a way that you feel does (some) justice to you. It is my deepest hope that your future life journeys will be smoother, wherever these may be. I am so happy to be a member of my Iraqi family. Without you, this book would not have existed. Professor Leah Bassel and Professor Helen Wood: thank you for believing in me and in my project. And for being great role models: not just as feminist professors, but as all-round wonderful people! Thank you to Professor Thomas Tufte and Professor Marie Gillespie for your feedback and encouragement to pursue this book project. I am grateful of the British Academy of Amman for providing me with additional funding and the necessary time and space to further develop this book project, and to the people at CBRL – Amman, in particular Carol Palmer and Firas Bq’ain for their grace and kindness. For Andrea. And Sarah Elliot for the fun. To all my fellow researchers and research activists, here, out there and everywhere: your input enabled me to keep going. To Hamdan Al-Mansour and Mette Stendevad, your persisting kindness is such an inspiration. Inshallah bukra ahla! To all of you who I have pestered with chapters, sometimes

Acknowledgements |

ix

very much a work in progress, and people who have inspired me in other ways: Philip Seuferling, Katherina Lenner, Melissa Wall, Zoe Jordan, Lewis Turner, Cecilia Sosa, Jordan Hayes, Anna Kvittingen, Anne Kaun, Kevin Smets, Nerina Boursinou, Xanthe Whitaker and Sara de Jong. A special word of thanks to Koen Leurs, who alongside proofreading a chapter was by chance also my (not so anonymous) peer reviewer for the entire manuscript: your enthusiasm and dedication are such an encouragement. And thanks to my other anonymous peer reviewer, who pushed me to where I needed to go. Thank you Maja Janmyr, Charlotte Lysa, M. Sanjeeb Hossain, Nora Milch Johnsen, Abdullah Yassen and Khaled Zaza for your additional input, encouragement in the final stages and the warm welcome in Oslo. Thank you, thank you, thank you Domenic Sherab for your patience and effort for proofreading again and again, with so much love and diligence. You are amazing! Thank you to my family for surrounding me with love, for thinking of me in your prayers and for being my home. And thank you to my friends, for their love and laughter and for keeping me sane. Thank you to anyone who reads this. May your kindness remain.

Notes on Translation and Transliteration

Throughout this book, only limited Arabic words and texts are used, and these are given in their context and vernacular usage: • • • •

•

Some institutions and place names have established English names, such as Amman, Iraq and Al Jazeera. In these cases, the accepted spelling is preserved. For Arabic words that have been incorporated into the Oxford English Dictionary, such as ‘abaya’ and ‘adhan’, I have used the established English spelling. The spelling of the word ı¯qa¯mh uses diacritical marks given that it refers to an official document. In my discussion on the word and meaning of tawteen in relation to the Lebanese protection contexts, I draw upon other studies discussing this matter (Meier, 2010, Janmyr, 2017a) and I therefore retain the spelling these authors have used rather than tawtin. In relation to other Arabic words (haram, ratib), I have omitted diacritical marks and have not stressed long vowels in line with the guidelines of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) for transliteration (IJMES, 2021).

I am not an Arabist and for me, learning the Arabic language continues to be a work in progress. I am versed in Ammiya, the colloquial dialect of Arabic spoken in Jordan, and the spelling or usage of these words can differ from Modern Standard Arabic. Translations from Arabic are largely my own, but with assistance from Hamdan Al-Mansour, Ibrahim Al-Aboosi, Mette Stendevad, Khaled Zaza and Charlotte Lysa. I am solely responsible for any remaining errors or mistakes in translation or transliteration.

Abbreviations

AAP

Accountability to Affected Populations

ALNAP

Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance

CBOs

Community-Based Organisations

CEO

Chief Executive Officer

CSCs

Community Support Centres

CwC

Communication with Communities

EU

European Union

ICT

Information and Communications Technology

INGO

International Nongovernmental Organisation

IOM

International Organization for Migration

ISIS

Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

IVR

Interactive Voice Response

JOD

Jordanian Dinar

MBC

Middle Eastern Broadcasting Group

MENA region

The Middle East and North Africa region

MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MoU

Memorandum of Understanding, in particular referring to the agreement between the UNHCR and the Jordanian government signed in 1998 to ensure a legal stay for those registered with UNHCR Jordan

NGO

Nongovernmental Organisation

xii | Abbreviations

ORA

One Refugee Approach

PoC

Persons of Concern

RAIS

Refugee Assistance Information System

RSD

Refugee Status Determination

SIV

Special Immigrant Visa; these were also made available for Iraqi nationals who had worked for the US forces or the US government in Iraq

UNHCR

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

USRAP

United States Resettlement Admission Program

VAF

Vulnerability Assessment Framework

VoIP

Voice-over-Internet-Protocol

WFP

World Food Programme

ZINC

Zain Innovation Campus

Introduction Becoming and Being a (Dis)Connected Forced Migrant

It is a hot summer night in June 2014. I am watching TV with Kholoud1 and her family in their small ground-floor apartment in Amman, the capital of Jordan. An Iraqi national, Kholoud and her family had fled in 2006 after the US-led invasion in 2003 resulted in a violent sectarian conflict in Iraq. They first sought refuge in Syria and then in Jordan, where they have been since 2011. Their TV set is tuned to MBC (Middle Eastern Broadcasting Group). The popular Dubaian transnational broadcaster shows an episode of the popular talent show America’s Got Talent. Four former Marine Corps soldiers enter the stage. They explain how they met while serving in Fallujah, the Iraqi city renowned for its active resistance in response to the presence of US military. After heavy combat and the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi civilians, the US forces – later accused of war crimes for the use of white phosphorus (Monbiot, 2005: 146) – took control of the city in 2004. The men formed a band to cope with Iraq’s reality on the ground. Back then, in 2014, Fallujah had recently fallen into the hands of the militant Islamist organisation ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIL or by the Arabic acronym Da’esh) and the episode of America’s Got Talent takes on a patriotic twist. One of the show’s judges, Howard Stern, an American television personality, stands up from his chair to thank the former soldiers for ‘serving our country’. The audience gives a standing ovation and the bulky men on the stage start to cry. I feel arrested by the complex flows of what I see on TV. My own anger to what I consider the stark realities of global inequality contrast to the calmness I perceive of my friends with their first-hand experiences of war, violence and marginalisation. As of that night, Kholoud and her family had been living for more than eight years in legal marginalisation and social uncertainty. American soldiers are publicly celebrated, whereas people like Kholoud have not only been forced to seek refuge as result of the chaos that erupted in response

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to the US-led invasion, but are also continuously mistrusted, feared and forgotten about. This book seeks to further comprehend how transnational connections, engendered by technological developments, interact with the everyday experiences of people who become forcibly displaced and whose lives are most often characterised by legal and temporal uncertainty and prolonged crisis. Media scholars refer to this dialectical relationship between mediated practices and embodied and embedded realities as mediation (Couldry, 2008; Livingstone, 2009). Global inequalities, bordering practices and (anti-Muslim/Middle Eastern/refugee) othering processes are also and increasingly experienced through regional and global media landscapes and messages, images and information obtained via information and communication technologies (ICTs). I provide a situated exploration of the mediated sense-making practices of refugees residing in prolonged conditions of displacement, specifically Iraqi urban refugees in Jordan. By 2009, it was estimated that between half a million and one million Iraqi nationals had sought refuge in response to the 2003 US-led invasion and the sectarian conflict that erupted afterwards. Most of them were residing in the cities of Iraq’s neighbouring countries: Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey (Chatelard, 2010). The ‘Iraq refugee crisis’ (International Crisis Group, 2008) resulted in a large-scale humanitarian response, led by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), the UN agency mandated to protect the world’s refugees in accordance with the Refugee Convention. Like many of the largest refugee-hosting countries, Jordan is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention that was established to guarantee the right of refuge and the rights of refugees. Whereas Iraqi refugees in Jordan are legally protected, their stay in Jordan is institutionalised as temporary and does not provide them with the right to work. Life in post-invasion Iraq continues to be marked by the ongoing struggle for safety and financial security (Ali, 2019), and the registration of newly arriving Iraqi nationals seeking refuge in Jordan never came to a full stop. In 2014 and 2015, in response to the extreme violence carried out by ISIS, there was again a relatively steep increase of Iraqi nationals seeking refuge in Jordan (UNHCR Jordan, 2019a). Months after that particular evening, Kholoud’s son Adam told me: ‘We take it simple because people out there they never know, they don’t know the truth, they don’t know what really happened, everything they know is what the media says, so … We take it simple. You can do nothing about it … It is normal.’ Adam’s response points to his perception of the distanced American spectator, ignorant of what actually took place in Iraq and the role he believes the American media played in this regard. His emphasis on ‘normal’ suggests that this is part of his everyday normality. The process of normalisation of living in difficult structural circumstances is a recurring

Introduction |

3

aspect of everyday living in crisis. Over the years, I have had recurring in-depth conversations with Iraqi refugees during which deeply personal experiences of a dictatorial regime, a US-led invasion, sectarian violence, ISIS atrocities and structural marginalisation in Jordan were explained to be ‘normal’. ‘Normal’ here implies that disorder associated with crisis has become part of one’s everyday life. This does not imply that this is how they believe things ought to be; normalisation should not be confused with indifference (Vigh, 2009: 11) or with giving in. The worldwide increase in availability and affordability of technologies has coincided with an increase in numbers of people who have registered as having been forcibly displaced and time spent in prolonged conditions of displacement (Doná, 2015). These conditions are often characterised by limited legal rights – for instance, regarding right to work and access to social services – and by prolonged temporariness: not having the certainty if you can stay and under which conditions. This applies to many refugees residing in the Global South, given the ever more restrictive asylum regimes and containment strategies of Western countries. And those who have managed to seek refuge in the Global North are also increasingly required to make do with restricted rights in place and uncertainty about where they will be geographically located in the future (Doná, 2015: 70). This study extends the growing body of studies of urban refugees in the Global South. It seeks to comprehend how in their often liminal situation of negotiated limited access to assistance, denial of rights and hopes for the future, people who have become forcibly displaced – specifically Iraqi refugees in Jordan – draw upon technologies to make sense and make do. Making sense consists of seeking meaning and seeking direction (Bourdieu, 2000: 207). It is a movement-seeking affirmative action. In line with Peter Nyers (2006), I consider movement to be an ontological activity. Through mediated and situated movements, bodies encounter other bodies, build up social relationships and develop modes of being in the world. To curtail movement and to sustain border practices and containment practices, nation-states – often aided by international organisations and private partners – are increasingly drawing upon technologies. But digital connections can simultaneously provide new means for seeking movement or mobility – affectively, emotionally, bodily and socially, but only seldomly geographically – and actively respond to one’s situation of prolonged displacement. Many meaningful studies have shown that years of living and waiting in prolonged displacement with suspended rights tend to require active and affective modes of being. Yet so far, relatively little attention has been given to the role of transnational connections and digital technologies for navigating amid prolonged uncertainty. Studies on mediation of migration provide valuable insights into how digital technologies and the connections they enable interact with locally situated realities, but they have largely focused

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on migrants’ experiences in Europe. The persisting stereotypical idea of the ‘vulnerable’ and unconnected refugee ‘other’ who is located beyond Europe contributes to unsubstantiated optimism about the potentials of technologies. Combined with the presumed neutrality of technologies and their abilities for sustaining distance, this can accelerate structural exclusions. Here I argue that an understanding of refugees’ connectivity in a global and post-humanitarian world therefore require a more situated comprehension of how refugees are digitally connected. Thinking about refugees’ connectivity and their connected experiences within a world that is characterised by globalised inequalities, legal, material and embodied constraints, and interactions with humanitarian operations also requires an important additional feature: that of being and feeling (simultaneously) disconnected. Because the paradox of globalisation and digital connectivity is that there is a ‘simultaneous global acceleration of inclusion and exclusion’ (Lucht, 2012: xi), and this plays out and interact with the lives and subjectivities of (dis) connected refugees and of precarious migrants across the globe.

Experiences of Waiting in Prolonged Conditions of Displacement Among the world’s forcible displaced, waiting has become the rule (Hyndman and Giles, 2011) and uncertainty the norm (Horst and Grabska, 2015). By June 2020, the UNHCR had registered 20.4 million refugees, 45.7 million internally displaced people and 4.2 million asylum seekers, alongside 5.6 million Palestine refugees who are under the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (UNHCR, 2020). Most of those refugees are geographically located in the Global South: 85% of the world’s refugees are residing for long periods in non-Western low- and middle-income countries (UNHCR, 2019a: 9). Whereas it is difficult to obtain accurate estimates on the length of time that people spend in a refugee-like situation, in 1993 the average refugee situation was considered to last nine years (UNHCR, 2006). In 2011, the average length that refugees were spending in prolonged legal and temporal uncertainty was approaching twenty years (Milner and Loescher, 2011). In 2015, the UNHCR estimated this figure to be twenty-six years (UNHCR, 2015a).2 Given the limited and steering goodwill of resettlement countries, the lack of capacities in hosting countries and the prolonged nature of conflict, unsafety and instability in countries where people come from, the three conventional durable solutions – repatriation, local integration and thirdcountry resettlement – cannot address the needs of the world’s refugees. At the time of writing, the UNCHR speaks of solutions, consisting of local integration, voluntary repatriation, third country resettlement and comple-

Introduction |

5

mentary pathways. The latter takes a meritocratic approach towards ascertaining the rights of some and only gained traction in more recent years as a component of the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees (UNHCR, 2018a). Combined with the Global Compact on Migration, initial responses to these nonbinding instruments proposed for rectifying the structural problems relating to refugee protection have received mixed responses (Chimni, 2018; Goodwin-Gill, 2018; Hathaway, 2018). The UNHCR uses the term ‘protraction’ to demarcate the circumstances of individuals who are recognised as refugees and for whom a so-called durable solution is not reached within five years (Crisp, 2003; Loescher and Milner, 2005; Long, 2011; Milner and Loescher, 2011). The term ‘protraction’ only applies to people possessing the legal label ‘refugee’ and draws upon the reductive understanding that people recognised as such would or should not move. It is a policy-driven concept that excludes internally displaced people, people who are not recognised as such and people who did not (immediately) register as refugees for a myriad of reasons ( Janmyr and Mourad, 2018). Moreover, people’s actual experiences and journeys towards seeking stability and security in prolonged refugee situations are not as linear or static. These often involve circular migration as the combination of everyday hardships and hope tends to push people to consider whether return is an actual possibility (Iaria, 2011, 2013). I therefore find forced migration scholar Georgia Doná’s understanding of ‘prolonged conditions of displacement’ (Doná, 2015) a more helpful and inclusive concept to consider prolonged living in restricted legal and social rights and uncertainty about the future. The term ‘protraction’ is too reductive and state-oriented, yet words like ‘transit’ fail to provide enough space to fully consider the temporal components of living in prolonged uncertainty and how its influence people’s subjective and social experiences. The concept of ‘fragmented journeys’ (Collyer, 2007; Kvittingen et al., 2018; Schapendonk, 2012) moves away from a reductive linear understanding on ‘transit’ as an only a temporary state in-between departure and arrival and does more justice to people’s ongoing search for a sense of stability amidst prolonged uncertainty. Some of the people in this study had been in Jordan for more than ten years. Others had arrived more recently, often following in the footsteps of family members and relatives who have travelled before them. Several, like Kholoud, had initially sought refuge in Jordan. And a few had returned to Iraq, but had come back to Jordan because of the persisting violence there. Yet, regardless of the length of their stay, all the people I worked with described their life in Jordan as ‘waiting’. It is for that reason that this study focuses upon mediated experiences of waiting in Jordan as one prolonged point in the fragmented journeys of Iraqi refugees. Waiting serves as a common ordering principle that (re)produces voiceless refugee subjectivities through humanitarian technologies of ‘care and

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control’ (Hyndman and Giles, 2011; Ticktin, 2011) and that is (re)produced by the externalisation of asylum to the Global South, the ‘purported benevolence of humanitarian aid’ (Hyndman and Giles, 2011: 362). But whereas the term ‘waiting’ might imply passivity, the people in this study were far from passively waiting for time to go by. Reducing their lives to depictions of ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998) or ‘wasted’ (Bauman, 2004) would be a macropolitical theoretical act of violence that ignores and therefore further reduces the agency of refugees in response to humanitarian crises, macropolitical development and local constraints (Harrell-Bond, 1986). Many valuable studies on migrants’ prolonged precarious experiences and their negotiations of time and place show that waiting is an active and affective attitude. Studies conducted in camp settings (Agier, 2011; Horst, 2006; Malkki, 1995a; Turner, 2010), on journeys (Anderson, 2014; Khosravi, 2008; 2010; Trimikliniotis et al., 2015), on years spent waiting for papers (Griffiths, 2014; Rotter, 2015), on detention and/or potential deportation (Hyndman and Mountz, 2008; Turnbull, 2016), on enduring illegalisation (de Genova, 2002; 2005; Lucht, 2012) and/or in response to actual deportation (Schuster and Majidi, 2013) have all successfully shown how in the time that is spent ‘in-between’, everyday life goes on and important subjective and social changes do occur (Crawley et al., 2017). People are seeking meaning and direction in their interaction with the humanitarian infrastructure in place, transnational connections and legal material realities. Yet so far, relatively little attention has been given to how digital technologies interact with the deeply situated experiences of waiting and prolonged crisis of migrants leaving under dire circumstances. Time is most vividly felt when there is a rupture between our expectations and what the world has delivered (Bourdieu, 2000: 208), for it is especially in these moments that time is experienced as slowed down and as being in a state of ‘waiting’. Hope, despair, expectation, anxiety and impatience are but a few states of mind through which time and waiting are experienced (Bourdieu 2000: 214). Like Europe’s borders, time in waiting is increasingly stretched out (Tsoni, 2016). The need to seek refuge can be the result of an imminent threat, but one’s departure can equally be the result of a long process – for instance, if one’s need to leave is a response to living under perpetual threat or because it requires necessary preparations, such as paperwork or financial resources (van Hear, 2004). ‘Arrival’ can also be a continuation of waiting, for instance, for status or for family reunification. And upon full recognition as a refugee, the consequences that years of living with violence, uncertainty, vulnerabilities, uncertainties and negotiated forms of resilience do not magically disappear (Garnier et al., 2018: 2) and symbolic and legal border practices persist. People move within the social and material environments in which they find themselves and they are moved by these environments. Crisis is a ter-

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7

rain of meaning and action. It is about finding one’s way despite the structural limitations in and, if necessary, beyond one’s physical place (Vigh, 2008). ‘Crisis’ puts a prolonged hold on people and societies. In this book I show how, beyond instrumental functions, digital technologies play important social and subjective roles for navigating in and only sometimes out of crisis. Emotions might wear out and the process is often tiresome, especially if there are only limited means to address or change them. This does not mean that Kholoud and people in similar circumstances are not touched by mediated messages or everyday difficulties. On the evening when we watched America’s Got Talent, Kholoud told me she wants to go to the country office of the UNHCR based in Jordan the next day. She had been there many times before to obtain information on whether she and her family could be considered for third country resettlement. The country office of the UNHCR (hereinafter referred to as ‘UNHCR Jordan’) is located far from their homes and, considering their limited income, paying for the taxi ride there is expensive. These visits tend to disappoint. As on previous occasions, they will tell her they can do little to help her as the capacities of the United Nations (UN) refugee agency are limited. But this time, Kholoud explains, it will be different. A UNHCR Jordan staff member will tell her that they have made a mistake. They will be able to travel to a Western country the day after. She sighs and then tells me: ‘It is a dream, Mirjam. I know.’ But even ‘just dreams’ serve a purpose. The act of holding on to hope might be crucial for making do in a structurally unjust world. Amid prolonged crisis, people hold on to life as meaningful in fragmented, ever more volatile worlds. In situations of disorder, people continue to act in the present, hold on to parts of their former lives and try to anticipate the future.

Being-and-Becoming Refugees in Prolonged Conditions of Displacement Mindful of the potential similarities between mediated practices of everyday experiences of other migrants and their descendants, not-yet migrants and nonmigrants residing in precarious circumstances across the globe, the focus of this book’s is on refugees’ waiting experience of prolonged displacement in the Global South. The 1951 Geneva Convention for the Status of Refugees and the related 1967 Protocol (hereinafter ‘the Refugee Convention’) was established to ensure the rights of those people seeking refuge from individually targeted persecution beyond the borders of the nation-state to which they are expected to belong. People categorised as ‘refugees’ ( Janmyr and Mourad, 2018; Zetter, 1991, 2007) became the focal point of a complex network established to ensure international protection and to institutionalise assistance.

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The UNHCR is mandated to protect the world’s refugees in accordance with the Refugee Convention. Jordan, like many Middle Eastern countries, is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention. In combination with its situated (lack of) rule of law, this has resulted in a rather complex legal interplay pertaining to the roles that the UNHCR, other international organisations, implementing partners, their (Western) donors and private entities have taken on regarding Jordan’s protection context. The position of UNHCR Jordan as a ‘surrogate state’ (Kagan, 2011; Slaughter and Crisp, 2009) and its (post-)humanitarian governance practices require scrutiny as it interacts with and influences the experiences of people seeking refuge. But UNHCR Jordan is but one in a complex network that has been developed for refugee protection in humanitarian settings. With this geographical and topical focus, I by no means seek to reify the Convention as a sine qua non for protection and/or to privilege the UNHCR (and/or states) as norm entrepreneurs and bearers of rights (Cole, 2020). While the Refugee Convention was originally established to ensure the right of refuge and the rights of refugees, this tends to be undermined by the actions of signatory states, through the deployment of xenophobic migration policies that make seeking asylum increasingly difficult and further criminalises migration while encouraging ‘humanitarian’ containment policies beyond Europe (Ajana, 2013; Anderson, 2014; Costello and Mann, 2020; Duffield, 2019; Hyndman and Giles, 2011). At the end of my fieldwork in September 2015, UNHCR Jordan had registered 50,340 Iraqi nationals (UNHCR Jordan, 2015a). At that point in time, UNHCR Jordan had registered a total of 686,584 people. The vast majority (628,867 people) hailed from Syria. Like their Iraqi peers, more than 80% of registered Syrian refugees are living in urban settings. UNHCR Jordan had registered 3,473 people from Sudan and 3,914 people with other national backgrounds (UNHCR Jordan, 2015a). A large number of Palestinians in Jordan also found themselves in legal limbo (Ramahi, 2015). Moreover, less privileged Transjordanian and Palestinian Jordanian citizens also experience grievances, including high levels of unemployment, for which Jordan’s displaced populations are often too easily blamed (Chatty, 2015). My academic interest focuses on what happens when humanitarian attention paid to a particular crisis decreases, but people continue to live in prolonged and digitally connected conditions of displacement and legal uncertainty, resulting in a focus on Iraqi refugees in Jordan. Humanitarian aid relates to the attention span of most news media outlets (Chouliaraki, 2013) and is inherently intended to be short term and temporary (Brun, 2016; Fassin, 2012). By 2015, the academic attention paid to Iraqi refugees had significantly reduced, along with international support and media attention. Much of what has been documented about the situation of Iraqi refugees residing in Jordan draws upon assessments and research conducted prior to 2014.

Introduction |

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All people in this study were registered with UNHCR Jordan and self-identified as refugees. I therefore refer to them as refugees even if not all of them were formally recognised as such via ‘refugee status determination proper’, the more rigorous process that UNHCR tends to conduct in nonsignatory countries on behalf of Western nation-states ( Janmyr, 2017a). In discussions on interactions with the humanitarian regime, I sometimes speak of Iraqi Persons of Concern (PoC) as this was the label that UNHCR Jordan started deploying by 2015. The different labels used for people crossing the borders of nation-states tend to be used to exclude and differentiate (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018; Janmyr and Mourad, 2018), and cause further misrecognition that reasons behind any kind of migration are often multicausal and multilayered (Lindley, 2010). The legal refugee status can provide access to rights, but the label ‘refugee’ tends to be appropriated as a stereotyping governing tool (Hyndman and Giles, 2011; Zetter, 1991, 2007), tends to be emotionally loaded and burdensome (Ludwig, 2013), and contributes to the institutionalisation of a ‘state of exception’ (Agamben, 2005; Holmes and Castañeda, 2016), which draws upon conditionality and vulnerability instead of rights. The social and subjective process of becoming-and-being a refugee is never simply the result of crossing nation-states’ borders and/or of being able to proof one’s individualised persecution. What Liisa Malkki (1995b) described as ‘refugeeness’ is the gradual transformation through which refugees learn from their own and other’s embedded, embodied and mediated experiences, of interactions with local authorities and humanitarian operations, of everyday encounters in place, and the many conditions that this subjectively and socially imposes on people. It is a continuous and dynamic process of (also and never only about) becoming a refugee and intersects with other identity markers.

The Mediation of Migration Migration is a complex process in which people continuously seek to find a balance between different geographical places and their own place in the world. Feeling at ease and feeling at home – belonging – relates to coexisting and not always competing political projects of belonging that (re)construct boundaries to define and differentiate between ‘us’ and ‘others’ (YuvalDavis, 2012). Exclusionary grand narratives – often following colonial, capitalist, racialised and/or patriarchal lines – tend to render this as an either/ or choice that serves to cast continued or renewed doubts on one’s place in the world of (would-be/descendants of) migrants simply because of their race, religion, name, legal status and other intersecting reasons (Ahmed et al., 2003; Al-Ali and Koser, 2002; Baubock and Faist, 2010; Brubaker, 2005;

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Clifford, 2007; Hall, 1990). Migrants’ experiences therefore often consist of acts of cultural maintenance, adaption, creation, repression, resistance and control. The dialectical process between fitting in (and if so, in whose structures) and/or being able to hold on to differences is partly shaped and restricted by localised, national and international national media outlets and transnational connections, but they can also and equally provide resources to negotiate hegemonic structures and power relations (Sinclair and Cunningham, 2001). For postcolonial thinkers such as Stuart Hall (1990) and Paul Gilroy (1993), diasporic identifications consist of two parts: attachments to one’s ‘roots’, including holding on to a shared history and community, but also to one’s ‘routes’ (future aspirations, transformations and intercultural trajectories). The in-between spaces that migrants inhabit are known as ‘diaspora space’ (Brah, 1996) or as the interstitial ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994). Moving beyond static understandings of insider/outsider and against methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002), such concepts enable the exploration of how there are multiple performative sites of power that can serve to differentiate and/or confound in relation to oneself, each other and the ‘other’ (Brah, 1996). Whereas this study focuses largely on digital connectivity and ICTs, often captured by the term ‘new’ technologies, it is important to recognise that ‘humanity is not one iota more mediated by the rise of the digital’ (Miller and Horst, 2013: 3). People’s experiences of migration were most probably never a permanent break to the people and places left behind. A wide array of mediated practices – from storytelling (Al-Hardan, 2016) and particular material objects (Dudley, 2010) to letters, video cassettes and radio (Madianou and Miller, 2011; Seuferling, 2019) – enabled means to navigate in new and sometimes deeply uncertain sociolegal environments and to hold on to the past and a sense of stability. The use of technologies by nation-states to curtail movement, enforce symbolic borders or mobilise sympathy for people suffering elsewhere is also not new (Curtis, 2012; Hyndman, 2000; Malkki, 1995a; Seuferling, 2019). Ethnographic studies on ‘new’ media often focus on virtual geographies and therefore potentially run the risk of negating how people’s mediated practices interact, relate and are layered over material geographies (Krajina et al., 2014; Miller and Slater, 2000; Morley, 2008; Postill, 2011). More contextual attention is needed for what transnational connections, enabled by technologies, do amidst and in interaction with the structural material, social and mediated inequalities that refugees encounter. A short-sighted focus on the ‘new’ would also negate how ‘older’ technologies are enduring (Hayes, 2019), given that matters such as class and location influence access to and usage of digital technologies, as well as experiences of being and becoming displaced. And the connections that newer technologies have often do not

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replace but have come to exist alongside and interact with other means of staying connected and making sense. Sense-making practices also increasingly in occur in an environment of polymedia (Madianou and Miller 2011), as people are increasingly able to access different media forms – TV, social media, written information, etc. – with different characteristics and affordances. ‘Digital exceptionalism’ (Marwick, 2013) would also overlook how, if people have access to this, a wider variety of different media forms and technologies interact and play a constitutive role in relation to people’s relationships, experiences and thoughts (Madianou and Miller, 2011). Digital technologies can provide additional spaces to manoeuvre, to seek a sense of security and to navigate new environments and sustaining connections. New technological developments including the increased availability of and the persistence and ubiquity of different technologies have provided an important push towards rethinking the intersections of migration and mediation (Hegde, 2016). As migrants’ identities are increasingly interconnected to mediated practices, the ‘diaspora space’ is increasingly becoming a ‘mediated transnational space’ (Hegde 2016: 17). Technologies play a crucial role in migrants’ lives just as they are able to link people – interactively, actively and affectively – to a world beyond their current geographical location and beyond their often precarious legal and social realities.

On Mediation and Affordances A simplified utilitarian view on connectivity tends to dehumanise refugees and other people residing in precarious circumstances as ‘others’ (Awad and Tossell, 2019). Technologies interact with already existing sociopolitical structures (Madianou et al., 2016: 978) and often also have important yet less apparent social and subjective purposes beyond instrumental functions. What technologies do (or do not do) is not the result of inherent technological features. Instead, they and the people using them act upon the world in which they are situated. How people use technology is influenced by the people’s experiences in world, including their personal and shared sociohistorical backgrounds. But digital technologies – as objects and by the information flows they enable – are simultaneously also structuring forces (boyd, 2010): they interact with everyday experiences and potentially alter (perceptions of) often grim and complex material and social realities, and how these relate to matters such as international politics, warfare, humanitarian governance and neoliberal capitalism. Mediation theory enables further comprehension of the interactions between technologies, social relations and material conditions. It considers the constant presence of media in everyday life, recognises that media audiences are not passive (Ang, 1991; Hall, 1991) and that media can have transformational capacities regarding social processes (Couldry, 2008). The

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significance of media relates to its ability to connect and link people as well as households – actively, passively or interactively – to a world beyond one’s geographical locations. People’s understanding of their place in the world, in reference to their immediate surrounding and in the home, is an ongoing mediated and situated processes that interacts with their legal status, class, gender, race, religion, sexuality, educational background, political beliefs, etc. By crossing the boundaries from the public world into the private world and vice versa, social, cultural and economic relations and ideologies – for instance, concerning nationality and youth – are continuously renegotiated (Anderson, 1991; Gillespie, 1995; Morley, 1986, 2000; Morley and Silverstone, 1990; Silverstone, 1994; Silverstone et al., 1992). Mediated information, images and practices can evoke particular ideas and desires. They can enable particular societal issues to be addressed and can result in social changes. Yet they can equally reinforce exclusionary and/or oppressive ideas, for instance, concerning class or patriarchal norms (Abu-Lughod, 1997; Mankekar, 1998; Schielke, 2015). Technologies can have transformational capacities, but how this occurs is far from straightforward and depends on many factors, including context. Affordances are the different potentialities emerging from the interaction between an object (in this case technologies) and its user. They can contribute and open up the possibilities for different kinds of communication and interaction and/or might close off others. Affordances go beyond the functional as they relate to one’s presence in the social and material world (Hutchby, 2001). Interactions with technologies are deeply embedded in wider social and material concerns that reach far beyond immediate interactions with a machine or ‘thing’. It is not only about what designers say that a technology is for or what people think technology can do; it is also what they imagine a tool can be used for (Nagy and Neff, 2015). Technologies affect imageries, and the imagination influences how technologies are used. This often occurs in chaotic, complex or previously unintended ways (Sneath et al., 2009). Technologies might ‘afford’ imaginings in unexpected ways (Nagy and Neff, 2015). This does not necessarily imply that outcomes are always unpredictable or incidental; technologies can be used and/or coopted in a priori unimaginable ways, yet imaginations are often also structured and influenced by sociohistorical context and local and global power relationships. There are of course a wide variety of differences in terms of access to, availability of and use of technologies. Certainly, not all people who become forcibly displaced have equal access to technologies. Digital divides are persisting and map onto already-existing inequalities. Yet it is safe to say that at least to some extent, digital connectivity has become embedded in the everyday experiences of many refugees. For instance, most of this

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study draws upon ethnographic fieldwork with Iraqi refugee households residing in Jordan’s capital Amman in the first nine months of 2015. Despite sometimes apparent financial struggles, in all Iraqi households, there was a widespread availability of smartphones and the constant presence of the flickering TV screen. In most cases, all adults and teenagers in the household owned a highly personalised smartphone.

Mediated Navigations of Belonging, Identity and Place-Making in Prolonged Uncertainty The increased availability and accessibility of internet and satellite TV have resulted in important changes with regard to migrants’ being in the world. Digital connectivity has pluralised social settings (Moores, 2012). The figure of the ‘connected migrant’ (Diminescu, 2008) and a wide variety of similar yet different academic buzzwords plays a central role in discussions in Media and Migration Studies (Leurs and Smets, 2018). Dana Diminescu’s (2008) epistemological manifesto played a key role in understanding migrants as actors of connections. They are less bounded by physical constraints considering that technologies provide additional means to navigate between their host country, their country of destination and elsewhere. But being connected often coincides with an increase in experiences of feeling or being disconnected from security or stability and with limited means for movement and social and physical mobility. This certainly is the case for many of the world’s refugees, and not only for them. Open for business and connected via technologies and globalised media productions, borders of nation-states are intentionally and porously closed off, enabling the movement of some – often cis, heterosexual, white, middle-class and Western people – while hindering the mobility of most others. Transnational connections can play a crucial role in coping with the material and legal difficulties of living in displacement and forced separation. For instance, considering that in the lives of many refugees one’s physical location cannot offer a sense of stability and familiarity, refugees’ home-making practices are often relocated to online spaces (Doná, 2015; Georgiou, 2012a, 2012b; Leurs, 2014, 2016). Digital connectivity can engender ways of ‘being there’ (Baldassar et al., 2016) despite being geographically distant, further explaining the wide variety of concepts of ‘connected presences’ (Georgiou, 2006; Licoppe, 2004; Madianou, 2016; Robertson et al., 2016). Literature suggests that digital co-presence tends to increase the longing to be physically together, resulting in an increase in visits among more mobile and well-off migrants (Baldassar, 2016). But for many forced migrants and other migrants residing in precarious settings, the ability to physically travel tends to be heavily restricted, often due to a combination of legal restrictions and financial uncertainties. And fear that transnational com-

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munication can potentially endanger loved ones or oneself can result in self-censorship or in avoiding contact (Opas and McMurray, 2015). Even if communication is possible and safe, dealing with physical separation is still extremely difficult. And the spaces that enable openness and connections are the same spaces through which surveillance and exclusion can play out. The means for escape and for seeking movement are easily morphed back into spaces of control (Papadopoulos et al., 2008). The same characteristics that enable movement, information-seeking and connections also increase means for ‘digital border policing’ and are used to criminalise migration, further hindering the universal human right to claim asylum. And having access to a wider variety of televised, online and offline sources and means to communicate with people ‘here’ and ‘there’ (Gillespie, 2006: 917) to make sense of events, relationships and identities tends to be crucial, but these connections simultaneously interact with the already-precarious lives of refugees (Wall et al., 2016: 240). This becomes evident in the following examples. The importance of digital platforms and technologies in migrants’ involvement in the politics of their distanced homeland has been widely documented (Aouragh, 2011; Bernal, 2005; Doná, 2015; Godin and Doná, 2016; Leurs, 2016; Sinclair and Cunningham, 2001). But through networked authoritarianism, oppressive regimes are also able to suppress the voices of dispersed opposition members (Moss, 2018). Online spaces enabled asylum seekers in Germany to present themselves as the people they want to be(come), beyond the figure of the victimised ‘refugee’ (Witteborn, 2015). But conditional and exclusionary refugee reception policies of host countries can also reinforce fears among asylum seekers about their mediated practices – for instance, watching satellite TV was feared by asylum seekers in the UK for not being considered the ‘right’ TV-viewing practices by the racialised and exclusionary nation-state in which they sought asylum (Lentin and Titley, 2012; Moore and Clifford, 2007; Skeggs et al., 2008). And mobile phones are known to function as social warning systems to mitigate the insecurities around informal employment (Collyer, 2007; Harney, 2013; Schapendonk, 2012; Schapendonk and van Moppes, 2007), to sustain one’s wellbeing and to keep an archive (Marino, 2021). But these digital identity archives are now also searched by several Western countries, including the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, and are used to validate or deny asylum claims ( Jumbert et al., 2018; Leurs, 2017) Years after the publication of her manifesto on the ‘connected migrant’, Diminescu (2020) therefore rightfully argued for a more nuanced position towards the potentials of digital connectivity. She likened ICTs to Jacques Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon: it can act simultaneously as a poison and as medicine. Aside from the many positive potentials in migrants’ lives

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(including making dangerous journeys more secure, easing the means for staying connected remotely, and establishing new networks and securing money transfers), newer technologies have also brought about ample negative effects, including the constraints of smart border policing and concerns for privacy. In the lives of migrants, technologies tend to have a ‘paradoxical presence’ (Gillespie et al., 2016: 2), given that technologies and their affordances simultaneously provide access to resources, threats and a wide range of things in-between (Hutchby, 2001). As the connected experiences of refugees interact with everyday experiences of legal, material and embodied constraints, seeing and hearing about lives elsewhere and occurring in interaction with humanitarian actors, I argue that the figure of the connected forced migrant requires an important addition: that of being disconnected. Being disconnected is different from not being connected, ‘just as being hung up on, is not the same thing as never having had a phone’ (Ferguson, 2002: 141). Disconnection implies a relationship. It is the product of active structural and historical disconnecting processes, which is partly (re)produced by a too celebratory and orientalising understanding of connectivity.

Towards a Situated Understanding of an Increasingly (Dis)Connected, Bordered and Post-humanitarian World The vignette described earlier on watching TV with Kholoud took place in 2014, when I was in Jordan for a preliminary field visit to prepare my ethnographic research that would last for nine months in Jordan in 2015. My time in Jordan coincided with what was soon framed as Europe’s ‘refugee’ or ‘migrant’ crisis, but what perhaps might be better considered as ‘Europe’s crisis’ (Collyer and King, 2016) and a crisis of solidarity (Marino, 2021: 1), for most were concerned with sustaining a (neo)colonial reified Europe (de Genova, 2013: 76), and Europe’s complicity in the reasons for causing and sustaining conditions in displacement was not addressed. It was largely in response to this ‘crisis’ and its mediated portrayal that there was a ‘technological fetishization of smartphone carrying and selfietaking refugees’ (Leurs and Smets, 2018: 8). The structural misrecognition for the globalised availability and accessibility of digital technologies breaks down the complex yet connected realities in which many people worldwide find themselves into discriminating dichotomies that once again differentiate the ‘West’ from the rest. Simplified understandings of ‘the’ digital divide split people into the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. Refugees in the Global South are one of the many groups deemed to be on the wrong side of that equation (Leung, 2020), given how discourses on refugees tend to render qualities present in citizens as being notably absent in refugees (Nyers, 2006). For

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instance, during and in response to the uprisings against various dictatorial regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in 2011, the same people whose prior use of technology was celebrated was immediately forgotten or was depicted as a threat upon crossing nation-state borders to seek refuge (Leurs, 2016). The UNHCR only published its ‘Connecting Refugees’ report in 2016 in favour of recognition of the importance of digital connectivity in refugees’ lives. As this title suggests, in this report the UN refugee agency perceives itself as the ‘connector’, placing itself in-between the Global North and the Global South while ignoring the fact that many of its targeted beneficiaries have long been connected (UNHCR, 2016a). Humanitarian reason – the deployment of moral sentiments and compassion by the spectacle of suffering (Fassin, 2012) – dehistoricises and depoliticises refugees and elicits the idea that refugees are ‘disconnected others’ who need help with becoming connected. This can encourage the hope that technologies can provide quick fixes for political problems. Over 1,500 apps were developed to aid refugees, largely without refugees’ involvement (Leurs and Smets, 2018). Most of these go unused, yet the enthusiasm of engineers, computer scientists and humanitarian actors to gather in hackathons to develop similar quick ‘solutions’ for refugees continues (Madianou, 2019a; Pascucci, 2019). On the other hand, othering processes are appropriated to politicise the figure of the migrant and to induce unfounded fears – for instance, in relation to the smartphone being a ‘terrorist essential’ (Gillespie et al., 2016). Both are signs of ‘high-tech orientalism’ (Chun, 2003). The importance of digital connectivity for sharing crucial information and accessing social networks upon more immediate geographical border crossings has been widely documented (Dekker and Engbersen, 2014; Frouws et al., 2016; Gillespie et al., 2016; Zijlstra and van Liempt, 2017, to name but a few). By now, the utilitarian view on migrants’ connectivity has been recognised as empirically and politically problematic due to its potential to simplify and ‘other’ refugees and other migrants (Awad and Tossell, 2019; Marino, 2021). But most critical studies on refugees’ use of media continue to have Europe and/or other Western settings as their main site of inquiry (Leurs and Smets, 2018). Important exceptions will be discussed throughout this book (Almenara-Niebla and Ascanio-Sánchez, 2019; Aouragh, 2011; Collyer, 2007; Danielson, 2012; Jack, 2017; Leurs, 2014; Madianou, 2019a; Pascucci, 2019; Schapendonk, 2012; Schapendonk and van Moppes, 2007; Smets, 2018; Wall et al., 2016; Witteborn, 2021). ‘Methodological Europeanism’ (Garelli and Tazzioli, 2013) contributes to persisting stereotypical perceptions on digital divides, refugees and migrants, especially concerning those who are geographically located in the Global South. The Global South and the Global North cannot be differentiated into two separate homogeneous spheres (Chouliaraki, 2013; Sassen, 2001), given

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that the combination of digital connectivity and accelerated capitalism further blurs these differences (Duffield, 2019). Yet I draw upon this distinction to emphasise how global divisions of power, the unequal distribution of resources and the accelerating potentials of technologies contribute to reproducing border practices and widening inequalities. This study aims to further comprehend how colonial and capitalist entanglements (Ponzanesi and Leurs, 2014) come into force within refugee households beyond Europe’s geographical borders.

A Post-humanitarian Celebration of Connectivity The lack of little in-depth research on (dis)connectivity in refugees’ lives in the Global South contrasts and coincides with a great number of technologyoriented changes in the fields of relief and aid. Speaking of a singular humanitarianism would misrecognise the wide variance and vast differences within the humanitarian sector concerning matters such as directionality, motivation and guiding principles (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Pacitto, 2015). There has been an increasing overlap and crossing over between humanitarian relief and development (Betts, Loescher and Milner, 2012) and ‘new humanitarianisms’ (armed humanitarianism, for-profit humanitarianism, diaspora humanitarianism, local humanitarianism, etc.) have crowded the humanitarian field, further complicating what humanitarianism is and/or ought to be. The humanitarian principles –a shared humanity, neutrality and impartiality – jostle alongside issues concerning territorial control, private gains, solidarity and religious motivation (Sezgin and Dijkzeul, 2016). Here I focus specifically on neoliberal forms of humanitarianisms and their digital turn. Critical development scholar Mark Duffield understands this as posthumanitarianism (Duffield, 2019) whereas Media and Migration scholar Mirca Madianou speaks of ‘technocolonialism’ (Madianou, 2019a). Humanitarian operations are increasingly drawing upon the potentials of connectivity, which includes ‘data’ mining and machine learning remote management, and additional potentials of innovation, informality and resilience. By default, the UNHCR now obtains biometric data during its refugee registration in the Global South and draws upon other modes of digitisation, meaning the ‘conversion, articulation and management of historically analogue information, processes and actions’ through digitally connected devices (Sandvik, Jacobsen and McDonald, 2017: 321). The humanitarian turn to data and technologies largely relates to the belief that this can provide neutral, objective and impartial answers to issues that are deeply political ( Jacobsen, 2015). Technologies and technical expertise often function like an anti-politics machine (Ferguson, 1994) as sociopo-

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litical questions are transformed into technical problems. This interacts with an unfounded optimism that innovations and private partnerships would be able to establish quick neoliberal fixes in humanitarian situations (ScottSmith, 2016). By negating politics and situated contexts, the already deeply unequal power relations inherent in humanitarian operations tend to become further entrenched and influence modes of humanitarian governance. Humanitarian governance refers to provision of care while simultaneously imposing control (Barnett, 2013; Jacobsen, 2015; Jacobsen and Fast, 2019). The optimism for the potentials for technologies in humanitarian crises and to aid refugees (Bessant et al., 2015; Betts, Bloom and Omata, 2012; Betts and Bloom, 2014; Betts, Bloom and Weaver, 2015; International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, 2013; Meier, 2015; UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2013) resonates with early studies on globalisation that celebrate the potentials of digital technologies for contributing to more egalitarian societies (Appadurai, 1990, 1996; Castells, 2000; Urry, 2000). Connectivity would have equalising capacities and result in a world less bounded by borders. But technological developments cannot efface the unevenness of ‘time-space-compression’ (Harvey, 1990). The powers of neoliberal capitalism, (neo)colonialism and patriarchy predominate. The potential that technologies can be used to reinforce rather than subvert racialised, classed, gendered differences in degree, initiation and control was already pointed out in 1994 by Doreen Massey (1994). Beyond means to connect and bridge, connectivity provides the means for control, surveillance, exploitation and abandonment (Duffield, 2019). Opportunities for mobility and/or equal access to capital have never been equally available (Ong, 1999; Sassen, 2001), but in the 1960s and 1970s, there was at least the promise of circulation and much fewer restrictions on movement (Anderson, 2017; Anderson et al., 2009; Duffield, 2019). A wide variety of interconnected resurgences of securitisation – the practice of power to define something (drugs, the economy, the potential terrorist, migration) as a threat – have contributed to the feeling of a heightened need for sustaining borders (Chandler, 2007; Duffield, 2001; Emmers, 2007). Advanced economic and technological developments have contributed to the creation of complex instruments that have sharpened the divide between those who have access to social and economic security and those who are denied this access (Sassen, 2014). Digital technologies and connectivity deployed by government but also by UN agencies are widening the possibilities for exceptional measures in relation to curtail and control in border and migration contexts (Achiume, 2020a, 2020b; Kaurin, 2019; Latonero and Kift, 2018; Molnar, 2020). Under the guise of security, biopolitical and necropolitical (Mbembe, 2003) measures have been increasingly deployed, further contributing to highly uneven and discriminatory differentials and

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exclusions in relation to mobility and movement (Scheel, 2019). This further points to the urgency to consider what these practices mean for people seeking protection beyond Europe. There are many other, and often interlinked, concerns about the rather wide range of technology-oriented experimental endeavours with humanitarian technology and its increasingly data-driven protection (Macias, 2020). These include the additional risks for misuse, extraction, exploitation and the potential costs these can have on refugees’ rights, protection and dignity (Cheesman, 2020; Hayes, 2018; Hosein and Nyst, 2013; Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2018; Lemberg-Pedersen and Haioty, 2020; Macias, 2020; Madianou, 2019a, 2019b; Sandvik, 2016a). This goes beyond the grave consequences of what can happen when things go wrong. When humanitarian technologies operate ‘successfully’, they can equally generate harm – for instance, by reconstituting what is considered normatively acceptable ( Jacobsen, 2015). Recently there has been more attention paid to personal data protection in humanitarian settings (International Committee of the Red Cross and Privacy International, 2018; Kuner and Marelli, 2020). But many concerns regarding this experimental deployment of technologies and machine learning to make the bodies and lives of people seeking refuge legible remain. This includes the permanence of records, widespread (meta)data sharing, limited meaningful consent and algorithm’s tendencies for entrenching structural inequalities.

(Dis)Connectivity in a Globalised World Broader and decolonised understandings of privacy in the lives of refugees and other migrants (Arora, 2018; Witteborn, 2021) and the risks associated with the digitisation of their protection are crucial, considering that, as Privacy International (2011) put it: ‘Getting privacy wrong will get people arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and may sometimes lead to death.’ But just like an unfettered optimism about technologies focuses only on the ‘good’, foregrounding only the ‘bad’ potentials of technologies in refugees’ lives would further contribute to a reification of the world’s refugees as ‘others’ outside of normality. The existence and use of technologies in refugees’ lives is a given, simply because they are part of our globally connected and structurally unequal social and material world. But whereas technologies are neither inherently good nor bad, they are not neutral either. Their design, operations, the data they engage with and the output they produce are the result of pre-existing human relationships and their structural inequalities. And they act upon and within the material and social world. Situated in different differentiating geographies and contexts, the studies of Hans Lucht (2012) and James Ferguson (2002) provide further comprehension on how simultaneous occurrences of (dis)connectivities interact with

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everyday experiences of limited opportunities in place and can engender a wide array of feelings and actions associated with loss, hope and of waiting. Ferguson (2002) considers the influence of technological developments in fibre optics in Zambia. In the 1960s, copper connectivity literally held the promise for connection to a global system, and to upward mobility and prosperity. The modernisation plotline – that one can catch up with the ‘West’, be part of ‘full’ humanity and no longer be cast as ‘second class’ – turned out to be a hoax, as the rendered need for Zambia’s copper also rendered the world system’s need to be connected to Zambia and its people. Ferguson draws upon Kristeva’s notion of abjection as a ‘process of being thrown aside, expelled or discarded’ (Ferguson, 2002: 140) to further describe the disconnected experiences of the people in his study. They are not expelled from capitalism. Situated in the ugly underbelly of a globalised capitalist global system, they are actually deeply connected to it as they are forced into accepting exploitative wages and reduced social protection, and are at risk of being left out. Saskia Sassen (2014) calls this the logic of expulsion. Beyond being thrown out and being thrown down, disconnection tends to imply feelings of humiliation, yet leaves behind ‘the gnawing sense of a continuing affective attachment to that which lies at the other side of the boundary’ (Ferguson, 2002: 140). Anthropologist Hans Lucht (2012) draws upon Ferguson’s notion of disconnection to describe the existential and social longing of Ghanaian fisherman/travellers/labourers, who had lost their livelihoods as a result of EU policies, and the eventual decision to risk the journey, deeply aware of the difficulties are awaiting them on their journey and in Europe. Lucht argues that they put their lives at risk in the hope of belonging to this so-called global world and of securing a ‘moral life’: a life that matters and is worth struggling for (Kleinman, 2006). In his somewhat similar argument for the imaginative dimensions of immobility in the immobility/mobility nexus, Kevin Smets (2019) points out that acts of disconnecting can be agentic, of deciding who or what to turn to or turn away from. This is also because connections can bring about conflicted and conflicting feelings. One can have conflicted attachments to one’s native country, especially when one’s rushed departure was the result of violence (Dhoest, 2016). Conflicted connections can also apply to one’s current geographical location, perhaps even more so if one is or feels not (fully) accepted there. In my argument for recognition for disconnections, and for how these relate to being transnationally connected and legally marginalised, it is not my aim to add yet another binary either/or logic, for these often mask much more complex realities. The international refugee regime, and the adjacent academic field of refugee studies, is filled with dichotomies with the purpose of ordering, classifying and legitimising; in practice, this often results in fragmentation. Instead, I give primacy to ‘and’ and ‘as well as’ (Hage, 2020).

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Situating Media Ethnography within Iraqi Refugee Households in Jordan I first met Kholoud in 2012, when I first started working with the Iraqi refugee population in Jordan. An Iraqi woman in her late forties, she was much more media-savvy than I likely ever will be. Her smartphone and my laptop enabled us to stay connected over the years and my connections were an important source of inspiration for this research project, and I stayed with her during my brief fieldwork trip in 2014. This and other social relationships I had established during earlier research with Iraqi refugees in Jordan as well as my awareness of the ample media use by Iraqi refugees provided an extra incentive for this focus: longer-term engagement can be a practice for countering exploitative research practices and working towards more accountable research. The experiences of Kholoud and her close family members play a central role throughout this book. In order to further comprehend how life in prolonged displacement can be simultaneously connected and disconnected, this book largely draws upon ethnographic research conducted for nine months among them and other Iraqi refugee households living in prolonged conditions of displacement in Jordan in 2015 and on their mediated and situated experiences. For some vignettes, I draw upon earlier interactions or on later conversations I had using Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) applications, such as Skype or Facebook Messenger. In Chapter 7, I draw upon data collected in the winter of 2018–19. Playing closer attention to small, localised experiences is useful to further understanding globalised oppressions and broader struggles (de Genova, 2013). Ethnography as a methodological approach offers a means to capture the localised complexity of mediated and social dynamics that interact with and shape everyday practices and experiences (Miller and Horst, 2013). Physical places and material localities continue to matter, simply because we are embedded and embodied human beings (Braidotti, 2019; Gifford and Wilding, 2013). Online spaces can be lived places, but they are never separate from the offline realm; they interact and are part and parcel of everyday life (Miller et al., 2016). An ethnographic study on mediated practices within refugee households therefore necessitates closer understanding of the legal, social and material realties in which Iraqi refugees in Jordan navigate their lives. Ethnography is a transdisciplinary, flexible, rather messy and encompassing approach. It draws upon a wide variety of methods to collect data as it recognises the importance of seeking multiple ways to produce situated and always partial knowledge (Haraway, 1988) on people’s complex lived realities and meaning-making processes. Knowledge generated through eth-

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nography with forced migrants provides a means to capture the complexity of forced migration and keeps open the channel for the voices of forced migrants without the claim to definitely represent them (Rodgers, 2004).

Ethnographic Research within Refugee Households The study’s empirical focus on refugee households is twofold: first, because of financial and legal uncertainty, much of Iraqi refugee life in Jordan took place within their temporary homes. I was often invited into these homes, which allowed me to closely observe the role of digital technologies in people’s private lives and to witness virtual and temporary home-making (Doná, 2015). In Western and non-Western settings alike, homes have for a long time been associated with people’s private worlds and with the feminine (hooks, 1990; Young, 2005). Arguably, this is currently more the case in the Arabic-speaking world. As in Egypt (Schielke, 2015) and Morocco (Mernissi, 2001), public outside spaces in Amman tend to be more male-dominated, whereas domestic spaces are women-orientated domains. This is by no means to essentialise gender or gendered identities here, but as a cis-woman, I was able to obtain invitations into people’s homes, and to hang out and spend time in people’s domestic settings. In the last three months of my fieldwork, I moved in with an Iraqi refugee family in East Amman who had a spare bedroom. Before and during the time I lived there, we made clear agreements and had frequent conversations about what (not) to write about in relation to events occurring within the household. Second, different power differences and sociocultural positionings play out within the household. I draw upon an intersectional lens as my focus on households enabled my understanding of gender – but also religion, generation, class, race and sexuality – as relational (Crenshaw, 1991). Much like the family, the household is a normative ideal and a web of affect, practices and institutions (Mankekar, 1998). Forced displacement often results in fragmentation of families over different geographical areas and therefore also in a reconfiguration of who lives where. My focus here goes out to the material circumstances of living in Jordan, the spatial dynamics of living physically together and the relational dynamic. ‘Hanging out’ (Rodgers, 2004) with different members refugee households – women and men, children and their parents –, enabled me to consider how lives in prolonged displacement are differently situated and mediated in relation to each other. Becoming and being displaced tends to require adaptation. This results in space for (re)negotiating social norms and gender relations and reconfigurations in gender identities, but this also, and sometimes simultaneously, can result in (re)productions of unequal power relations within and beyond refugee households (Grabska, 2014). Navigating this ‘hybridity of place, identity and self’ in processes of social gendered transformation in displacement oc-

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curs in interaction with and through mediated practices. Displaced women seeking asylum in Germany would use practices of ‘hiding’ – their physical movement but also their online practices – from strangers they were living with and to accommodate cultural expectations (Witteborn, 2020). Silvia Almenara-Niebla and Carmen Ascanio-Sánchez (2019) shows how young Sahrawi refugee women in Spain not only navigate the potentials of ‘digital transnational gossip’ in order to maintain connections, but also deploy online strategies to confront these gendered mechanisms of control. The need to navigate different gendered and generational expectations – for instance, via keeping different online accounts – is not at all specific to forced migration contexts (Costa, 2018), but legal and social uncertainties interact with and can heighten the need for a protective response (Dhoest, 2019). A focus on refugee households and/or on digital practices heightens the potential for research to be intrusive. Entrance into people’s homes requires patience, invitations, the building up of trust, maintaining relations and respect, ongoing sensitivity towards the boundaries people explicitly or implicitly draw, and frequent reminders of my position as a researcher. Ethnography as a methodological approach has gained a place within the fields of Forced Migration Studies and Media Studies, but it has been rightfully criticised for its orientalising and harmful potentials (Ahmed, 2000). Research, due to its links to colonialism and European imperialism, is a dirty word from the ‘vantage point of the colonized’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012: 1). Research on forced migration contexts in the Middle Eastern region can be damaging (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2012) and highly exploitative (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2019). And knowledge practices enact migration management, migration policies and border regimes (Scheel, 2019). This means that there is a heightened need to be(com)ing accountable and reflexive regarding my positioning as a white researcher with access to a Dutch passport and the knowledge a study such as this can (re)produce (Mohanty, 1988: 260). My immersive presence in the field as well as my absence through leaving the field and writing (Mosse, 2006) are deeply embedded and implicated in the broader sociopolitical systems of globalisation, capitalism and (neo)colonialism I am writing against. Mark Duffield describes post-humanitarianism as the ‘international face of post-humanism’ (2019: 10). Here, he talks about a post-humanist belief that technologies could somehow enable a flat, objective viewing of the world. By ignoring the inequalities and power relations in place, this tends to intensify existing hierarchies. However, Duffield ignores decolonising and feminist approaches to post-human knowledge that foreground relationality, the politics of locations and a decentring of the white, Western men (Braidotti 2019). I will explore this in more detail in the conclusion of this book, where I question if my complicity (in power and knowledge structures) can also be constructive (de Jong, 2017).

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Reflexivity includes an important note on language: my understanding of Arabic is good enough to make conversation in more informal settings and to ‘hang out’. Out of the forty-two informal interviews I undertook, twelve were conducted in English. For the other thirty, I relied on translation. Working with translation provides several epistemological and ethical difficulties. Translation adds ‘layers of meaning’ (and confusion and misinterpretation) and can reinforce power differentials (Fontana and Frey, 1994: 367). It might heighten concerns about trust and insecurity among people who already find themselves in extremely vulnerable circumstances, but at times it can also be an advantage, as my otherness might make me more receptive to potential issues that are taken for granted (Borchgrevink, 2003). Considering that it is extremely uncertain where the future journeys of people in this study will lead to and in order to exclude even the slightest potentiality that people’s participation in this study could somehow hinder a successful or even safe outcome, I hold on to the importance of (sometimes self-chosen) pseudonyms to safeguard the anonymity of the participants to this study as much as possible. I describe participants by their age and gender they identified with. The post-2003 violence in Iraq has been largely linked to US-imposed ethnosectarian differences that have also been rejected in the uprisings in Iraq of young Iraqi nationals in the autumn of 2019 (Ali, 2019). For this reason, I only refer to a person’s religious or sectarian denomination if it provides further comprehension to situated experiences or if a person emphasised this part of their identity at the time of our conversation.

The Outline of the Coverage in the Book Throughout this book, I engage and connect discussions occurring in different academic fields within the social sciences that speak directly to each other and to the topic of this book. The field of Forced Migration Studies is inherently interdisciplinary and tends to include perspectives from different disciplines such as law, political science and anthropology (Chatty and Marfleet, 2013). I further connect this to discussions in media studies, critical humanitarian studies, critical borders studies and sociology that provide important additional insights into how to understand the social and subjective functions of technologies in the lives of refugees residing in prolonged conditions of displacement. In the following chapters, I draw upon central themes within literature on the subjective and social functions of technologies in migrants’ lives. These include the role of technologies in sustaining transnational relations, navigating time (ideas and emotions in relation to the past, present and the future, and how these interact and work out in everyday practice) and place (absences

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and presences, home-making and place-making, the plurality of places to which people feel attachments to) and seeking security (physical, material, legal, social and ontological) in the midst of perpetual uncertainty. Often these functions overlap, are rather diffuse and are not necessarily straightforward or intentional. For instance, contact with a faraway loved one can make one feel better in the present, and can simultaneously painfully remind someone of loss and can infuse hopes about being reunited in the future. In Chapter 1, I provide the sociohistorical context of the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’ and the presence of urban Iraqi refugees in Jordan. Restricted rights combined with the role that UNHCR Jordan has taken on as a ‘surrogate state’ (Kagan, 2011) and, in comparison to other prolonged refugee situations, a relatively large US resettlement programme has contributed to an experience of life in waiting. I critique a too narrow and short-term understanding of crisis, as in the lives of the people in this study, crisis was the chronic, ever-present and endemic precarious background around which they are navigating their lives. Chapter 2 considers how modes of waiting for resettlement among Iraqi refugees in Jordan relate to the formal and informal access to information and communication regarding this conventional durable solution. This imposition of waiting is experienced differently as it interacts with gendered roles and patterns of life prior to flight and in Jordan. The lack of clear information about selection procedures and personal progress contributes to a rather anxious drive for comprehending the system and the logic behind it, and for assessing one’s chances of resettlement. I understand the sense-making practices of and during waiting by the Iraqi refugees in this study as everyday tactics (de Certeau, 1984), and show how modes of waiting are deeply affective and active. In Chapter 3, more outspoken actions are discussed in response to Jordan’s temporary protection context and border regimes, and their structural implications. These acts of resistance – protests and travelling onwards – should not be read as celebratory. They require a combination of courage, desperation and capital, occur in a context of chronic lack, can result in further exposure to risk and show how the Iraqi refugees in this study are active meaning-making and connected human beings who are continuously seeking ways to navigate and are only sometimes able to overcome crisis. Chapter 4 explores the local and material experiences of Iraqi urban refugees, as I scrutinise how in displacement, place matters. Embodied experiences of a multi-layered (in)securities associated with and beyond urban life in Jordan mean that much of life takes place in the home. Virtual home-making practices create means for coping and the potentiality for carving out a private sense of space. Gendered and generational dynamics can shift, as material realities become interspersed with digital presences and are simultaneously challenges and maintained.

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Digital technologies can also serve as orientation devices making it possible to imagine futures elsewhere, away from Jordan and Iraq, as becomes evident in Chapter 5. Through the interplay of media forms, the Iraqi refugees refract their own lives via the experiences of friends and family members, mediated images of present and past Iraq, and popular culture. Seeing and hearing about life in Iraq can be extremely painful and visceral. But the affordances – the potential of different media forms to bring about affects like hope and anxiety – also enable Iraqi refugees to turn away from Iraq and Jordan and to reorient themselves to particular places and futures elsewhere. Chapter 6 differs from the other chapters in that it is less empirically driven as it explores how Jordan’s protection space is increasingly becoming post-humanitarian. Default biometric registration, the usage of biometric data for a wide variety of purposes and the involvement of big tech raises important concerns ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2018; Lemberg-Pedersen and Haioty, 2020; Madianou, 2019b). And a short-sighted focus on refugees’ economic inclusion through digital connectivity reinforces the expectations on refugees to be resilient in their adversity. By sidestepping important sociopolitical discussions on rights, digital connectivity paves the way for refugees’ more immediate inclusion into global capitalism. Digital technology is appropriated to cherrypick narrow conceptions of some rights – the right to a digital identity and the right to work – while the risks and potential rights infringements, in the process towards and beyond achieving those goals, are wilfully ignored. The question I engage with in Chapter 7 is whether the logic that humanitarian technology use and connectivity would contribute to accountability and, if so, to whom. In the period between 2015 and 2018, more recognition for refugees’ connectivity coincided with more focus in humanitarian operations on (and was perceived as a shortcut to) Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP) and participation. I draw upon follow-up research conducted in 2018 to show that despite efforts and more means to connect, the disconnect between refugees’ needs for information and humanitarian communicative practices remains. This relates to Jordan’s protection context, as well as humanitarian tendencies to paternalise and depoliticise. The importance of hope, simply because of structural inequality, becomes evident in the acts of holding on to hope against all odds by the Iraqi refugees in this study. In the conclusion, I question to what extent tech optimism and academic studies such as this one can also be considered as hopeful, as both hold on to the potential for change ( Jansen, 2016). But whereas optimism moves away from social and political context and towards an imagined neutrality, hope is a deeply political, relational and affirmative stance in the midst of structural injustices (Bloch, 1995). This includes a recognition that ‘our’ lives and struggles are deeply connected, yet

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‘we’ are positioned differently, and implies that the onus for change should not be put on refugees for being even more empowered, resilient or innovative, or on humanitarian practitioners on the ground to work harder. It is an argument for moving away from a fleeting and individualising compassion and towards situated and decolonising solidarities in recognition of fellow human(e)ness. The idea that things can and should be different and that ‘we’ should do this together is a conscious act of not settling for the current realities. Such a position is indeed required for a ‘moral life’ (Kleinman, 2006: 5–6) for all: one that matters and is worth living.

Notes 1. Pseudonyms are used to secure anonymity. See p. 24 on why I believe that when referring to people residing in prolonged legal uncertainty, securing anonymity is crucial. 2. Not all UNHCR Global Trends Reports provide detailed information on the average of years that refugees spend in protracted refugee settings. The latest figures I could find date from 2015. Moreover, the accuracy of these numbers can be disputed, bearing in mind discussions on who are and who are not considered as refugees and therefore are (not) included in such estimations. And the tendency to dehistoricise figures on migration runs the risk of framing the situation as exceptional, therefore warranting extraordinary measures. My main concern here is twofold: that, perhaps not unlike before, many of the world’s forcibly displaced people find themselves in legal limbo and that people living in prolonged legal and social uncertainty are equally affected by globalisation, digital connectivity and accelerated capitalism, not least because of technology-driven turns in humanitarian efforts.

1 ‘Life Is Like a Waiting Stop’ Situating Experiences of Iraqi Refugees in Jordan’s Temporary Protection Context

Kholoud and her family were among those Iraqi nationals who sought refuge in Syria in 2006. When in 2011 peaceful demonstrations in Syria transformed into a violent conflict, they travelled onwards to Jordan. Her son Adam recalls that, ever since they became forcefully displaced, he has seen many people leave. His sister and many friends and acquaintances have been considered and selected for third country resettlement to the United States. Other friends found other, often precarious and irregular, means to travel onwards to European countries. At the time of my fieldwork in 2015, Adam was twenty-one years old and would spend most of his time at home. In Jordan, Adam has had many informal and odd jobs. His refugee status does not give him the right to work. Police arrests, threats and experiences with exploitation have provided an important disincentive to work. He emphasises the significance of digital connectivity in his life in consideration of the contextual circumstances in which he finds himself: If you notice, my life is like a waiting stop. You got no work, you got nothing, but waiting. So, what are you going to do while waiting …? You are bored from the TV, from the shisha [also known as argileh, the Mediterranean waterpipe, MT], from the bed itself … The laptop has changed my life. I have net. You can always use the YouTube channels. And you can play games. And you write about what is going on. The laptop is awesome! Awesome!

This quote can be easily misread as supporting the celebratory tone that by now has become widespread among international donors and humanitarian actors alike: that technologies could somehow provide quick fixes for the structural difficulties refugees and other people living in precarious circumstances find themselves in. Technologies do not provide access to rights,

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nor do they solve the many structural difficulties that Adam, like most of the world’s refugees, encounters. The workings of technologies ought to be considered in relation to social and political processes. Adam does describe his laptop as crucial as it enables him to make do. But he also relates his laptop’s awesomeness to the context of waiting, limited opportunities in place and boredom. Later in our conversation, Adam’s enthusiasm dimmed: ‘As a refugee, this is the best solution, we got …’ Adam categorises himself and aligns his situation of limited movement and mobility to that of being a refugee. And his use of the word ‘solution’ resonates with the UNHCR’s protection framework and its emphasis on durable solutions (Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Program, 2004). The social and subjective process of becoming-and-being a refugee is never simply the result of crossing nation-states’ borders and/or of being able to proof one’s individualised persecution. As mentioned in the introduction, refugeeness (Malkki, 1995b) refers to the gradual transformation through which refugees learn from their own and other’s embedded, embodied and mediated experiences. Moreover, this process is shaped by interactions with local authorities, humanitarian operations, everyday encounters and the many conditions imposed on people. Becoming-and-being (also but never only) a refugee is a continuous and dynamic process that intersects with other identity markers, including race, gender and class. In most situations of forced displacement, what is supposed to be temporary – seeking refuge and the conditions that one seeks refuge from – tend to become prolonged for years. This makes the short-term and dehistoricised focus of humanitarian relief problematic: refugees, like other human beings, also have a ‘biographical life, the life through which they could independently give a meaning to their existence’ (Brun, 2016; Fassin, 2012: 245). They operate in a present that is infused by thoughts on the past and ideas about the future (Munn, 1992). A narrow focus on refugees obliterates the fact that everyday situated experiences of people who become refugees are related to their future aspirations and rooted in their memories. In the case of Iraqi refugees residing in Jordan, the latter includes memories of yesterday’s Iraq as well as recollections of the previous humanitarian attention that was available to Iraqi refugees residing in Jordan. A study that critiques the decontextualising capacities and crisis-orientation of (post-)humanitarianism requires context. In 2015, structural support for Iraqi refugees residing in Jordan had been substantially reduced. The ongoing warfare in Syria had resulted in another humanitarian response with a different target population: the Syrian Refugee Response. Iraqi nationals were still newly arriving in Jordan to seek refugee protection. Others had already spent years in prolonged conditions of displacement. But past developments in relation to the humanitarian response to what became known as

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the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’, including Jordan’s temporary and fluid protection space and the establishment of a relatively large resettlement programme, continued to play a significant role in terms of how Iraqi refugees experienced their lives.

The ‘Iraq Refugee Crisis’ and the Construction of Jordan as a Temporary Protection Space On 20 March 2003, a US-led coalition – supported by the United Kingdom, Australia and to a much lesser extent Poland – invaded Iraq. Western powers and the international aid regime were anticipating that this would result in a million Iraqi nationals seeking refuge, yet in its immediate aftermath, relatively few left the country (Chatty and Mansour, 2011: 52). But whereas it took only three weeks for the US-led coalition to occupy Iraq (Tripp, 2010: 278–82), with few plans how to reconstruct a post-Saddam Iraq, the occupying powers imposed a neoliberal and neocolonial system (Barakat, 2005) that has proven to be detrimental. The situation in Iraq further deteriorated into a bloody sectarian civil conflict. The US-led transitional government abolished the entire Iraqi army and security apparatus with the stroke of a pen. More than 300,000 young armed men were out of work and on the street (Tripp, 2010: 282–85). It also pushed for a representational democracy by differentiating between Sunni Muslims, Shi’ite Muslims and Kurdish nationals. This essentialised and institutionalised an ethnosectarian political system, whereas before, differences were largely based upon social class, background, political orientations and generation (Al-Ali, 2007: 2). The absence of a central state was an incentive to pledge allegiance to tribes, sectarian communities and militias in order to find additional means to secure one’s safety as the state had fallen apart (Al-Mohammad, 2012; Boyle, 2009). Militias such as the militant Sunni network Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and Shi’a militias like the Mahdi Army sought to establish sectarian boundaries across what had previously been mixed neighbourhoods. Many civilians became targets for bombings, and kidnapping became a major industry. Often motivated by revenge as well as exclusionary political and religious ideas, the attention of the internationally oriented media was sought as this could enable a higher ransom (Al-Mohammad, 2012). In response to the widespread violence, Iraqi nationals started to increasingly seek refuge in Iraq’s neighbouring countries: Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. In January 2007, the UNHCR labelled the outward movement of Iraqi nationals to Jordan and Syria as ‘the big one’ (Stevens, 2013: 1), and policy and academic publications started to call for attention to the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’ (Amnesty International, 2008; International Crisis Group, 2008;

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Marfleet and Chatty, 2009; Sassoon, 2010). The role of Western countries was addressed, given the illegitimacy of interventions in Iraq, as well as the need for humanitarian support for refugee assistance in Iraq’s neighbouring countries. But humanitarian responses are often driven by short-term, emergency-driven, operationally bounded and state-centred perspectives. It contributed to visibility and support for Iraqi refugees under duress, yet it simultaneously obscured context, including historical continuities and regional dynamics, such as long-established transnational connections, circular labour migration and overlapping regional ideologies, such as pan-Arabism (Chatelard, 2002, 2010). Estimates suggest that prior to 2003, there were 50,000–300,000 Iraqi nationals in Jordan. These numbers include labour migrants, like Hassan, but also people who had left Iraq as a result of duress. At least since 1948, there have been several episodes of Iraqi outward migration that are related to persecution, armed conflict, political unrest, violence towards particular ethnic or religious groups and societal failure (Al-Ali, 2007; Al-Ali and Pratt, 2009; Al-Rasheed, 1994; Chatelard, 2002, 2010; Dewachi, 2017; van Hear, 1995). In 1996, it was estimated that there were around four million Iraqi nationals living outside of Iraq, 600,000 of whom were formally recognised as refugees (US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, 1996). And of the more than 200,000 Iraqi nationals who had sought asylum by 2002 in European countries, many had transited via Jordan (Chatelard, 2010). The UNHCR started recording Iraqi asylum applications in Jordan in 1996, given that Jordan is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention. In 1998, the Jordanian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the UNHCR to provide refugee protection to non-Palestinian nationals seeking refuge in Jordan. The MoU provided those registered with the UNHCR with lawful presence and formally enables the refugee agency to safeguard their legal and social protection. Upon signing the 1998 MoU between Jordan and the UNHCR, there was a significant drop in deportations (Chatelard, 2002: 9). Protection from forceful return, known as refoulement, is considered as ‘the essential foundation of international refugee law’ (Goodwin-Gill, 2014: 40; Goodwin Gill and McAdam, 2007). The MoU provides those registered with the UNHCR with lawful presence and formally enables the refugee agency to safeguard their legal and social protection. But for all the UNHCR’s Persons of Concern, refugee protection in Jordan is meant to be only temporary and restricted. Article 5 of the MoU stipulates that the stay of a recognised refugee in Jordan should not exceed six months and that a so-called durable solution should be found outside of Jordan (Library of Congress, 2020). In 2014, it was reported that this period was extended to one year, but the amendment has not been made public (International Human Rights Clinic and Norwegian Refugee Council, 2015; Malkawi, 2014). Refugee protection in Jordan does not in-

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clude the right to work. Since 2016, there have been limited and restricted work rights for Syrian refugees only (Lenner and Turner, 2018). The 1998 MoU came into existence alongside and not instead of Jordan’s domestic legislation on migration and movement. Jordan’s Law No 24 of 1973 on Residence and Foreigners’ Affairs continues to be in effect, enabling additional means for migrants, including safeguarding their legal status in Jordan (Stevens, 2013). Residency referred to as ı¯qa¯mh can be obtained in a variety of ways. In 2017, these included buying property or putting the equivalent of 10,000 JOD ( Jordanian Dinar, approximately US$14,104.55) on a Jordanian bank account (Government of Jordan, 2017).1 This enabled the Jordanian state to hold on to a segmented assimilation policy, in which rich migrants are welcomed to compose a transversal, globalised elite (de Bel-Air, 2007). ı¯qa¯mh in and of itself does not provide right to work. Except for those professionals with skills that are in high demand in Jordan’s labour market, work permits are very difficult to acquire. The UNHCR estimated that in 2002 only 5% of all the Iraqi nationals present in Jordan were registered with its local office (Chatelard, 2010: 6), but not all who had left under duress would opt to register. There were rumours that an Iraqi secret agent had infiltrated in UNHCR Jordan’s Country Office (Chatelard, 2010) and the additional benefits of registration were believed to be few. At that point and up until 2003, UNHCR Jordan would carry out individual refugee status determination (RSD) (Stevens, 2013: 8). Refugee recognition was very low and did not provide any additional access to social benefits (Chatelard, 2010: 8). Those who had directly fled because of state violence and terror also found that many Jordanians actually admired Saddam Hussein’s masculine force and strong stance against Western imperialism (Chatelard, 2010: 7). Moreover, considering that Jordan is a country where the vast majority are Sunni Muslim with a Christian minority, Iraqi Shi’a Muslims experienced ignorance or even hostility to this denomination of Islam and were not allowed communal organisation (Chatelard, 2005). These factors along with the pull of social networks – as many had already friends and family members living elsewhere – further reinforced the need to travel onwards to Europe (Chatelard, 2010; Chatelard and Morris, 2011). Hassan was the only person in my study who had been in Jordan prior to 2003. He had come to Jordan in 2000 to work and briefly returned to Iraq in 2003. In response to the changes in his country, he decided to come back to Jordan and, subsequently heard of the existence of UNHCR Jordan. Initially he was reluctant to register for refugee protection. He feared that registration would increase his visibility and could therefore jeopardise his informal employment opportunities. And as a Shi’a Muslim, Hassan felt additional pressure to stay ‘invisible’ (Chatelard, 2002). He registered with UNHCR Jordan in 2006.

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Urban Settlement Patterns There has been a wide variety of reasons why and under which circumstances Iraqi nationals have sought refuge in Jordan since 2003. Those who came immediately after the ousting of Saddam Hussein were framed as ‘Mercedes refugees’ (Margesson, Sharp and Andorra, 2009: 7). Many of them, but certainly not all, were able to draw upon their assets and ties in order to obtain property and/or other means to also safeguard their legal status via ı¯qa¯mh. Since the sectarian civil war in 2006–7, there was much more variation in the geographical and socioeconomic backgrounds of people seeking refuge and the circumstances under which they were forced to leave. Newer arrivals were often in poorer conditions than co-nationals who had left earlier (Chatelard, 2010; Chatelard and Morris, 2011; Sassoon, 2010). Upon arrival, the more affluent Iraqis – especially those who were able to invest in housing – found residence in neighbourhoods in West Amman. Those who were less well-off and/or those who saw their savings dwindle over time would rent or share an apartment in popular areas in the eastern parts of the city (Chatelard and Morris, 2011). The preferences of Iraqi refugees for settling into Jordan’s capital coincided with the preference of the Jordanian government to sustain temporariness. Drawing upon their experiences with Palestinian refugees in overcrowded locations, there was no interest in setting up refugee camps (Crisp, 2017: 91). Cities tend to provide more means for self-sufficiency, access to transnational spaces and informal opportunities for jobs (Fábos and Kibreab, 2007). Amman’s urban infrastructure is closely linked to short-sighted colonial planning (Meaton and Alnsour, 2012), rapid growth and neoliberal urbanisation (Abu-Hamdi, 2018). The problems arising are therefore not equally divided across the city: ‘There is a very clear east/west divide with much of the housing in the east being refugee camps, slums and dwelling units built without any adherence to planning or building regulations. This contrasts with the developments that typify the west of Amman where most dwelling units have been built in complete compliance with building regulations’ (Meaton and Alnsour, 2012: 374). Experiences of living in West Amman or in cheaper, crowded East Amman influence everyday life. Neighbourhoods in West Amman are rather spacious and relatively affluent quiet areas. The apartments there were quite large and well-insulated. Two areas had taken on a more Iraqi-like vibe, as you find Iraqi food products in the supermarkets and there were restaurants with names like Fallujah and Baghdad serving dishes associated with Iraqi cuisine. There were cafes known to be frequented mostly by Iraqi men. In contrast, East Amman mostly consist of lower-class, crowded, conservative and predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods with high unemployment levels. Some areas in

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East Amman are known to house many Iraqi refugees, and it is there that you can also buy some Iraqi food products. But apartments are generally smaller than in West Amman, badly kept and barely insulated. Like many of the other Iraqi refugees I have engaged with over the years, Kholoud and Adam were living in an area in East Amman called Hashmi Schmali. They have been living there ever since their arrival in Jordan in 2011. I also lived in Hashmi Schmali for parts of 2015 as I shared an apartment there with an Iraqi refugee family who had arrived in Jordan in 2014. Experiences of everyday difficulties around living in crowded East Amman were often framed around religious differences or national identity markers. For instance, Kholoud would often equate the ‘dirty’ streets of Hashmi Schmali with the people living there. Descriptions of neighbours as backwards or even dirty would often be associated with the presumed Palestinian-ness of the people living in these neighbourhoods. Remarks like these were often immediately followed by a comment that they did not experience any issues with people residing in West Amman or with Jordanian people from Jordanian origin. Iraqi-Palestinian animosities can be related to the support that the Ba’athist regime – including but not limited to Saddam Hussein – gave to the Palestinian cause (Huggler, 2013). Whether and to what extent there were close relationships between the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Iraq’s Ba’athist regime is contested (Mattar, 1994: 31). Yet I suggest that their difficult experiences relate to class differences, downward social mobility and loss. I was often told of the large houses and gardens that were forcefully left behind or destroyed. And if they were present, photographs were shown. The accounts suggest that they had not previously lived in such densely populated working-class areas. The vast majority of Iraqi refugees has an urban middle-class background (Bishop, 2016; Chatelard and Morris, 2011; Pascucci, 2011). It is important not to simply attribute a Western-oriented classed status to people hailing from Iraq. Pre-2003 Iraq was a socialist-oriented society, university and health services were state-provided, and the effects of the economic sanctions cut across classes (Al-Ali and Pratt, 2009; Dewachi, 2017). In this case, one’s classed disposition provides a hint to the past and how this plays out in experiences of loss and expectations of life in the present (Bishop, 2016). Socioeconomic backgrounds and access to different forms of capital do shape and hinder movement, given the increasingly stringent international migration regime (van Hear, 2004). But one’s classed background does not necessarily move along with transnational migration, which highlights the importance of an intersectional approach that considers how legal status, class, gender, race, sexuality, etc. interact (Crenshaw, 1991) and can change, also in relation to each other.

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Humanitarian actors would often perceive the predominantly urban and highly educated Iraqi refugee population in the MENA region as too demanding (Dodd, 2010) and would problematise their concerns over the education of their children or lack of clarity about the future as ‘middle-class anxieties’ (Pascucci, 2011: 50). Humanitarian operations tend to work via their own reductive one-size-ought-to-fit-all approach and normative script of what makes a ‘good refugee’. The acts and concerns of the Iraqi refugees would not fit with what they expected of the performativity associated with being-and-becoming a refugee.

Amman as Contested Urban Protection Space Already by the 1960s, it was recognised that patterns of displacement were becoming increasingly urbanised (Crisp, 2017: 87–88). But in the decades that followed, the international community continued to focus its interest on refugee populations in camps, despite valuable discussions on whether refugee camps were humane (Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, 2005) and widespread recognition that many forced migrants preferred to live in urban settings. The urban settlement of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria was an important driver for the UNHCR’s 2009 Urban Refugee Policy and its commitment to setting up a comprehensive policy for urban refugee protection (Crisp, 2017). UNHCR Jordan’s position has been likened to that of a ‘surrogate state’ (Kagan, 2011): it performs functions that are generally performed by states, including registration and RSD, but with limited capacities to guarantee full recognition of the rights associated with the legal status of refugees. The 1998 MoU enabled UNHCR Jordan to set up and expand its operative framework. But the extent to which the agency can provide access to social and economic rights, as well as the option for ascertaining a so-called durable solution, depends on the goodwill of nation-states. Considering its dependency on donors and the host government, the space available to UNHCR Jordan to provide comprehensive refugee protection is fluid. Jordan’s protection space (Evans Barnes, 2009) can expand, but it can also retract. Initially, UNHCR drew upon figures provided by host governments, including the Jordanian government, for its response to the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’. In 2007, it was estimated that more than two million Iraqi refugees were residing in neighbouring host countries and donations were provided for accordingly (Chatelard and Morris, 2011; Sassoon, 2010). This enabled the UNHCR to expand its protection space in Jordan. Beyond registration and RSD, UNHCR Jordan took over several other functions that are generally performed by signatory states, such as providing cash assistance and access to services such as education and healthcare. Schools and public

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healthcare became freely accessible to Iraqi nationals registered with the UNHCR (Sassoon, 2010: 41). Much of UNHCR Jordan’s budget went to the Jordanian government. As a refugee rentier state (Tsourapas, 2019), the Jordanian government received millions of US dollars in aid, much of which went to ministries to improve services for Iraqi refugees as well as poorer members of the host community. The Jordanian government also insisted that humanitarian aid should equally benefit struggling host communities (Seeley, 2010). The urban settlement pattern raised concerns among humanitarian practitioners. These included worries over how to offer adequate protection to urban refugees against arbitrary state actions and how to not upset the equally struggling host populations ( Jacobsen and Furst-Nichols, 2012). An additional concern regarding urban settlement among humanitarian actors was how to assess the size and needs of an urban refugee population, given that until November 2005, no prior visa procedures were required. In response to bomb explosions in three hotels in Amman, Iraqis – especially men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five – and Shi’ites were stopped at the border. From 2007, Iraqis who were planning to cross the borders were required to present a so-called G-series passport, which was difficult to obtain (Stevens, 2013: 15) The figures on Iraqi refugees residing in Jordan became the object of heated debate. In 2007, the Norwegian independent research institute Fafo (Dalen and Pedersen, 2007) conducted a sample survey and concluded that there were approximately 161,000 Iraqi refugees residing in Jordan. The Jordanian government contested these figures, arguing that the number of Iraqi nationals who had registered for a mobile phone subscription was much higher, pointing to the possibility that digital technologies can provide means for counting and surveillance. Fafo, pressed to reassess and re-adjust, then concluded that there were between 450,000 and 500,000 Iraqi refugees in Jordan. Since 2009, UNHCR Jordan has been operating strictly based upon its registration numbers (Chatelard and Morris, 2011). In that same year, the number of Iraqi nationals who had registered with the UNHCR would have peaked at 310,000 across the MENA region, including 220,000 Iraqi nationals who had registered in Syria (Chatelard and Morris, 2011: 8). During those years, the number of Iraqi nationals registered with UNHCR Jordan was never much higher than 65,000. Humanitarian organisations, the international media and forced migration scholars initially argued that this number was much lower than expected since newly arrived refugees would be unfamiliar with the UNHCR or would fear the potential repercussions of registration, as Hassan also described. Outreach programmes were set up by the UNHCR and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to locate the ‘invisible’ Iraqi refugees. However, after a couple of years and costly efforts,

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it was concluded that over 90% of the Iraqi nationals in Jordan in need of protection had already been registered (Chatelard and Morris, 2011). The inflated numbers would have resulted in a rapid expansion of humanitarian agencies who were competing rather than collaborating (Dodd, 2010; Washington, 2010). As Jeff Crisp notes (2017), the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’ resulted in significantly greater donations than any urban refugee situation had received before. This related not only to the overcounting, but also to the political profile of the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’. The earmarking of aid is a funding strategy by which donor states exert influence by tying their funding to specific, often strategic priorities. This funding practice can be considered as challenging humanitarian principles as it forces humanitarian actors to maintain ‘neutral’ and impartial. Donor demands and earmarking also played an important role in the turn to humanitarian technology use, including biometrics ( Jacobsen, 2015: 17–18). International funding enabled UNHCR Jordan to explore new and rather costly approaches, including the systematic determination of vulnerability of aid recipients and providing information to refugees via text messages (Chatelard and Morris, 2011). And the delivery of cash-based assistance through ATMs was celebrated as an innovation (UN News, 2007). This is not to suggest that all Iraqi nationals who came to Jordan or sought refuge in other neighbouring countries in response to violence or persecution did opt to register with the UNHCR for refugee protection. Not everyone would have benefited from registration. Former Ba’ath Party officials and businessmen who started to invest in Jordan had their own capacities to find a solution (Leenders, 2008). And fear of potential or real repercussions can indeed keep people from registering for refugee protection, as has also become evident among Mozambican refugees in South Africa (Polzer, 2007). However, as Chatelard and Morris (2011: 8) show, those Iraqi nationals who did not register for refugee protection might need to be approached on different terms from those offered by the international refugee regime. There are always politics behind statistics published on forced migration populations (Crisp, 1999; Fargues, 2014). Questions such as who counts and who is recognised are not neutral ones. Across the globe and also in Western signatory countries, legal and practical issues concerning labels, operations and logistics in migration management interact with a politics of inflating (for instance, in order to receive more support) and/or deflating numbers (for election purposes) (Crisp, 1999). In migration matters, there are no objective or neutral truths: different points of view and different ways of defining who is an ‘insider/outsider’ plug into societal discussions on migration, rights and national sovereignty, and produce contrasting but not necessarily contradictory estimates (Fargues, 2014). But often, these matters are played out in the lives and bodies of people who already find themselves in structurally marginalised positions.

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The politics behind statistics and counting are closely connected to the politics of labels (Zetter, 1991, 2007). In January 2007, UNHCR Jordan started applying prima facie status to all Iraqi nationals from South and Central Iraq who would register (Stevens, 2013). Prima facie is generally declared when there are a large number of newly arrived claimants and limited capacities to process. The question whether a prima facie status holds an equivalent status as a legal refugee status as offered by the Refugee Convention is contentious, considering that its legal meaning in international law is not codified. According to Albert (2010), a refugee status based on prima facie status would not convey the right to being considered for third country resettlement, yet would provide entitlement to repatriation and/or local integration. The latter is not the case in Jordan, considering that the MoU imposes formal restrictions on local integration. In 2009, the UNHCR revised its eligibility criteria for asylum seekers from Iraq and prima facie status was only provided to Iraqi nationals hailing from the five Central Governorates of Iraq: Baghdad, Diyala, Kirkuk, Ninewa and Saladin. Stevens (2013) reports that in its RSD procedures, the UNHCR had at least until 2012 been applying a prima facie approach that implied that all Iraqi asylum seekers from these Governorates were considered as refugees, based on the 1951 Convention Criteria. At the time of my fieldwork in 2015, the protection space for Iraqi refugees had been reduced and the meaning of the label ‘refugee’ continued to be ‘confused and confusing’ (Stevens, 2013: 13), as will be further explored in Chapter 3. The earmarking of donations can mean that aid is allocated to specific populations, as was the case in the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’ and the subsequent Syrian Refugee Response. This is because whereas the international support allocated for Iraqi refugees had already been dwindling before, this coincided with the arrival of a new target population: people seeking refuge from Syria. Notably, the need to counter the allocation of aid based on nationality has been discussed in Jordan’s humanitarian circles since 2013, but it was only in 2018 that what became known as a ‘One Refugee Approach’ (ORA) made it into UNHCR and NGO reporting. By September 2015, close to 50,340 Iraqi nationals were now considered to be ‘Persons of Concern’ (PoC), UNHCR Jordan (2015a) had registered 3,473 people hailing from Sudan, 3,914 people from other national backgrounds and 628,867 Syrian nationals. This figure differed from the official number used by the Jordanian government, which stated there were approximately 1.3 million Syrians in the country.2 Based on its institutional memory of the politics and difficulties in overcounting Iraqi refugees, the UNHCR sought to prevent a repetition of the Syrian Refugee Response and deployed biometrics in its registration procedures (Lenner, 2016). Indeed, in 2013, UNHCR Jordan was one of the first UNHCR operations to make widespread use of ‘iris-scanning fraud-proof biometrics’ for refugee registration (UNHCR Innovations, 2016). The emphasis on fraud here refers to

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rather low-level fraud, such as people who would register or seek financial assistance more than once ( Jacobsen, 2015: 151). This suspicious mindset ignores the fact that most fraud in humanitarian settings happens much earlier in the aid supply chain and the many additional challenges regarding biometric identification (see Chapter 7). Over time, two larger and several smaller camps for Syrian refugees emerged as deeply securitised spaces within Jordan. In September 2015, more than 80% of Syrians lived outside of camps, like all Iraqi refugees, in urban contexts among host communities (UNHCR Jordan, 2015a). In 2015, access to healthcare and schooling ceased to be free for Iraqi refugees (Hart and Kvittingen, 2015; Ward, 2014). I met a few parents whose children did not go to school, often because of a combination of concerns relating to financial constraints, lack of trust in the Jordanian school system, distance from the available schools, experiences of bullying and the hope that their life in Jordan would only be temporary. Several young Iraqi men and women had also stopped going to school because they considered that a Jordanian high school certificate would not benefit them. An average of 2,050 refugee households were still receiving regular financial support (UNHCR Jordan, 2015b). Households receiving this financial support would receive approximately 172 JOD (the equivalent of US$242) a month, the total amount depending on the family composition. Monthly cash assistance was for many crucial to make do, yet it was often not enough to make ends meet, considering that already by 2007, the median monthly rent for Iraqi refugees Iraqi refugees was 179 JOD (US$252.51) a month (Dalen and Pedersen, 2007). Inflation and changes in Jordan’s Landlord and Tenants Law in 2013 contributed to an increase in average rent prices in Jordan. Most often, people would need to rely on a combination of sources to get by, including drawing upon savings, regular or more sporadic financial or material support from (I)NGOs and support from families abroad. Many also had informal jobs or would seek odd jobs. Informal employment in Jordan is common also among Jordanian citizens: 44% of the total employment market in Jordan in 2013 was informal (UNDP, 2013). But unlike for their citizen peers, there were additional risks for them. According to Geraldine Chatelard (2016), the risk of being deported was not a common complaint; what was more common was exploitation. Informally working Iraqi refugees would receive salaries well below the salaries of Jordanians who were employed in similar positions. Several people in my study did not get paid after a month of work or suffered other forms of exploitation. Poverty in Jordan is a structural and widespread issue, which also relates to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment programmes from the late 1980s (Lenner, 2013). Austerity measures, high levels of unemployment and economic hardships have affected people from all socioeconomic backgrounds (Ababneh, 2018). And

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whereas studies have pointed to other causes such as higher oil prices and foreign non-Iraqi investment, Jordan’s post-2003 inflation has been blamed in public discourse and by the local media on the presence of large number of Iraqi refugees and their investment in property (Saif and DeBartolo, 2007; Sassoon, 2010: 49–51). Despite the wide variance in the socioeconomic conditions of Iraqi refugees, the popular belief that all Iraqi refugees are affluent has been persistent and their presence has been contrasted to the later arriving Syrian refugee population who are generally perceived as poor (Chatty, 2015: 3). Also, in consideration of this context, the meaning of the status of refugees in Jordan continues to be far from straightforward. In reference to Iraqi prima facie refugees, the Jordanian government continued to refer to all Iraqi nationals as ‘guests’ and equally insisted on compliance with the MoU and the definition of refugee in accordance with the Refugee Convention. Jordan’s ‘guest discourse’ draws upon an ethical hospitality that refers to the country’s Bedouin, Islamic and Arab cultural traditions. It implies a warm welcome, but this welcome is conditional and temporary. It interacts with discourses on security and development as well as with the rights discourse of the international refugee regime (El-Abed, 2014). The adoption of a rights-based approach by the UNHCR ignores how UNHCR Jordan, as a ‘surrogate state’, cannot provide full recognition of these rights (Stevens, 2015). And its position does have a profound impact on the experiences and subjectivities of those who the agency is mandated to protect.

Navigating in and Only Sometimes out of Jordan’s Protection Space When I spoke to Hassen in 2015, he recalled the reason why he chose to register with the Jordan office of the UNHCR in 2006: ‘They told us: this is UNHCR, they ask for Iraqi or any refugees, you can apply using this institute … This place … And you will be able to live in another country.’ It was during that time that potential host countries were increasingly encouraged to consider Iraqi refugees for resettlement. The UNHCR (n.d.a) defines ‘refugee resettlement’ as ‘the transfer of refugees from an asylum country to another State that has agreed to admit them and ultimately grant them permanent settlement’. Considering that full local integration in Jordan was not a possibility and return to Iraq was not deemed a safe option (UNHCR, 2016b), third country resettlement was for many Iraqi refugees the only viable solution. Like Hassan, the option for being considered for third country resettlement was an important reason for registration with the UNHCR. Certainly, many had registered because they also had immediate protection needs in

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Jordan – for instance, in relation to being protected from refoulement, access to social services and potentially receiving financial assistance. But for most Iraqi refugees, the potential for a legal exit out of Jordan also played an important role. In 2014, between 30% and 40% of the UNHCR-registered Iraqi nationals also had ı¯qa¯mh (Chatelard, 2016). At that point in time, when there were limited additional benefits to having both, it is likely that especially for those people, the hope for prolonged certainty via third country resettlement provided an important incentive for registration. Almost every Iraqi refugee I spoke to experienced their life as waiting or, as Adam put it, a ‘waiting stop’. Waiting is a deeply optimistic attitude, as it indicates having expectations of life. But at the same time, the mismatch between these expectations and the reality of the world tends to result in heightened feelings of anxiety and feeling out of control (Bourdieu, 2000). This also becomes evident in Adam’s ongoing reflections on his current life and why he and his family – unlike many of his friends and relatives – have not been considered for third country resettlement: I ask myself, why am I not travelling, what is wrong with me? I am just normal. I want a … nice quiet life. Why? I am not a terrorist, to wait for nine years. I want a good reason! What is wrong?! Am I a terrorist? Did I do something? I start to … ask myself, even my parents, because I started asking myself … ourselves. What is going on? We start to think about ourselves in a bad way. Because it has been nine years and nothing from them. [Silence] The worst part of it: you are waiting for a whole long time, but they never tell you: where are you now. Or what kind of stop you are now. Or where did you reach? Where are you!? It looks like … we are just animals.

Adam was at the time of this recorded interview twenty-one years old. He and his family had been registered as refugees since 2006. The ‘they’ in his narratives refers to the operations of UNHCR Jordan and International Organization for Migration (IOM) Jordan, which had been contracted by the US government and other Western governments to assist with refugee resettlement. He felt ‘they’ were dehumanising him as he compared his situation to that of animals. The lack of clear answers – the actual reason for not (yet) being resettled and/or clarity about the progress towards resettlement – made Adam doubt himself and his parents: ‘I am not a terrorist … Am I a terrorist?’ His words expose the power he attributed to these international organisations, as well as the belief in their capacities to relieve him from waiting and/or his frustration of not-knowing. But the narrative also suggests he believes his case is still in the pipeline. The words ‘What kind of stop did you reach’ imply that they are at hold at a station, yet there is very slow and unclear progress towards a state-sanctioned exit.

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Third Country Resettlement in Response to the ‘Iraq Refugee Crisis’ Adam’s words resonate with what a Resettlement Officer of UNHCR Jordan3 told me when she expressed there to be a widespread misunderstanding among Iraqi refugees in Jordan: that everyone who is waiting – even if longer than ten years – would at some point be called for resettlement. She contrasted these expectations with those of the other refugee populations she had previously worked with and emphasised the organisations’ limitations: there are too many refugees and simply not enough resettlement places. In their comparative study on migration strategies among Iraqi and Syrian refugees in Jordan in 2015–16, Anna Kvittingen et al. (2018) came to a similar conclusion: that particularly among Iraqi refugees in Jordan, hope while ‘waiting’ was oriented towards obtaining legal entry and residence in a Western country via third country resettlement, instead of seeking other precarious means of travel onwards. To further understand expectations for resettlement, it is important to know that, in comparison to other prolonged refugee situations (Lindsay, 2017), there has been relatively large resettlement programme for Iraqi nationals who sought refuge in response to the violence that erupted after 2003 Initially, the United States was reluctant to accept resettlement cases from Iraq as this would imply that the 2003 US-led invasion had been a failure. Resettlement levels of Iraqi nationals seeking refuge even went down in comparison to pre-invasion years. In 2006, the resettlement of Iraqi refugees was reframed as a ‘strategic’ interest for US national security (Berman, 2011: 2). Between October 2006 and August 2019, a total of 143,059 Iraqi refugees have been resettled in the United States (Refugee Processing Centre, 2019). These numbers include those Iraqi nationals who were selected for consideration for US resettlement by UNHCR Jordan, but also those in and beyond Jordan who had been able directly apply for family reunification or who had been able to obtain a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV). The SIV was available to those Iraqi nationals who had worked for the US armed forces or the US government, and who could prove that their persecution was related to their former employment. Between October 2006 and August 2019, 18,500 Iraqi nationals managed to obtain a SIV and were able to travel to the United States (Refugee Processing Centre, 2019). In 2016, the US government drastically cut the country’s resettlement programme (International Rescue Committee, 2017b; Siegfried, 2017) and there has been a steady decrease among Iraqi nationals receiving a SIV to enter the United States (Refugee Processing Centre, 2019). Other Western countries saw Iraqi displacement largely as a problem created by the United States (Cohen, 2008). European countries were only willing to accept those refugees who were considered vulnerable, who were

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able to prove their history was not incriminating and who could become economically independent (Berman, 2011). But like before the 2003 invasion, quite a high number of Iraqi nationals found other ways to travel to Europe and seek asylum. However, refugee recognition rates of Iraqi asylum seekers decreased after 2003 (Berman, 2011), resulting in an increase in the number of deportations to Iraq by some EU countries (Sperl, 2007: 12). Resettlement is an important tool to safeguard the safety for those with immediate protection needs. But beyond a necessary exit for some, resettlement is ‘an unaccountable, costly process permeated by inequality’ (Garnier et al., 2018: 2). One of the main difficulties with resettlement and other complementary pathways is that availability depends on the limited goodwill of third nation-states to provide slots. It is neither mandated by the 1951 Refugee Convention nor is it a right. Instead, it can be considered as a central instrument of durable humanitarian governance: a long-term and therefore durable concern driven by the humanitarian ethos of serving the most vulnerable, which involves practices that rule and control the lives of those potentially selected. Across different refugee situations, the implementation of a resettlement programme tends to alter experiences of displacement, if only because it includes some while excluding many others (Horst, 2006; Jansen, 2008; Sandvik, 2011), given that there is a structural shortage of resettlement slots in comparison to the sheer numbers of refugees living in prolonged legal and temporal uncertainty.

The ‘Refugee’ Label and Its Relation to Resettlement from Jordan The expectations for resettlement among Iraqi refugees relate to the MoU and Jordan’s temporary protection context. When I spoke to the UNHCR Resettlement Officer, she – like several other UNHCR staff members I have spoken to over the years – insisted that resettlement was neither a right nor an entitlement.4 However, such remarks ignore how the MoU and its limits on the prolonged stay for recognised refugees have contributed to the hope for resettlement among many Iraqi refugees (Stevens, 2013: 28) and the involvement of the UNHCR in RSD and selection for consideration for resettlement. A prima facie status requires a ‘refugee status determination proper’ to be considered for resettlement (Albert, 2010). Determining who receives ‘refugee status determination proper’ is a deeply political project ( Janmyr, 2017a; Janmyr and Mourad, 2018). Often this is done by the UNHCR on behalf of other (often Western) receiving nation-states in order to only select ‘bona fide’ refugees for resettlement (Garnier et al., 2018; Janmyr, 2017a). UNHCR operations have been criticised for their involvement of RSD, as its procedures tend to follow and strengthen a Northern-centric, bureaucratic and exclusionary logic behind migration management. This can be considered

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problematic or even contradictory towards safeguarding humanitarian principles, like neutrality and impartiality (Scheel and Ratfisch, 2013). UNHCR country offices are also known for applying far lower standards than what the UNHCR declares states should follow – for instance, that those seeking asylum ought to be entitled to legal aid (Harrell-Bond, 2008; Jones, 2015). For recognised refugees, resettlement is not guaranteed. Kholoud and her family had undergone RSD. And when I met Naima in 2015, she was holding on to her blue refugee document. Such a card was only issued to those Iraqi refugees who were considered to have a realistic opportunity for resettlement within the then specified time of six months. It was six years since Naima had received the card, which, in her words, testified that she and her family ‘are accepted to get a homeland’. But such a document does not provide a guarantee for a new homeland. Eventually the decision – if a person recognized as a refugee by UNHCR is resettled – is outside the UN refugee agency’s purview. Instead this depends entirely on resettlement countries (Garnier et al., 2018). In 2015, there were specific changes in the UNHCR’s procedures regarding RSD for Iraqi nationals. These will be further explored in the next chapter. Prior to this change, all Iraqi nationals were expected to be at one point called in for RSD by UNHCR Jordan. And all the people in this study would claim the label of refugee and would describe themselves as such. A reason for this is that this label to them relates to hope that an avenue for legal onward migration will be possible. What makes the processes towards resettlement specifically complex and elusive is the tendencies of nation-states to outsource aspects of refugee/migration management. This obscures who has the power to decide on behalf of whom and further reduces the already limited means to seek accountability. I met Naima as she was queuing at the Jordan office of the IOM in 2015. The IOM was contracted by the US to operate its US Resettlement Admission Program (USRAP) and by several other Western countries to assist with resettlement. On the premises of IOM Jordan, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) conducted thorough security screenings of potential candidates. Naima would visit IOM Jordan each month when the agency provided applicants to ask if progress in their cases was being made. For her, nothing had changed. In the introduction, I briefly mentioned that it was in 2012 that I first came to Jordan and started to engage with the topic of forced displacement from Iraq. As part of the master’s thesis I was studying at a Dutch university, I conducted a three-month internship at IOM Jordan. Whereas most of its operations were then focused on resettlement activities, my position entailed supporting a programme for direct assistance to Iraqi refugees which was funded by the US Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM). In this programme, statistics and computer assessments resulted in a selection of people who were deemed ‘the most vulnerable’ and therefore

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eligible to receive a cash donation. This could very well have been some of the last financial support earmarked specifically for Iraqi refugees residing in Jordan. Donor interests had already been waning (Chatelard and Morris, 2011; Crisp et al., 2009) and humanitarian operations had started to shift their focus to the newly arriving refugees with Syrian nationality. The internship gave me important insights into the operations of humanitarian organisations and sparked interest in the experiences and practices of forcibly displaced populations who stay behind when humanitarian interest fades. In the wake of this short engagement with IOM, I started to better realise the roles the agency performs in performing migration management on behalf of (often Western) nation-states. One example is the enabling of regional containment of people seeking refuge (Scheel and Ratfisch, 2013). The IOM obtained its UN-related organisation status in 2016 and now presents itself as ‘the UN migration agency’. However, it is not ‘bound by the human rights framework that forms the basis of the UN’s work’ (Pécoud, 2018: 1625) and has a rather broad and flexible mandate, and an entrepreneurial approach (Bradley, 2017). Arguably, at least some of its involvement in the forced migration regime can be considered distanced forms of humanitarianisms that draw upon the ‘colonialism of compassion’ (Hyndman, 2000: xviii). My internship was followed by research for my master’s thesis and focused on the navigations of Iraqi refugees waiting for resettlement. This is when I first met Kholoud. I also met Mahmoud and his wife, who were resettled to the US a year later. In 2015, I met Mahmoud’s parents and his siblings, who by then had left Baghdad and were hoping for family reunification with their son. My 2012 study also included Iraqi refugees who had formally been notified that they had been rejected for third country resettlement to the United States. At that point in time, those who had been through security screenings would receive a letter from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which would state if their case had been accepted, deferred or if they were receiving a so-called Notice of Ineligibility for Resettlement. Highly discretionary and written in legalistic English, this Notice had one or more of the seven boxes ticked, which would explain the reason why that person and his or her family was not accepted. These reasons ranged from the applicant not having been able to establish that he or she was persecuted or could not return, to the category stating that the applicant had the burden of proof in demonstrating that he or she had not participated in the persecutions of others and ‘Other reasons’, which were not further specified. In response to receiving this letter, refugees had ninety days to appeal against the decision made. I was told by the then programme manager of the IOM Resettlement Support Centre that 20–30% of the cases were overturned in response to such an appeal letter. Years later, those who had received such a Notice would still seek to refute the decision made (Twigt, 2013).

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Often little is communicated about the reasons why people are or are not considered for resettlement. The multiplicity of governing actors – who are partly but never fully responsible for specific segments in the resettlement process – tends to further limit recourse for refugees to hold any actor accountable (Garnier et al., 2018; Grabska, 2006). Naima and her family had even finished their so-called Cultural Orientation course, a training on ‘American’ culture, during which it was presumed that refugees had to be told what a flushing toilet looks like and that in the United States, a policeman or policewoman can be black. This training was conducted at the IOM’s premises and is considered to one of the last steps towards being resettled in the United States (Bishop, 2016). Her experience, along with those of others like Kholoud and Adam, attests to the fact that even if one has ‘successfully’ completed the UNHCR’s RSD interview and subsequent steps, there is no guarantee that a legalised exit will be forthcoming. Naima has no one she can hold accountable, yet she holds on to the hope and to the idea that the international community, embodied through organisations like the UNHCR and the IOM, have a responsibility to provide her with a way out of Jordan. She recalled the euphoria after she and her family received the notice they were officially recognised as refugees and were told that they would be resettled elsewhere. They had started selling their goods they had accumulated and planning more concretely about a potential future in that new land. People like Adam, Hassan and Naima found their excitement shifting as days, months and years passed by with no word from the relevant authority. This uncertain process, combined with the many goodbyes of friends and relatives who did travel, has made them somehow only more persistent in holding on to the hope that someday they will also leave. The Iraqi refugees who arrived years later in Jordan, in 2014 or 2015, were equally hopeful that they would be considered and selected for third country resettlement. They were closely following the steps of family members and relatives who had travelled before them. Deeply aware of the restricted legal rights and limited opportunities they have in Jordan, there was no intention to stay. There was a common understanding that the UNHCR’s procedures towards resettlement out of Jordan were faster than in other ‘transitioning’ countries – Turkey or Lebanon – which played a significant role in their choice to come to Jordan (Kvittingen et al., 2018).

Conclusion In this chapter I have considered how, after the 2003 US-led invasion, the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’ came into being and changed Jordan’s protection space. I have purposely used inverted commas for discussing the ‘Iraq refugee

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crisis’ for a number of reasons. First, it refers to the rather inflated numbers of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, which together with the political profile of the conflict in Iraq resulted in significantly greater donations than any urban refugee situation had received before and increased the availability for third country resettlement for Iraqi refugees. Second, it relates to the short-term and emergency-driven focus on the understanding of crisis. Urgency in humanitarian aid is crucial at the beginning of a conflict or disaster. Yet its short-term and temporary focus on saving lives too often results in a prolonged policy of ‘don’t die survival’ (Horst, 2008: 10). Humanitarian reason (Fassin, 2012) plays a crucial role in mobilising humanitarian responses. Suffering has the potential to move and mobilise people, but quickly turns into compassion fatigue as moral sentiments tend to be worn down. Iraqi nationals were already seeking refuge in and beyond Jordan before the US-led invasion, and the registration of Iraqi nationals with UNHCR Jordan never came to a full stop. The violence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014 and 2015 again resulted in a steep increase in new arrivals seeking protection (UNHCR Jordan, 2019a). No longer marked out as a target population, the humanitarian operations set up in initial response and related modes of humanitarian governance continued to influence Iraqi refugee life in 2015. They draw upon the past experiences of others, and refugee protection in Jordan continues to be temporary and restrictive. The potential for legal pathways out of Iraq’s neighbouring countries continued to play a formative role in the subjective and social experiences of Iraqi refugees residing in Jordan. By critiquing a short-sighted crisis-thinking and some of the problematic tenets in humanitarian relief, I by no means suggest that a crisis is not real or potentially devastating, or that relief is not important. On the contrary, beyond the importance for immediate responses, I point to the longevity of living in crisis. Like the lives of many other people worldwide, the lives of the Iraqi refugees in this study are characterised by the ongoing presence and/or possibility of physical and systemic violence, poverty and conflict (Vigh, 2008) before and long after humanitarian actors and media outlets found their lives and stories worthy of attention. For them, crisis is not a temporary rupture, but the chronic, ever-present and endemic precarious background around which they are navigating their lives. I started this chapter with the US-led invasion and its repercussions, but prior foreign involvement including British colonialism and the US/ UN-imposed economic sanctions (1990–2003) already laid the foundations for post-invasion Iraq (Al-Ali, 2007; Al-Ali and Pratt, 2009; Dewachi, 2017; Tripp, 2010). These sanctions resulted in widespread malnutrition, poverty and unemployment. Social support systems – like nurseries and free transport – collapsed, pushing professional women back into their homes (Al-Ali, 2007: 186), while the ruthless regime of Saddam Hussein tightened its grip

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and established an elaborate governmental bureaucracy, largely consisting of patronage networks. Many of the people I have spoken to over the years remember the embargo period rather fondly, despite their everyday experiences of poverty and state repression. The relatively predictable state violence contrasts with Iraq’s violent unravelling after 2003. Nadje Al-Ali (2007: 261) puts it well: ‘any positive nostalgia for the period before the invasion is largely a measure of the extent to which living conditions have deteriorated since 2003’.

Notes 1. In 2017, other means for obtaining in ı¯qa¯mh included: attending a Jordanian university, starting an import/export business with the help of a Jordanian business partner and/or marrying (as a non-Jordanian woman) a man with Jordanian citizenship, as citizenship in Jordan only crosses over through patrilineal lines. Most options are unavailable to people without resources. The latter is only an option for unmarried Iraqi women and potential divorce could again complicate their legal position. Children from a marriage between an Iraqi man and a Jordanian woman also tend to find themselves in difficult legal in-between positions. 2. Like their Iraqi peers, not all Syrian nationals who sought refuge in Jordan would have seen benefits or would have felt it safe to register with UNHCR Jordan. The estimate of the Jordanian government is based upon the number of Syrian refugees registered with the UNCHR in addition to the 750,000 Syrians who were estimated to have been in the country before the start of the war in March 2011 (Lenner, 2016). 3. Interview with UNHCR Jordan’s Resettlement Officer, 6 August 2015. 4. Ibid.

2 Hoping for Solutions in a ‘Surrogate State’

Making people wait, of delaying without destroying hope, of adjourning without totally disappointing, which would have the effect of killing the waiting itself, is an integral part of the exercise of power. —Pierre Bourdieu, Pascallian Meditations

Worldwide, there is a chronic lack of solutions for people residing in prolonged conditions of displacement (Cohen and van Hear, 2017; Doná, 2015; Easton-Calabria and Omata, 2018; Horst and Grabska, 2015; Loescher and Milner, 2011). This scarcity includes yet goes beyond the conventional durable solutions – local integration, voluntary repatriation and third country resettlement. Refugees are often silenced by the very ‘discourses that attempt to provide solutions for their plight’ (Nyers, 2006: xiv). Mindful that social studies research tends to contribute to essentialising notions of nation/ state/society as natural rather than as sociological and political forms (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002), in this chapter I gauge how communication on one durable solution – resettlement – works out in Iraqi refugees’ lives in Jordan and reinforces particular modes of waiting. A too narrow and rigid solution-focused approach draws upon a state-centric discourse that essentialises the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995b). In combination with a humanitarian state of emergency, it contributes to a framing of refugees as temporary problems in need of solutions and further reduces them to ‘matter out of place’ (Malkki, 1992). A state-centric solution thinking reduces the space for refugees to articulate their voices, but solution-minded yet exclusionary humanitarian practices do influence the social and subjective experiences of refugees who assert their agency in response to and only sometimes as a result of

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prolonged bureaucratic uncertainty. Preferences for ways of movement and for navigations towards stability often map onto colonial cartographies, the hierarchical order of nation-states in governance and the presence of loved ones elsewhere. But they also relate to the activities conducted by or on behalf of a so-called international community. In Chapter 1, I provided further insight into refugee protection in Jordan and how it is institutionalised as temporary. Regardless of the length of time spent in Amman and despite the scarcity of resettlement, forty out of the forty-two people I conducted in-depth interviews with and with whom I frequently hung out with (Rodgers, 2004) described their experiences as ‘waiting’ for resettlement. I understand resettlement as an instrument of durable humanitarian governance (Garnier et al., 2018): a long-term and therefore durable concern driven by the humanitarian ethos of serving the most vulnerable, which involves practices that rule and control the lives of those potentially or potentially not selected. Humanitarian communicative practices impose care, control and conditionality on the lives and subjectivities of Iraqi refugees. It does not provide much recourse to accountability. The lack of information and limited means for communication by the UNHCR on resettlement further contributes to ‘information precarity’ (Wall et al., 2016: 240): ‘a condition of instability that refugees experience in accessing news and personal information, potentially leaving them vulnerable to misinformation, stereotyping, and rumours that can affect their economic and social capital’.

The Mediation of Waiting for Resettlement Waiting is a deeply optimistic attitude. It indicates having expectations of life. But at the same time, the mismatch between expectations and the world’s precarious reality tends to result in heightened feelings of anxiety and feeling out of control (Bourdieu, 2000). This makes waiting an active mode of being in the world. Making sense is seeking meaning and seeking direction (Bourdieu, 2000: 207). Formal and informal access to information and communication regarding this resettlement influences how Iraqi refugees make sense of their life in Jordan. Lack of clarity about selection procedures for consideration for third country resettlement, what criteria are used and changes in procedures and policies, along with uncertainties about the present and the future, only heighten the need to seek meaning and direction. Previous studies on camp and urban refugees in African countries have shown that limited information on resettlement can reinforce the circulation of interpretations, stories and potential strategies (Horst, 2006; Jansen, 2008; Sandvik, 2011; Turner, 2010). Whereas some might be successfully being

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selected for resettlement, it often also reinforces instability and uncertainty around the question of whether one will be or will not be considered for resettlement. Those who are not considered for resettlement tend to receive little to no information regarding this decision (Garnier, 2016; Sandvik, 2012). This lack of information regarding one’s case further limits refugees’ abilities to gain insight or negotiate the outcomes (Garnier et al., 2018: 13). This further reinforces the rather powerless notion that all one can do is ‘wait’, as also became evident in Adam’s narrative of life in Jordan as a ‘waiting stop’ described in the last chapter. In that chapter, I also briefly cited a Resettlement Officer working at UNHCR Jordan.1 It was extremely difficult for Iraqi refugees to obtain formal information regarding resettlement procedures or a comprehensive insight into their personal cases. For me, as a Western postgraduate researcher, obtaining information regarding resettlement procedures was not impossible, but not that easy either. It was only at the end of my fieldwork in August 2015 that I managed to sit down with her. To emphasise that the hope of Iraqi refugees for resettlement was unfounded, she underscored that the UNHCR was a protection agency and not a resettlement agency. This remark is far from straightforward. The Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Program (2004), the main advisory body of the UNHCR, stated that seeking a solution is a crucial element of UNHCR’s protection framework. And the MoU with the Jordanian government clearly stipulates that for recognised refugees, a solution needs to be found outside of the country. As an international protection actor, the role and power of the UNHCR regarding solutions is complex, considering the agency’s limited capacities to bypass the nation-states in which they operate and their dependency on other countries to provide donations or resettlement slots. The UNHCR’s mandate requires it to seek ‘permanent’ solutions to refugee situations. The formal causes for protraction are ‘to be found in the failure of major powers, including the US and the EU, to engage in countries of origin and the failure to consolidate peace agreements’ (Loescher and Milner, 2005: 81). Yet there has been criticism that it was only when the number of refugees of non-European origin seeking refuge in Europe increased that the UN refugee agency started to speak of three ‘durable’ solutions – local integration, voluntary return and resettlement (Harrell-Bond and Voutira, 1992) – and began to operate with a ‘return bias’ (Long, 2011). In 2021, at the time of writing, the UNCHR spoke of solutions, consisting of local integration, voluntary repatriation, third country resettlement and complementary pathways. The latter has gained traction in recent years as component of the nonbinding 2018 Global Compact on Refugees (UNHCR, 2018a). This includes, for instance, opportunities for younger refugees to pursue their education elsewhere or private sponsorship programmes, as New Zealand, Canada and Ireland have been offering. These initiatives

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provide more and safer ways for refugees to reach a lasting solution yet continue to be meritocratic approaches that ascertain rights to only few people who are able to draw on enough social capital to make use of them. The understanding that ‘voluntary repatriation’ would be most desirable (Harrell-Bond and Voutira, 1992: 7) builds upon the premise that people would ‘naturally’ belong to one primordial nation-state (Appadurai, 2004; Gupta and Ferguson, 1992). It can serve to justify the prolonged situation of living under restricted rights and containment of refugees closer to the country from which they fled. The nativist assumption that a refugee wants to and simply can return should always be questioned, as becomes evident in empirical research in different refugee settings (Black and Koser, 1998; Chatty and Mansour, 2011; Crisp, 2003; Hammond, 1999; Iaria, 2011; van Hear, 2004). Refugees continue to be exempted from decision-making processes regarding ‘solutions’ to their plight (Nyers, 2006: 126). The issue of how humanitarian practices regarding some durable solutions shape refugees’ perceptions and aspirations is also ignored. UNHCR Jordan and its implementing partners operate as a ‘surrogate state’ (Kagan, 2011) within Jordan to safeguard refugee protection, but with too few capacities to do so. UNHCR Jordan operates as a representative of the international regime in an auxiliary space (Smirl, 2008). Whereas it is based in Jordan, it acts on behalf of a rather Western-centred and Western-oriented international community and is interpreted as such. The understanding that UNHCR Jordan is representative of the international community has gained common currency among Iraqi refugees; in a similar fashion to how Simon Turner (2004: 246) describes the perceptions of Burundian refugees in Tanzania on the UNHCR’s operations, UNHCR Jordan has become ‘the locus of power, the authorial position from which recognition is sought’. But the recognition sought for does not serve to place oneself outside of the hegemony of nation-states. For many of the Iraqi refugees in this study, resettlement is one of the (if not the only) legal and safe pathways for placing themselves (back) within an exploitative and cruel world system they feel they have been long disconnected from, first in Iraq and then in Jordan.

The Comfort of the Queue Bureaucracy is a core feature of waiting: in contact with an institute or organisation, people wait for officials to make their decision in relation to them (Bourdieu, 2000; Khosravi, 2014; Schwartz, 1975). The multiplicity of governing actors – who are partly but never fully responsible for particular segments in the resettlement process – tends to further limit recourse for refugees to hold any actor accountable (Garnier et al., 2018; Grabska, 2006) and also increases the number of actors to whom refugees can turn to obtain information.

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Beyond third country resettlement operations via the UNHCR, there were several countries that ran separate programmes that enabled legal travel for refugees. IOM Jordan was contracted to run the USRAP, which also provided the opportunity to directly apply for family reunification with nuclear family members residing in the United States or for a SIV, a special visa available to those who were able to prove that they had worked for the US armed forces or the US government. Every month, the IOM provided the opportunity to obtain information on case-specific progress towards US resettlement: every first Thursday of the month, Iraqi refugees who were able to draw on close family relations in the United States, those who could prove previous US affiliations in Iraq and those who were selected by the UNHCR to be considered gathered in front of IOM Jordan’s office and were able to speak to a representative. On a hot summer morning in July 2015, I attended this visible waiting experience. Approximately 200 people had gathered in a queue, approximately 150 men and 50 women. Every 10–20 minutes, a small group could go inside the building to talk to one of the IOM employers, who would access the system to see if any progress had been made in relation to their admission. Those who had already been able to talk to a representative were most often disappointed by the lack of progress. But even if the outcomes were disappointing, the communal aspect of waiting could still be comforting, as can be seen in Abu Mahmoud’s words: ‘I go every month, make a visit to the IOM to see other people there and when there are a lot and I see I am not alone in this, that sort of gives me a good feeling. I am not alone in this. There are more people waiting like me. So, it is useful for my mind.’ ‘Orderly waiting in a queue’ (Hage, 2015: 7) is the most physical manifestation of waiting. It makes the waiting process tangible and visible. Abu Mahmoud is waiting for family reunification with his son Mahmoud, who was resettled to the US two years earlier. Seeing that he and his family are not alone in their waiting – seeing other people wait – comforts him. The rest of the month, he spends rather isolated at home, looking into ways to speed up the progress towards resettlement.

Being Put on Hold In contrast to a visible waiting experience, most of the actual waiting and governing of the self in waiting takes place within the home. Technologymediated communication and information played a central role in sustaining waiting experiences. Technologies interact with modes of waiting and provide means to obtain information, negotiate and make sense of waiting. These did not replace the need for actual interactions, and it was the lack of actual interactions with humanitarian representatives that spurred the need for seeking additional information via online and offline channels.

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In 2015, Iraqi nationals who were registered with UNHCR Jordan were able to contact UNHCR Jordan and seek information on their rights and access to services via a number of ways. This included visiting UNHCR Jordan’s registration centre based in West Amman. Considering the difficult financial circumstances, the transportation costs and the distance from where urban refugees were living, such visits were not a regular option for everyone. A SIM card of Zain, one of Jordan’s main telecommunication providers, was provided to refugees who were now considered ‘Persons of Concern’ (PoC). This enabled them to call UNHCR Jordan’s helpline service free of charge. The official UNHCR Jordan Facebook page provided additional information. Occasionally, targeted text messages were sent to refugees, for instance regarding one-off financial support for newly arrived Iraqi refugees who were not eligible for monthly support. I was also told by UNHCR Jordan’s Resettlement Officer that at the time of our interview, an information brochure that explicitly provided background information on the services available for Iraqi refugees was in the making, as this differed – as was the case for Palestinian refugees from Syria and other non-Syrian nationals seeking refuge – from what was available to Syrian nationals.2 Many of the Iraqi refugees I spoke to frequently reached out to UNHCR Jordan, most often with the purpose of gaining more insight into whether there was any news regarding their own chances and/or progress for resettlement. I was told that the main messages they received, upon visiting the UNHCR registration centre or upon phoning UNHCR Jordan’s helpline service, was to ‘wait’. It is difficult to know whether UNHCR Jordan’s message was a concrete imperative to ‘wait’ – implying there is something to wait for – or whether people interpreted it as such. In her report on the role of communication, information and technology among urban refugees living in not dissimilar legal precarious circumstances in Egypt, Nora Danielson wrote: ‘When ears are closed to all but one message, even the best information delivery and most sensitive communication will fail’ (Danielson, 2012: 13). In the absence of satisfactory answers, there can be a heightened need to stay hopeful. In order to sustain a sense of normality and stability, it might be that ‘ears that will not hear’ (ibid.). But many of the Iraqi refugees were actively seeking more communication and information regarding resettlement and had different strategies to obtain more this. And, as Danielson mentions, there is another side to this coin: the tongues that will not speak, as she noticed the reluctance of humanitarian bureaucrats to provide clear information and, if necessary, to share bad news. The most punitive characteristics of waiting are not knowing how long to wait and of not feeling in control (Schwartz, 1975). Some Iraqi refugees would call the helpline every month or every week to see if there had been any changes to their status. Nabila, a widowed single mother who at that time was living in a more affluent area in West Amman, called every month:

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‘and they say: “we will call you”. Your future is put on hold. At least give us an estimate of time’. Nabila’s actions and words suggest that she believes UNHCR Jordan knows exactly how long her wait will be, but that the organisation is deliberately withholding this information from her. In her account, Lillian, a young Iraqi woman who only recently arrived in Jordan, had noticed that a good friend of hers would call the UNHCR every day: ‘It is her hobby. She thinks that if she calls them a lot, they will tell her that the next day: “Yalla, you can go!”‘ The actions of Lillian’s friend suggest that she thinks that calling frequently could somehow speed up her process towards resettlement. Her frequent phone calls might provide her with a sense of control over an uncontrollable situation and/or she might want to make sure UNHCR Jordan’s staff do not forget about her. As urban refugees, Iraqi refugees were considered to be more difficult to reach and/ or more difficult to recognise, considering they are residing among host communities (Chatelard, 2010). From the side of refugees, the urban environment and its limited and less visible interactions with the humanitarian regime can potentially heighten the fear of being forgotten about. The actions of Nabila and Lilian’s friend contrast with the reluctance of Rima to even make a phone call to the UNHCR’s information line: ‘We are just waiting, and we are even afraid to call UNHCR because we are afraid they would close our case.’ Rima’s words suggest that she fears that her actions could come across as impatient and that doing anything that could be interpreted as ‘wrong’ would somehow potentially influence her outcome. The indignation of Nabila, the frequent phone calls of Lillian’s friend and also the fear of Rima all belie the understanding that UNHCR Jordan’s staff have the capacity to decide who is and who is not resettled and exposes the power differentials involved. This also implies that individuals can potentially blame UNHCR Jordan and its staff for not providing them with a durable solution. Vulnerability tends to be the main criterion for consideration for resettlement (Garnier et al., 2018: 5), yet how exactly vulnerability is determined was unclear to and a frequent topic of conversation and hearsay among Iraqi refugees. The submission categories for resettlement, formulated in the UNHCR’s Resettlement Handbook (2011), persist. These include heightened legal or medical protection needs and ‘women at risk’. One of the seven categories includes the ‘lack of foreseeable alternative durable solutions’, which is a reality for most people worldwide residing in prolonged refugee situations (UNHCR, 2011: 37).3 UNHCR staff members do have some (yet very limited) capacity for prioritising RST submissions, as also became evident in an in-depth study on formal and informal transactions towards the distribution of resettlement slots in Uganda. At the interface between refugees, humanitarian actors and nation-states, rules on resettlement and comprehension of these rules are

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continuously negotiated (Sandvik, 2011: 21). Over the last few years, policies and technologies have been implemented with the argument that this would guarantee that such determinations – for instance, regarding vulnerability and eligibility for aid – would happen in a more transparent’ and fair manner. ‘Objective’ and ‘neutral’ interpretations of quantifiable measurements of vulnerability belie implicit politicisation, are essentialist and overlook heterogeneity, context and the potential for change (Clark, 2007; Janmyr and Mourad, 2018; Sandvik, 2011). And ‘accountability technologies’ ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2018) tend to mean that responsibility is increasingly absorbed by the machine, further diminishing explanations as to why decisions are made and, subsequently, means to hold someone (a person or organisation) accountable (Duffield, 2019; Johns, 2017; Madianou, 2019a). But even if UNHCR staff members and UNHCR operations have some influence over who or which category of vulnerable people gains priority, indignation towards UNHCR Jordan can be considered at least partly misdirected, considering that there are too few resettlement slots available. Instead, this could perhaps be better directed at governments, who have the capacity to provide access to territories and to show more solidarity with the largest refugee-hosting countries. By providing resettlement slots, resettlement states can appear to be humane as they grant a selected group of people who they consider as worthy or deserving a legal way to travel, while simultaneously fortifying and extending their control beyond their own geographical borders (Papadopoulos et al., 2008: 175). Whereas all countries use vulnerability as a criterion for resettlement (Garnier et al., 2018: 12), some resettlement-selecting countries require further evidence that selected people are ‘real’ and ‘vulnerable refugees, along with proof of their ability to integrate and to become economically independent. The UNHCR might depend on countries to provide resettlement slots or complementary pathways, but the agency could also push signatory states for its responsibilities to show solidarity with majority refugee-hosting countries ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2016: 15). And the diligence through which selection for consideration for resettlement takes place on behalf of potential receiving countries contrasts sharply with the lack of transparency on the part of the refugee, who is waiting with the hope of being resettled. This includes a systematic lack of clarity regarding selection procedures (Fresia and von Känel, 2016). The absence of adequate information about resettlement policies and selection procedures, and the limited communication around one’s personal chances leave much room for guesswork. By acting as the middle party in relation to the selection of who is considered for resettlement, UNHCR Jordan has put itself in a difficult position. It acts as the messenger, but as a messenger it refrains from providing clear messages to the people it serves, for instance about its formal procedures and people’s personal progress. A question that Barbara Harrell-Bond al-

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ready asked in 2002, and that I will more fully engage with in Chapter 7, persists: ‘If an enduring problem is scarce resources (or in this case, scarce resettlement slots), would it not be more honest (humane) to explain this reality to refugees?’ (Harrell-Bond, 2002: 69).

Waiting for the Phone to Ring The direction of communication imbues modes of waiting and exposes power relations: refugees can reach out to UNHCR Jordan, but for important news, the UN agency reaches out to the refugee directly. Abu Mahmoud, the older man who is waiting for reunification with his son, told me that the main reason for having a mobile phone is ‘to wait for the UN to call’. Technologies have made refugees reachable and traceable. Humanitarian organisations can now contact people via their mobile phones. This is far from a panacea, considering the potential for surveillance, control, potential infringements upon people’s privacy and data extraction. And people can change phone numbers, phone batteries run out and phone calls can be missed. Most Iraqi refugees owned more than one phone: a simple 2G mobile phone containing the UNHCR-provided SIM card served as their ‘UNHCR phone’. The 2G phone was an enduring technology, just like it was among Syrian refugees residing in Iraqi Kurdistan who did not have access to smartphones, but for a different reason. In Iraqi Kurdistan, local SIM cards in 2G phones made it possible to sustain affordable transnational contacts with relatives still residing in Syria because connectivity and its infrastructures do not always neatly follow nation-states borders (Hayes, 2019). Among the Iraqi refugees in Jordan, smartphones served to sustain transnational connections and to seek additional online information, but the simplicity of the 2G UNHCR phone served an important function: it does not run out of battery quickly, which enables the Iraqi refugees to always be reachable. Aram’s words highlight the worries and concerns he attributes to his UNHCR phone: ‘They can call nighttime, uhm … morning time, evening time. Twenty-four hours, nine months, this has been in my head. I don’t leave this mobile. Because this is our life now. I don’t know what we can do but [sigh] it is difficult. When I go outside, when I reach to USA or anywhere … I promise I don’t use the mobile. Because I hate the mobile. Twenty-four [hours] with me!’ Like Aram, many of the people I interviewed associated the device with strong emotions as it could potentially but might also never bring the good news that they would be considered for resettlement or even scheduled for resettlement. Access to technologies might give additional means to make sense of and navigate uncertainty, but it might also aggravate anxiety by engendering the feeling of being always in the queue.

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This ‘always on’ culture (Madianou, 2016) relates to the rumours about the ‘missed phone call’. Almost everyone I spoke to knew at least one person who knew someone who would have missed their chance for (consideration for) resettlement because they missed the decisive phone call. The accuracy of this ‘fact’ might be disputable. What matters here is the effect this rumour had, given people’s already precarious circumstances, on people’s mediated and situated behaviour. The absence of clear information – especially in prolonged situations of legal and temporary uncertainty – can easily result in the circulations of rumours, like the story of the ‘missed phone call’. This has also become evident in other prolonged conditions of displacement (Horst, 2006; Jack, 2016, 2017; Jansen, 2008; Turner, 2004). Access to adequate information amounts to more than simply having technological access. Factors such as the spread of irrelevant or even dangerous information, differences in social access, the inability to control how one is represented, surveillance of the state and fear of control, and disrupted personal information networks can contribute to information precarity (Wall et al., 2016). Technologies do not necessarily improve the conditions of populations affected by humanitarian crisis, considering that they tend to map onto already-existing social inequalities relating to class, race and gender. This also means that they interact and tend to further entrench the unequal power relationships inherent in humanitarianism (Madianou et al., 2015). UNHCR Jordan has taken on the role that a ‘signatory state’ would have and, as such, the Iraqi refugees attribute power to UNHCR Jordan as its physical manifestation of the international community. This reinforces what Hage (2003) defines as societal hope – the belief that solutions will be provided for by this ‘surrogate state’ (Kagan, 2011; Slaughter and Crisp, 2009). As the state, this hope is surrogate: UNHCR Jordan lacks the capacities to fully realise refugee rights, given its dependence on the goodwill of nation-states. But UNHCR Jordan’s position and that of the international community at large require scrutiny for how they sustain control and hopes by withholding information. At the beginning of this chapter, I cited Bourdieu’s work on hope, power and their relation to people’s experiences of waiting. For Bourdieu, sustaining people’s hope is an integral part of exercising power (Bourdieu, 2000: 228). Having one’s time wasted can make it feel like the people, the activities in which they are involved, the people they care for, and their experiences and subjectivities do not matter. People who become displaced are often (over)counted yet are simultaneously perceived as to not (fully) count. Data and information are gathered to assess circumstances but can also be used to sustain distance. Distributions of power are reflected and performed through the act of waiting: it is often the poor and powerless who need to wait (Schwartz, 1975). This reinforces a sense of dependency and subordination. Limited access to information can reinforce indignation, worries and frustration, but can equally and simultaneously function to sustain hope.

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However, the power that Bourdieu (2000) addresses is therefore more diffuse and less straightforward. The prolonged condition of displacement in which many of the Iraqi refugees in Jordan find themselves resembles Lauren Berlant’s (2011) understanding of impasse: a situation where someone cannot or will not move forward and in which there is a creative, anxious assessment of information and possibilities. While Berlant does not directly address the physical context of migration and her work is situated in late modern societies in the Global North, many Iraqi refugees had an anxiety-ridden drive to obtain more information on where, how and when to ‘travel’. Not knowing where one belongs and if one will ever belong again is overwhelming and exhausting. This was especially the case for those Iraqi refugees who have personal experiences of violence in Iraq, who are poor or have become impoverished in the process of waiting for years and/or do not have supportive transnational networks. Abir and Muadh, an Iraqi couple in their late forties, asked a relative for financial help: ‘My cousin in the UK said: “you have to suffer so, when you come here, you know how much you suffered, and you start working”.’ The precariousness they endure seems to be portrayed as a rite of passage, a liminal state one needs to reach before being allowed to enter a Western country. Refugees’ everyday experiences within uncertain geographies have been considered as liminal experiences as people seek ways to navigate their lives amidst, and only sometimes out of, structural oppressions (Malkki, 1995b). But in contrast to how it was originally described in anthropological work on rituals (Turner, 1964, 1969; van Gennep, 1960), most often there is no guaranteed exit in conditions of prolonged displacement. The everyday experiences of prolonged uncertainty and waiting are deeply affective: ‘not yet’ simultaneously implies a promise and the threat that this will never materialise (Hage, 2009; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). This is exemplified in the double meaning of the word buufis used by Somali refugees in Kenya. The word refers to the longing for third country resettlement, but also to the madness and suicide that can occur when dreams for a future elsewhere are shattered (Horst, 2006). Kvittingen et al. (2018) found that Iraqi refugees in Jordan held on to the slim possibility for resettlement simply because their files were ‘still being studied’ and would remain open until a solution was found. Throughout this book, it becomes evident that Iraqi refugees in Jordan were activity involved in practices that serve to sustain a hopeful outlook to futures elsewhere. When the promise fails to materialise and there is a rupture between expectations and reality, hope gains urgency. The lack of certainties is expansive (Schielke, 2015). Lack can reinforce the need to hold on to the promise that is projected upon UNHCR Jordan: that the agency can and should provide legal avenues for futures elsewhere.

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Gendered Experiences of the Boredom and Anxiety Associated with Waiting In her brilliant Ph.D. thesis on humanitarian classification and legibility in Lebanon’s emergency response, Cowling (2020) loosely groups two main approaches to engagement with gender in humanitarian situations. The first is rather normative, as it focuses on how patriarchal power structures tend to be exacerbated in conflict and displacement. Whereas this has increasingly been gaining in nuance, as well as taking on an intersectional approach (Crenshaw, 1991), it is often institutionally used to justify a gender-oriented humanitarian programming that holds on to narrow stereotypical conceptions of vulnerable ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe, 1993) in need of (gender) empowerment. The second approach can be considered as a response to this liberal feminist approach of aid. Inspired by postcolonial scholarship, it explores the role of humanitarian operations and governance by casting victimhood and identifying who is morally legitimate (Ticktin, 2011). Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2013) shows how humanitarian aid’s construction of the ‘ideal refugee woman’ contributes to the marginalisation of ‘non-ideal’ Sahrawi refugee women and girls. Jennifer Hyndman and Winona Giles have argued that the externalisation of asylum to the Global South, the ‘purported benevolence of humanitarian aid’ (2011: 362) and the prolonged suspension of refugees’ human rights have resulted in a feminisation and depoliticisation of those who are kept in place. Feminisation here does not relate to the experiences of women alone, but refers to how the social and legal uncertainty, material limitations and waiting as an ordering principle tend to (re)produce both refugee men and refugee women as passive and weak ‘others’. Waiting serves as a common ordering principle that (re)produces voiceless refugee subjectivities through humanitarian technologies of ‘care and control’ (Hyndman and Giles, 2011; Ticktin, 2011). For many of the young and older Iraqi refugee men, the experience of not being able to work and feeling powerless regarding their period of waiting was interpreted as a failure to provide for their family and undermined their sense of masculinity. This is not an uncommon experience: the inability to fulfil gendered role patterns can reinforce a sense of loss and defeatism among refugee men (Indra, 1999; Kibreab, 2004; Matsuoka and Sorenson, 1999). Approaches to gender in humanitarian programming often disregard the fact that men can also be victims of gender-based violence and other gendered vulnerabilities to which men and boys are exposed prior to or during displacement (Cowling, 2020; Turner, 2018). Here I show how differences in waiting experiences of life in Jordan also relate to how life in Iraq was experienced differently considering gender identities. In Chapter 4, I will consider more closely how gender norms and relations were negotiated within the Iraqi refugee households.

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In contrast and despite the general violence that erupted in the years following the US-led invasion in 2003, most Iraqi men and boys had still been going out to work and to socialise. Mobile phones played a pivotal role in enabling a sense that this out-of-house-movement for men and boys was somewhat safe. Ismail, an Iraqi man in his early thirties, contrasts how life was prior to and after the US invasion: ‘When Saddam Hussein was the president. We didn’t have a phone. But we didn’t need it.’ But after the invasion, a mobile phone became a necessity. Ismail explained how his mother would call him every 10 minutes to ask him if he was out. He imitated his mother: ‘“Habibi (my love), are you OK?”’ He added: ‘Because, of course, haha, that means I am not OK, because someone has kidnapped me.’ The perception that frequent phone calls could somehow ensure safety or at least control the worries of parents was a way of coping with the generalised violence. The use of mobile phones for safeguarding security and/or surveillance during mobility is not new, nor is it a mediated practice that only relates to conflict and/or seeking refuge. For instance, in 2005, mobile phones played a crucial role in the geographies of young people in the UK and the (parental) management of negotiating safety (Pain et al., 2005). In Iraq, mobile phones ensured movement, but predominantly for Iraqi men and boys; for women and girls in the first years of post-invasion Iraq, mobile phones did not serve a similar function. For Iraqi women, life in Jordan was not that dissimilar to how life had been in Iraq. In the 1960s and 1970s, women had been actively involved in Iraq’s labour force and were among the most highly educated in the Middle East, but decades of warfare, sanctions and general insecurity coincided with an increase in religiosity. These factors had already pushed Iraqi women back into their homes (Al-Ali, 2007; Al-Ali and Pratt, 2009). Their practices to sustain social relations had already largely moved to online social media platforms in the first years after the invasion. And in Jordan, gendered roles ascribed to work in the house continued in very similar ways to how it had been in Iraq. Like in Iraq, Iraqi women and girls were often busy with domestic and emotional tasks. This meant – in a similar fashion to the study undertaken by Samuli Schielke (2015: 32–33) among rural Egyptian youngers, that Iraqi women and girls had less time to be bored than their male counterparts. The continuation of deeply gendered home-making work and the resemblance of prior restricted movement outside in Iraq meant that for many women, life in Jordan was not unlike how much of their everyday life had been in Iraq. The experiences of Iraqi men and boys of feeling confined to their temporary homes in Amman were deeply uncomfortable. Many Iraqi men seemed to feel doubly displaced: out of place in Jordan and within the domestic setting in which they were not used to spending much time and that they associated with femininity. Both components reinforced the experience

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of feeling lost and of perpetual boredom, as would be often emphasised. In Iraqi slang, unemployed men are typically referred to as ‘pillow drivers’ or ‘gardens’, both implying a rather poetic sense of laziness. There were different ways of coping with this, including the anxious drive to seek information on resettlement and other potential ways to leave Jordan. Mediated practices can also help to sustain a sense of seriality and normality: to obtain a sense of structure in what might otherwise seem to be a structureless day (Hobson, 1980). Some people I met actively tried to maintain a day/night structure by watching specific TV shows at set times communally. But many others would stay up until late at night, watching films on TV and browsing online. The lack of employment provided little incentive to wake up in the morning and to actively sustain the normal rhythm of being asleep at night and awake during the day. For Omar, the alteration of his everyday rhythm ever since he arrived in Jordan also served another purpose. In Amman, he had gotten used to going to bed at 6 AM: ‘The problem is … when you wake up you see all the people going to somewhere, to some work. They have their lives and you just sit there, in the morning doing nothing. It makes your moral worse.’ Omar tried to avoid being reminded that he was not working by making sure he did not see other people who were able to go to work.

Making Sense of Solution-Scarcity Digital connectivity provides important additional means for seeking information and understanding the system and the criteria used – and, accordingly, to assess one’s chances for resettlement. This search is neverending, as the lack of clarity about procedures interacts with everyday experiences of prolonged uncertainty that reinforces the need to seek alternative understandings. The frantic information management of the Iraqi refugees in this study occurred through a wide variety of ‘talking spaces’ (Gillespie, 2006) – the interaction between online and offline spaces and with people geographically located in different places to double-check and assess different truth claims. If necessary and available, these interactions were also key in relation to seeking regular or irregular ways out of Jordan. This becomes evident in the sense-making practices of Omar and his wife Zeineb. Educated as engineers, Omar and Zeineb were extremely mediasavvy and were able to draw upon many transnational connections as many friends and family members had travelled before them. Their behaviour was not dissimilar to that of many other Iraqi refugees I interacted with. The journey of Omar and Zeineb started in Baghdad. Years, earlier Omar had been individually targeted by AQI, the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda. Subsequently, Omar and Zeineb had tried to rebuild a secure life in Baghdad, but after the

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surge of ISIS and ongoing disappointment with the Iraqi government, they lost faith in the possibility of a stable and secure future in Iraq and started to actively search for a means to find refuge in a Western country. In Iraq, Omar and Zeineb had already registered online for the US SIV programme, as Omar had worked as a translator for the US Army. They also started to follow Facebook groups with names such as ‘IOM Jordan’, ‘Iraqi IOM SIV’, ‘UN & IOM Iraqi Refugees in Jordan’ and ‘Iraqi SIV & IOM’. These titles suggest that these groups were established to exchange information on the procedures for US resettlement, including SIVs. Yet they were equally used to discussing other issues, such as UNHCR procedures around resettlement and other, alternative ways of travelling onwards. In their mapping of the most frequented Facebook groups used by Syrian refugees travelling (in)to France, Gillespie et al. (2016: 57) found that a total of four out of fourteen were in fact referring to Iraqi refugees, including the Facebook group ‘UN & IOM Iraqi Refugees in Jordan’, showing that the popularity of these Facebook groups goes well beyond nationality and also exposes the wider accessibility that these platforms afford. Platforms and groups designed with a particular purpose or audience in mind can change and develop over time, serving other audiences and purposes. Upon arrival in Jordan, Omar and Zeineb immediately registered with UNHCR Jordan. This registration was directly tied to the possibility of being considered for resettlement by UNHCR Jordan, as this procedure takes place separately from the US SIV programme. The couple was aware that the resettlement process could take years. They therefore also obtained an ı¯qa¯mh, as the residency permit enabled them to send their young daughters to a private school while waiting. They continued to spend much of their time online, as they were balancing what was said on official Facebook groups – like the UNHCR Jordan Facebook page – with what was said on the unofficial Facebook groups and webpages. All Iraqi refugees I spoke to were deeply aware that what was presented online as ‘fact’ was far from always accurate. Abu Ali, for instance, joked that the administrators of these groups presented themselves as ‘professors in resettlement’, yet were stuck in Jordan, just like him. The ease with which misinformation spread online and people’s awareness about this reinforced the necessity for physical offline interactions – with fellow Iraqi and nonIraqi refugees, NGO workers and Western researchers like me – and direct communication via messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Viber. These interactions were considered safer because they involved people they trusted. WhatsApp and Viber only became encrypted in 2016. Both forms of interaction enabled Iraqi refugees to crosscheck and double-check the accuracy of what was read, heard or seen. Transnational connections provided access to different types of information, as the people with whom these connections were could draw upon

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their personal experiences with, for instance, European border police or with asylum seek procedures in respective Western countries. Beyond crucial insights, transnational networks in Western countries can also potentially provide additional possibilities for legal travel out of Jordan. Zeineb had been strengthening her ties with rather distant family members in Canada in the hope this would enable them to apply to Canada’s sponsorship programme. During his visits to Iraqi-owned coffee shops, located in West Amman and mostly frequented by fellow Iraqi men, and during interactions in front of the offices of the IOM and the UNHCR, Omar would double-check the accuracy of the information he had acquired online. And he obtained new information and insights, for instance that countries like France and Australia were rumoured to be opening separate resettlement programmes that would operate aside of the UNHCR’s selection process for consideration for resettlement. For Iraqi women, international and local NGOs and community-based organisations (CBOs) were the main hubs where information was obtained, personal circumstances were compared and in-kind assistance was obtained. Beyond obtaining information that might be useful to know in terms of what to expect and to strategise accordingly, comparisons also served an important subjective dimension: the realisation that your case was moving faster than that of others could be the source of optimism and could provide the understanding that progress was being made. Hearing about the progress of people with similar characteristics – especially among the more recently arrived Christian and Iraqi nationals belonging to the Sabean minority – was also interpreted as an indicator of their own potential (lack of) movement. Conversations among Iraqi refugees were therefore often focused on the following comparisons: how much time had fellow refugees spent in Jordan and how many interviews had they completed since then. Some clarification is required here: rather than using legalistic terms, the Iraqi refugees would refer to the interviews done by the UNHCR in terms of numbers. In 2015, the substantive RSD interview was referred to as the second interview, after the initial (first) interview that served to register with UNHCR Jordan. The third interview was then the interview that would serve to determine if a refugee was to be considered for resettlement. The stage reached and the pace of progress were interpreted as signs and served to estimate the likelihood of and progress towards an exit. Comparing them could serve as a reassurance, providing a sense of order over and understanding of the elusive process. It could also have the opposite effect: Kholoud’s frequent visits to the local CBO where she would attend yoga classes and the handicraft programme not only provided her with a sense of community; it also served as a frequent reminder of her own ‘stuckedness’ (Hage, 2015): ‘The routine question is …: How long have you been here?

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When do you travel? These are the everyday questions we have: why are you here for four years and you haven’t travelled?’ Deeply aware that compassion, international support and resettlement slots designated to Iraqi refugees were becoming increasingly scarce, it was important to be strategic about information sharing. In a similar fashion to online channels, offline information could be wrong or even intentionally deceitful. During his time in Jordan, Omar encountered co-nationals spreading false information several times: ‘If he finds out that he is in some way in advantage over you, he will rather … not show you or lie to you, so you wouldn’t take his place.’ This is reflective of the work of Iraqi-born anthropologist Haydar Al-Mohammad (2012), who highlights that the violence in Iraq has resulted in a complete breakdown of trust in social relationships that go beyond family and lifelong friendships. In Jordan, everyday experiences are coloured by prolonged insecurity and the limited possibilities for futures elsewhere. Information precarity in combination with the increasingly neoliberal and individualising approach to humanitarianism (Ilcan and Rygiel, 2015) has far from restored more communal forms of trust and solidarity. Beyond discussing what criteria were thought to be used, Iraqi refugees would also discuss frequently what criteria ‘ought’ to be used, drawing upon their own (varying) normative and subjective frameworks of vulnerability. As compassion is scarce, the hierarchy of who is suffering can be contested (Chouliaraki, 2013; Fassin, 2012). For the Iraqi refugees, determining who is the most vulnerable is understandingly self-referential. There was an understanding that one’s personal suffering was worse than that of others or one was more ‘deserving’ (Holmes and Castañeda, 2016) simply because one belonged to a particular minority, had a distinguishing identity marker and/ or because so many years had already been spent in a state of prolonged uncertainty. This rekindles the hope and belief that one ought to be prioritised and fosters denial that what was supposed to be temporary – a difficult and marginalised life in Jordan – might have become sustained. Europe’s orientalist demands on who would count as ‘deserving refugees’ have long reached Jordan. In response to watching news on political developments in Europe – for instance, in response to discussions about the niqab (the face-covering veil) or terror threats – Muslim Iraqi refugees felt they needed to emphasise to me that they were ‘not like them’. There was also the belief that given one’s social, cultural, religious and/or educational background, and in relation to their imageries of Western countries, they would more easily ‘fit’ into Western society than those ‘others’ with more ‘different’ backgrounds and/or would be of more use to the potential country’s economy or system. Iraqi medical doctors were confused why they had not (yet) been resettled given their skills. Many of the Iraqi Christian expressed disappointment as they had presumed Western countries would be more willing to help fellow-Christians like them. Later in 2015 this became

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a reality as France provided targeted resettlement slots for Iraqi Christians (Elzas, 2015) and so did Australia (Medhora and Safi, 2015; Odysseus, 2017). But at the time of my fieldwork, while there were surely rumours, these were not (yet) verified. The international refugee regime and its interrelated resettlement programmes operate alongside other forms of migration, which are enabled by different criteria and draw upon different legal frameworks (Betts, 2010) and other moral registers. This meant that discussions of the Iraqi refugees as to why they ought to be resettled drew upon different normative scripts that seemingly contradicted the very vulnerability that consideration and selection for resettlement requires. A multiple understanding of self might seem paradoxical, yet it is labels that are used to differentiate, categorise and box in human beings and different forms of migration that are reductive to human complexity. Here I have explored different sense-making processes of Iraqi refugees aimed at arriving at a closer comprehension of the logic and order while waiting, on how the selection for consideration for resettlement ‘works’, and of one’s personal progress and chances of being considered for resettlement. These processes were grounded in the understanding that UNHCR Jordan acts as a representative of a rather Western-oriented international community and therefore would act in a fair and orderly manner. Changes in the RSD/resettlement procedures further disrupted a belief in this logic, as will become evident in the next section.

Waiting Disrupted: Changes in Humanitarian Procedures In March 2015 and the months that followed, I increasingly noticed distress among the more recently arrived Iraqi refugees. UNHCR Jordan had been increasingly cancelling RSD interviews or what refugees themselves referred to as the second interview. Upon being notified of this cancellation, the Iraqi refugees were told that their interviews were to be rescheduled. It was only in August 2015 that more information was provided on how these cancellations were the result of changes in UNHCR Jordan’s procedures. In the months in-between, I heard numerous interpretations regarding the change. The explanation I most frequently heard – among Iraqi refugees of all creeds and backgrounds – was that RSD and resettlement submission interviews had been merged, with the purpose of prioritising and speeding up the consideration of Iraqi nationals for resettlement. The logic behind this was very much centred on the large presence of Syrian refugees in Jordan: even if they were new arrivals, Iraqi nationals had been struggling longer with warfare and forced displacement and were therefore deemed to be more ‘deserving’ for resettlement than their Syrian counterparts. It was also argued that the departure of the Iraqi refugees could potentially motivate the Jordanian government to further integrate Syrian refugees.

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On 3 August 2015, UNHCR Jordan put out a notification in front of its Registration Centre. A picture was immediately shared on the IOM Jordan Facebook group. The message read as follows: To All Asylum Seekers of Iraqi Nationality. Please note that all RSD interviews had been cancelled, and there will be re-scheduling for the most vulnerable cases. For any inquiry and further information, please call the info-line (064008000). Only the most ‘vulnerable’ would undergo RSD, a requirement towards being considered for resettlement.

While this awkwardly phrased mention of the change in UNHCR Jordan’s procedures might have made the process for resettlement for some Iraqi refugees more efficient, it certainly did not result in resettlement for all or most Iraqi refugees, as had been hoped. The agency whose mandate it is to protect refugees has unnecessarily contributed to information precarity (Wall et al., 2016). It took four months before UNHCR Jordan provided information about the changes in its interview procedures for Iraqi refugees. This provided considerable space for alternative interpretations to the one outlined above. These changes in RSD procedures and the subsequent communication regarding this raise concerns that largely go beyond the scope of this book. These include that a focus on nationality could be considered a breach of the humanitarian principle of universality. This is not new: the focus of the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’ followed by the Syrian Refugee Response has been largely on nationality. In 2018, UNHCR Jordan openly started speaking of One Refugee Approach (ORA) to encourage donors to not earmark donations so that they can ensure that all PoC, regardless of nationality, have equitable access to protection and assistance. And countries providing resettlement slots often prioritise some groups of people over others, for instance on the basis of national identity. Moreover, whereas the UNHCR’s message read that this alteration only applied to people of Iraqi nationality, this was not necessarily the case. The merging of RSD/resettlement procedures was already common practice for Syrian refugees residing in Lebanon ( Janmyr, 2017a) and similar standard operating procedures (SOPs) were used for Syrian refugees residing in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq (UNHCR Lebanon, 2015). Johnston et al. (2019) also point to the confusion around the merged procedure among Sudanese and Yemeni refugees residing in Jordan at the time of their research. But even if UNHCR Jordan now uses similar procedures for refugees from all nationalities, in its communication the agency provides the impression that it differentiates according to national background. A second question concerning the merger of the interviews is to what extent a person’s vulnerability– and therefore one’s eligibility for consideration for resettlement – can be thoroughly assessed, considering that the interview upon registration lasts roughly half an hour and includes the col-

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lection of biometric data (UNHCR Lebanon, 2015). In practice, vulnerability assessment and eligibility for resettlement tends to be based upon much more than just this interview and includes a home visit and drawing on information provided by implementing partners. But UNHCR Lebanon clarifies that following the registration interview, a UNHCR case worker has approximately two hours to assess eligibility based upon vulnerability, willingness and suitability for being resettled and the absence of exclusion causes. Given the large numbers of refugees that countries like Jordan and Lebanon are hosting, the time allocated sounds generous. But these two hours serve to make life-defining decisions without giving refugees any information, let alone any recourse to contest the decisions made. Janmyr (2017a: 11) also cites a UNHCR official in Lebanon who states that determining which individuals are selected ‘starts already with a strong assumption of eligibility’, further raising questions about the objectivity and neutrality of such considerations. Here my interest focuses on how this change and the (lack of) communication about it were interpreted by the Iraqi refugees in this study. UNHCR Jordan’s Resettlement Officer indicated that the protection and eligibility to services that UNHCR Jordan could offer would be similar for those Iraqi nationals who had undergone RSD and those who had not, as RSD would only be conducted on behalf of potential resettlement countries. Therefore, according to her, the merged RSD/resettlement procedure would not have important implications for Iraqi nationals seeking refugee protection in Jordan.4 But the social and subjective influences that the change in procedures brought about among Jordan’s Iraqi refugees should not be underestimated. Counting the number of interviews and the time interval in-between was an important way of measuring one’s progress towards and therefore belief in resettlement as a potential legal exit. The inability to comprehend one’s situation, as in a state progress towards a potential legal exit, was perceived by many as foreclosing the chance for resettlement. Some Iraqi refugees started even more actively than before seeking alternative ways out of Jordan – for instance, by visiting embassies of countries that run resettlement and familyreunification programmes outside of the UNHCR’s programme. Others, who are equally living without the prospect of a durable solution in sight – which is still one of the formal selection criteria for resettlement (UNHCR, 2011) – might have felt less inclined to wait for the scarce legal pathways. Omar and Zeineb – the media-savvy engineering couple – ceased to believe that waiting for UNHCR Jordan and the IOM would be worthwhile as there was no certainty that they would gain access to a legal pathway to travel onwards: ‘we were calling for UNHCR for updates … asking for IOM any updates. Anything. And they didn’t give us anything. That thing [as he refers to UNHCR’s notification on 3 August 2015] broke our spirits …

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I started to think about the sea’. And like Omar and Zeineb, other Iraqi refugees might have equally ceased to believe that to ‘wait it out’ (Hage, 2015: 4) would be worthwhile. The logic of order and progress no longer applied. It is impossible to make any claims about the actual impact that the merging of RSD/resettlement procedures and the lack of communication by UNHCR Jordan had on the subjectivities and lives of Iraqi refugees waiting in Jordan. This is even more the case because it coincided with a temporary suspension of the Dublin III Regulation by some European countries and mediated images of people travelling in(to) Europe, as will be further discussed in Chapter 3. But even if a merged process would successfully filter out the people who are, by comparison, in the most difficult circumstances, for others the possibility of being considered for resettlement might be prematurely foreclosed. Vulnerability tends to be subject to change while living in displacement and those most in need might not have felt safe to disclose personal or sensitive information that would be necessary to adequately assess their need for protection.

Conclusion Waiting is not a passive experience; it always involves acts of sense-making, seeking movement and forms of resistance. People’s sense-making processes and practices can be understood as everyday tactics (de Certeau, 1984), deployed to make the best out of the challenging and uncertain circumstances and the different powers, pressures, hopes and expectations they encounter. The awareness that resettlement slots are scarce resulted in a rather anxiety-driven search to comprehend the system, to understand the logic behind it and to assess one’s chances for resettlement. The acts described in this chapter are rather subtle, given that humanitarian governance imposes conditionality. In the next chapter I discuss the more outspoken or deliberate tactics that were taken by Iraqi refugees in Jordan to actively negotiate their experiences of waiting and seek ways to overcome their sense of ‘stuckedness’.

Notes 1. Interview with UNHCR Jordan’s Resettlement Officer, 6 August 2015. 2. Ibid. 3. The official selection criteria for third country resettlement are: people with specific legal and/or protection needs (including threat of refoulement to the country of origin; threat of arbitrary arrest, detention or imprisonment; threat to physical safety and/or fundamental human rights in the country of refuge, ren-

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dering asylum untenable); survivor of torture and/or violent trauma (including sexual and gender-based violence); medical needs if no effective treatment is available in the country of asylum; women and girls considered as being at risk; family reunification if resettlement is the only means to reunite family members; children and adolescents at risk; and lack of foreseeable alternative durable solutions (UNHCR, 2011). 4. Interview with UNHCR Jordan’s Resettlement Officer, 6 August 2015.

3 Tactics to Get ‘Unstuck’ Refugee Protests and Seeking Alternative Means to Travel

Where there is hope there is trouble. —Samuli Schielke, Egypt in the Future Tense

In the last chapter I described the sense-making practices of Iraqi refugees, given the lack of information and communication about procedures and personal progress regarding resettlement. I considered acts like being ‘always on’ (Madianou, 2016), the ongoing anxious assessment of one’s situation through online and offline interactions, self-referential sense-making processes of criteria and procedures by which resettlement works and/or ought to work as everyday tactics for holding on to hope and the idea that waiting will serve a purpose. These acts are important yet subtle acts for making sense and making do in prolonged conditions of legal and temporal uncertainty. Here I describe more deliberate tactics (de Certeau, 1984) as these respond to and resist the structural implications of Jordan’s temporary protection context and global border regimes, and make particular rights claims. Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert’s work Being Digital Citizens (2015) is of interest here as it explores how ‘subjects’ are simultaneously subject to power and subjects of power: everyday life is increasingly mediated by the internet and data politics, but ‘digital citizens’ can also make rights claims, question strategies of power and subvert this by tactics. Refugees and other migrants who are marked out as not belonging can equally be engaged in these acts even if they are not (yet) citizens, as will become evident in this chapter. I first explore how Iraqi refugees organised protests at UNHCR Jordan’s office. I then consider how ‘Europe’s crisis’ (Collyer and King, 2016) provided some with the opportunities to leave Jordan and left many others behind.

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Refugee Protests In the first week of May 2015, a three-day protest was organised in front of UNHCR Jordan’s office in Deir Ghbar, an area in West Amman where at that point in time, the agency performed its operations for consideration for resettlement. The Facebook groups mentioned in Chapter 2 (‘IOM Jordan’, ‘Iraqi IOM SIV’, ‘UN & IOM Iraqi Refugees in Jordan’ and ‘Iraqi SIV & IOM’), WhatsApp groups and text messages were used to notify many of the Iraqi refugees, who were spread out over Amman. Buses were booked, departing from the areas most populated by Iraqi refugees. I attended the ‘sit-in’, as the Iraqi demonstrators referred to their act of mobilisation. A group of approximately 150 Iraqi nationals (my quick headcount came to almost 100 men and 50 women and a few children) had gathered. Approximately ten Sudanese refugees had joined with similar demands. As a white European woman, I stood out and I was rather formally welcomed by one of the Iraqi organisers to join what he called ‘their revolution’. He expressed how grateful he was to the Jordanian king for letting him stay in Jordan, which can be read as a performative act of making clear that the protest was not targeting the Jordanian government. He emphasised: ‘Everyone here has their personal story, but we have gathered to address the same thing: to demand communication with the UN about our cases.’ The protest was a means to demand accountability and to challenge the organisation they held responsible for the betterment of their living conditions. The protestors held banners that explained their cases in English, including their UNHCR case numbers and their demand for their ‘right for resettlement’. Slogans were chanted, which can be translated as ‘We want a solution’ and ‘UN, where is your humanitarianism?’ Prior to the protest, many had been gathering money to buy airtime on one of the smaller Iraqi news channels.1 Deeply aware of the connection between media attention and the direction of humanitarian assistance, they aimed to spark media interest for Iraqi refugees in Jordan. The most outspoken people were interviewed. After two days of protesting, UNHCR Jordan’s staff made promises to change their communication policy and the ‘sit-in’ came to an end. Protests in response to the discrepancy between refugee rights and the actual capacities of the UNHCR’s operating missions to safeguard these rights are not new. In 2006, over 3,000 Sudanese refugees organised a sit-in in Cairo in Egypt to contest the UNHCR’s politics of care, protection and mobility (Grabska, 2006). In June 2009, more than a hundred refugees gathered in front of UNHCR’s office in Rabat, Morocco to demand immediate resettlement and the right to speak for themselves (Scheel and Ratfisch, 2013). As such, they challenged the UNHCR’s legitimacy to speak on their behalf. By appropriating the practices and language focused on rights, protesting refugees spoke up in order to have a say in the ‘solution to their

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plight’ (Moulin and Nyers, 2007: 370) and interrupted the ‘UNHCR’s monopoly over the language of protection, care and resettlement’ (2007: 363). Refugees are too easily thought of and reduced to nonpolitical human beings. One of the main issues that complicates protests in countries that have not (fully) ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention is the question of where the locus of responsibility and accountability sits in relation to the rights of refugees (Stevens, 2015). Does it sit with the host government or the UNHCR? When I spoke to UNHCR Jordan’s Resettlement Officer in August 2015, she emphasised the UNHCR’s limits as she stated that UNHCR cannot create a country. Interestingly, the Sudanese protestors in Egypt mentioned above drew upon exactly the same slogan to demand the accountability of the UN body in the absence of a state that could provide them with comprehensive refugee protection. Their claims read: ‘We live in a country of UNHCR’ (Grabska, 2006; Moulin and Nyers, 2007). For many of the world’s migrants, the sheer visibility of protest can be an activity of last resort (Tyler and Marciniak, 2013). The 2006 protests in Cairo eventually resulted in the death of at least twenty-eight people (Grabska, 2006). And in contrast to the earlier refugee protests, the UNHCR called in the police during the 2009 protests in Morocco, which violently dissolved the crowd (Scheel and Ratfisch, 2013). The risks of refugee protests also became clear in Jordan on 18 December 2015. In direct violation of international humanitarian law and the 1998 MoU between the Jordanian government and the UNHCR, 585 Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers were forcefully returned to Sudan after demonstrating in front of the UNHCR’s office. Many of them were Darfuri and therefore persecuted by the central government led by Omar al-Bashir. Most carried UNHCR documents that should have guaranteed their legal right to stay in Jordan (Staton, 2016b; Williams, 2016). Sudanese refugees in Jordan had long struggled with everyday racism (Haddad, 2012). This violation of rights can be considered as another devastating example of the racism that black and ethnic minority migrants experience in Jordan and as a deliberate act to stoke fear amongst all refugee and other precarious migrant communities.2 Temporary refugee protection implies that the leniency towards Iraqis and other refugees by the Jordanian government has an expiry date. This might make protesting by refugees dangerous, and potentially explains the organiser’s expression of gratefulness to the Jordanian government. But this was not the reason that kept Kholoud and her husband Abu Adam from attending. Abu Adam believed that some members of the Iraq refugee community had not been resettled because their acts of standing up for their rights did not fit with the ascribed behaviour of the ‘good refugee’ (Scheel and Ratfisch, 2013: 936). Abu Adam’s concerns were not directed at the Jordanian state, a country where he is legally tolerated, but towards the potential consequences undertaken by UNHCR Jordan. This again points to the

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power that he, like many of the people in this study, ascribed to UNHCR Jordan regarding resettlement selection. Yet it is certainly true that in the past, the UNHCR has taken issue with refugee protests (Crisp, 2017). Much of the emphasis on the refugee protection discourse centres on maintaining and managing ‘order’ (Scheel and Ratfisch, 2013: 934). If a queue is the physical manifestation of waiting and order (Hage, 2009; Schwartz, 1975), a protest can be considered as the opposite: as disorder and a chaos that needs to be contained. Despite promises made in response to the May protest, I got the impression that relatively few changes were made towards the improvement of the UNHCR’s communication.3 This was confirmed by the organisation of yet another protest with similar demands by Iraqi refugees in September 2015. Several of the former organisers had left for Europe, there were far fewer attendees and the atmosphere was very different. In May, among the demonstrators there seemed to be a sense of excitement and relief at having come together and at being able to verbalise their concerns. In September, the affective environment seemed more anxious. Much of the attendees’ attention was on the events at Europe’s borders and the potential influence these developments could have on their personal fate. A young Iraqi woman held a placard featuring Angela Merkel, perhaps in the hope that this ‘compassionate mother’ (Olterman, 2015) of the Syrian refugees who had reached Europe could also help Iraqi refugees like her in Jordan. When I attended the September protest, I often heard a similar concern: why was it that European countries were helping people who had suddenly entered Europe and not them, who had been waiting legally for years? There was also confusion as the present refugees tried to consolidate the internalised discourse on the criminalisation of migration and the interlinked notion of deservingness: because they had fled first and had been ‘sticking’ it out (Hage, 2015), they ought to be more entitled to a future elsewhere then others. Their words mark out the fear that – given the deep awareness that Europe’s compassion tends to be sparse – there would be no asylum slots left from them. Travelling irregularly was considered as jumping the orderly queue – marked out as ‘illegalised’ (de Genova, 2002), it was internalised as criminal behaviour that was unjustly rewarded. At one point during the September protest, I was approached by UNHCR Jordan’s Communication Officer, whose name I recognised. I had sent him several emails with a request for an interview, but he had never responded. I was asked what I was doing in front of UNHCR Jordan’s premises, as it was ‘his’ mandate to protect the people present. He explained that the people present were expressing ‘a lot of emotions’. I was invited for a meeting in his office to hear the ‘real’ story. However, he never responded to the emails I sent to him subsequently to arrange a meeting.

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The Communication Officer was right about the emotiveness in the accounts of the refugees who were present: the stakes were high. To be sure, recognising their emotiveness is not an excuse for dismissing their accounts. Marking language out as (too) emotional is a way to pathologise, to exclude narratives from the register of legitimate speech (Ahmed, 2013) and to reinstate power relations. The unequal power relationships between humanitarian practitioners and benefactors are far from immune to this. For instance, in disaster-response scenarios in the Philippines, some accounts of affected people were simply discounted as emotional outbursts (Madianou et al., 2015). Given the focus of humanitarianism on vulnerability, this is at least somewhat paradoxical. Acting emotional is read as out of line with the appropriate behaviour of the ‘good refugee’ and is therefore simply disregarded. A central question in the literature on refugee protests is whether these protests would exceed the politics of citizenship and/or act against the exclusionary logic of citizenship (Tyler and Marciniak, 2013). This question goes beyond the scope of this book, but most refugees I worked with did not voice a direct critique on a system built of exclusionary nation-states; on the contrary, many expressed a strong desire to fit back into the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995b). The 2006 Sudanese protestors in Egypt (Grabska, 2006; Moulin and Nyers, 2007), the 2009 refugee protestors in Morocco (Scheel and Ratfisch, 2013) and the 2015 Iraqi refugee protestors in Jordan all verbalised their demands around their (presumed) ‘right to resettlement’. Given how the world is currently organised, this is understandable: for the people in this study, it provides one of very few somewhat realistic and sustainable ways out of the bureaucratic, legal and social circumstances in which Iraqi refugees in Jordan find themselves. But can such claims be considered a stance against the very borders that oppress them rather than as a tactic made in precarious legal and structural difficulties? In refugee governance, demands for one’s ‘right to resettlement’ are often too easily dismissed by stating that resettlement is not a right (Sandvik, 2011: 10). But if no attention is paid to the actual demands formulated by people in legally marginalised positions, would I not be further complicit in silencing their voices? Rather than looking for opportunities to legally integrate in Jordan or to ever go back to Iraq, as I explained in the last two chapters, many of the hopes of Iraqi refugees were oriented towards obtaining legal entry and residence in a Western country. This also became evident in the emphasis in claims heard among Iraqi refugees and seen on the banners during the two protests. For instance, one of the banners read: ‘Stop!!! Our tragedies that we are experiencing. “Resettlement” is the solution.’ And whereas the Iraqi refugees had gathered communally to protest, it seemed that actual collective mobility was inhibited by an emphasis on

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rather individualistic journeys and opportunities for a few (Tuckett, 2016). In a world governed by borders, neoliberal capitalism and technocolonialism (Madianou, 2019a) and experienced through wars, violence and prolonged legal uncertainties, seeking individual outward mobility can be the only conceivable and the only available safe and legal pathway forward. Critical border scholars have argued that there are moments of autonomy prior to and in response to migration management (Papadopoulos et al., 2008). Among other things, the autonomy of migration approach refutes the victimisation of migrants, points to the important social and subjective functions of migration, and emphasises how borders are porous and are shaped and built by human beings (Scheel, 2019). The productivity of borders and border controls relates to its differential inclusion of migrants (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013), which includes differential treatment and access to movement. It also produces ideas about what are and what are not (il)legitimate ways of movement. Efforts to negotiate the control and power of migration management can therefore still be considered acts in response to borders, especially if the aim is to ‘fit back in’. And not any solution to ‘fit back in’ would be embraced. Anthropologist Ghasan Hage (2015) differentiates between modes of waiting and experiences of ‘stuckedness’. ‘Stuckedness’ is the opposite of mobility, in that it is the experience of an embedded, embodied everyday reality of not moving (on) in life and that one is socially or physically stuck. But for Hage, waiting is still fulfilled with hope, whereas ‘stuckedness’ would be characterised by a paralysis of the radical imagination. Here and in the rest of this book, I argue for a re-evaluation of the role of the imagination in the midst of ‘stuckedness’. In everyday prolonged conditions of displacement and with the past presence of war and violence, sustaining a hopeful outlook towards the future is crucial for deploying tactics to potentially become unstuck. Most often, as Hage attests, these imaginations are not that radical. But they are agentic. In contrast to the Palestinian diaspora, who managed to build online communities despite physical dispersal (Aouragh, 2011), neoliberal capitalism, border regimes and imagined futures based upon transnational connections and mass media seem to restrict the Iraqi refugees examined in this study from imagining and establishing more collective struggles to improve their rights within and beyond Jordan. Hage (2015) might have been right that in experiences of ‘stuckedness’, there is a lack of radical imagination. But a critique like this should not be misread as putting individualised blame on the refugees themselves. The problem here is not that refugees’ imageries are falling short, but of refugees’ rights structurally falling short. And the same power relations that make it more likely that people attach themselves to some ideas also make the world more hospitable to some persons than it is to other persons.

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The term ‘tactics’ is used conscientiously. I critically appropriate the de Certeau’s (1984) differentiation between strategies of the more powerful and tactics that people living under duress deploy. In relation to this first tactic – refugee protests – I understand UNHCR Jordan as the locus of power, not to reinforce a duality between who would be powerful and who would be powerless or to claim that UNHCR Jordan has more capacity than it actually has, but rather considering how the Iraqi refugees attribute power to the agency and/or hope that the agency has power. The second tactic focuses directly on Fortress Europe and how in the summer of 2015 its (neo)colonial borders were temporarily more porous than they were before or afterwards. This is because another similarity between the refugee protests in Egypt, Morocco and Jordan was that all three countries are focal points for the EU’s externalising migration strategy. Whereas the UNHCR’s operations are crucial to (somewhat) protecting the rights of people whose rights might not be protected otherwise, their operations equally enable Europe’s containment strategies: only a few vulnerable yet resilient people are carefully selected for resettlement, while those in waiting in the Global South are controlled and contained (Hyndman and Giles, 2011). De Certeau’s thinking has been criticised for the presumption that tactics of making do would be beneficial for those who act: Tactics of making do can ‘fail, backfire or end up constituting that against which they are directed’ (Schielke, 2015: 218). National sovereignty holds sway over the political imagination of the Iraqi refugees in Jordan, as their preferences for solutions seem to follow an internalised sedentarist metaphysics. Perhaps more often than not, tactics can be (mis)used to reinforce the very structures people are acting against, as has also become evident in the EU’s reinforced focus on regional containment prior to and in response to ‘Europe’s crisis’ (Squire et al., 2021). And even for those people who find the financial resources and the desperation needed to travel irregularly, lives as asylum seekers, illegalised migrants and recognised refugees in the Global North are also increasingly likely to continue being marked by uncertainty.

Escaping Jordan’s ‘Surrogate State’, Stuck in Border Regimes In the early summer of 2015, I noticed that the Iraqi refugees I hung out with were increasingly talking about irregular ways of travelling in(to) Europe. I use the word ‘in(to)’ as it was evident that for those people who were thinking of leaving for Europe, their fragmented journeys (Collyer, 2007) would not end with their safe arrival in Greece or Italy. They would continue to somewhere in the northwest of Europe and were likely to be slowed down

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because of asylum and integration procedures. The words tahrib (migration) or katjaq (a Turkish-derived word for smuggling) were contrasted with the word that Iraqi refugees would use when they were talking about resettlement: tawteen. This terminology is rather confusing, especially considering that how tawteen should be translated is disputed. Lebanese scholar Daniel Meier (2010: 147) translates it as ‘a situation that people endure if they were obliged to settle down’, yet in the history of Palestine refugees, it is used to refer to the prohibition to permanent settlement in Lebanon ( Janmyr, 2017b: 441). Most people would keep their plans for irregular journeying to themselves. Omar did not feel constrained from discussing his potential plans to travel onwards in public when we met at one of the Iraqi-owned cafes to play backgammon. When I double-checked if he felt confident, he stated that almost everyone in that very cafe was talking about the same subject matter. Besides, he argued, he did not believe that anyone in Jordan would really mind if he and his family left. His wife Zeineb was convinced that leaving for Europe was for the best. Omar was collecting as much information as possible, but was still hesitant, for he believed that, like some of the people in the September protest, travelling irregularly was a criminal act that should not be rewarded. But Omar explained that he had nothing left to lose. According to him, nothing was worse than living in waiting in Jordan. Around that time, Omar sent a poem to my WhatsApp number. He had seen this poem on one of the many migration-related Facebook groups he was following. It was accompanied by a drawing of a young girl dragging her suitcase. Whereas I still have access to this picture and the poem, the resolution of it was too low to include in this book. The picture and a shorter version of this poem4 were designed by Rahma al Rahbi, who cites her work by her Instagram handle @roro_19888. Her permission was obtained for sharing it. The version that Omar shared with me is as follows:

‫ ﻣﺴﺎﻓﺮه‬..‫ﻣﺴﺎﻓﺮه‬ ‫ارﴈ‬،‫ ﺳاموي‬،‫ﺑﺤﺮي‬،‫ﺑﺮي‬،‫ﺟﻮي‬ ‫ ﺑﻮ ان ﻧﻮ ان‬-‫ﻳﻮ ان‬ ‫أي ﳾء اﳌﻬﻢ اﺳﻠﻔﺮ‬ ‫ﻗﺠﻖ – ﻣﺠﻖ – ﺑﺠﻖ‬ ‫ﺣﺘﻰ ﻟﻮ ﺑﺎﻟﺠﺪر ﺑﺲ اﳌﻬﻢ‬ ‫اﺳﺎﻓﺮ‬ The poem can be translated as: I am travelling. I will be travelling. Through the air, overland, overseas, Through the sky, across the earth. UN, Boe N, No N

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No matter how, I will travel! Smuggled, Fuggled, Buggled, Even if in a pot, I will travel

The poem and image provide insight into the rather tangible excitement and persistence regarding travelling, which is situated in people’s everyday material uncertain realities, as will be further discussed in Chapter 4. It points to the potential for action and change in response to sometimes years of ‘stuckedness’. The part sentence ‘UN, Boe N, No N’ points to the shifting relationship held towards to the UN(HCR?) as representative of the international community. After the initial reliance on the UNHCR for searching for comprehensive solutions while safeguarding rights, and the disappointment when these were not fully realised (Boe N), there is a giving up on the UN all together (No N) and the realisation that one has to fend for oneself at all costs. This is a confirmation of the movement-seeking affirmative actions discussed by Peter Nyers (2006) and of the force in forced migration (Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Witteborn, 2018). Like this poem, many other mediated messages, images and videos were shared online and via more private messenger applications. Travelling onwards was portrayed as easy, safe and fun. It took a few days later before news channels like Al Jazeera (Arabic and English) and BBC Arabic caught up. Excitement about the potential for movement coincided with a deep awareness of at least the immediate potential risks of the journey. Alongside the videos of successful arrival and onward journeys, people would also share photos and videos of sinking dinghies and people who did not make it. Online platforms warned about scams and dangerous practices, and shared pictures of notorious smugglers who would willingly put people in more unnecessary danger for their own financial benefit. During that time, alongside talk about ‘waiting for resettlement’ and potential alternative journeys, people would also more frequently talk about the prospect of staying in Jordan and how this could result in a slow, precarious withering away. As such, the possibility for quickly dying at sea was contrasted with this ‘social death’ (Hage, 2003; Lucht, 2012; Vigh, 2009): the position of expecting progress set in an environment that only seems to offer socioeconomic and political regress. On her walk across the aptly called Path of Hope between Italy and France, Karina Horsti (2018) encountered several scribbles left behind to leave memories and/or to encourage fellow travellers. One of them read (in Arabic): ‘If you have to live, live free! Or else die motionless, like the trees, motionless’ (2018: 3). Reading the acts and decisions to opt (or not) for irregular movement as an affirmative act is not similar as reading it as celebratory. The decision to leave was extremely difficult, even if there were fewer barriers to overcome. Omar’s aim was to safeguard the future of his children and, as he pointed out, what would be

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the point of taking that risk if they would end up drowning in the Mediterranean Sea? When Omar heard the news that Germany had suspended the Dublin III Regulation, he ceased to hold on to some of his reservations: ‘And then Europe takes action. And suddenly it was: There is only the sea, the problem of the sea you are facing. And after that: no. Because, I don’t know if you know, but one year ago, there was, a police force and all this country problem, but as … when the EU take this action, it was only the sea.’ Dublin III is the EU-wide policy that demands that asylum seekers apply for asylum in the first EU country of entry. Designed for burden sharing, in practice this legislation placed a greater burden on Europe’s bordering countries and limited people’s movement (Cabot, 2016). Its temporary suspension made it easier for refugees to travel onwards to preferred destinations, often located in the northwest of Europe. People’s preferences regarding travelling onwards related to different factors, including the presence of people they knew and what they knew known about matters such as job opportunities and family reunification programmes in these respective countries. The straw that eventually broke the camel’s back regarding Omar’s decision to leave Jordan in an irregularised way was seeing co-nationals reaching Europe. ‘On Facebook, some guys were in safe cities in the south [of Iraq] … And he broadcast this video on Facebook … We felt a mix of sadness, anger and pressure. They took our chance and … We are just sitting here, waiting for UNHCR without no job’. Omar still held on to a logic and hierarchy of deservingness (Holmes and Castañeda, 2016) and was equally and deeply aware that the goodwill of Western countries would have its limits; these other – according to him less legitimate – individuals would take what he considered to be his rightful place. To secure their future, he and his family needed to leave. They planned their journey diligently, also cross-checking and safeguarding the reliability of different smugglers. Omar also taught Zeineb how to swim. Making the horrible and potentially devastating decision to leave Jordan for Europe requires social networks, financial resources and desperation. The last two relate to each other. Given the restrictions on formal employment and limited financial assistance, refugees in Jordan who have savings tend to draw upon them until these are depleted. Omar knew that if he stayed in Jordan for another year, he would no longer have the financial resources to cover the irregular journey. The summer of 2015 was also an exciting and anxious time for those Iraqi refugees who knew they would never be able to make the journey. Adam did not have the financial resources to do so, and even if he had these, he was reluctant to leave his ailing parents behind in Jordan. Yet he was carefully following what was happening. He found the temporary changes regarding the Dublin III Regulation deeply confusing. Friends and family

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members who had made the journey had told him of the importance of circumventing Greek authorities to secure access to asylum elsewhere. This contrasted starkly with what he now saw: ‘Some even go voluntarily to the police to register!’ Abu Mahmoud was also carefully following what was happening. He was mostly puzzled by the broadcast images of the UNHCR stepping into Greece. To him, the organisation was associated with chaos and conflict and not with Europe. He also tried to assess whether these changes would provide an opportunity for his daughter Ibtisam and her family. Ibtisam and her family had undergone RSD and were now formally recognised as refugees. But this status would not directly guarantee Ibtisam and her family that they would also be recognised as refugees in a European country. Travelling onwards would provide her with the opportunity but certainly not the guarantee to obtain refugee recognition in a Western country, as they would need to re-apply for protection. Germany and other European countries have discretionary and rigid standards and procedures in place regarding refugee protection. In most European countries, refugee recognition rates for Iraqi asylum seekers were much lower than they were for Syrian nationals. Deeply aware of the immediate risks of travelling irregularly, the Iraqi refugees seemed to have less knowledge or willingness to engage with these next legal and bureaucratic hurdles on the road. Perhaps this also relates to the necessity of staying hopeful amidst prolonged uncertainty, as will be further discussed in Chapter 5. In 2018, when I organised dissemination activities and conducted follow-up research on the changes in UNHCR Jordan’s communicative infrastructure, I reconnected with some of the people I knew from 2015, including an elderly couple. Their son and his wife and children had travelled onwards from Jordan to Germany in the summer of 2015. But as their claim for asylum had been rejected, they were now residing in a detention centre and had been notified of their potential deportation to Iraq or a third country that would be willing to accept them. For the German state, he and his family did not count as refugees.

Conclusion The Iraqi refugees living in prolonged displacement in Jordan are meaningmaking and connected human beings. They are not only searching for making sense of their predicament; they are actively deploying tactics to become ‘unstuck’. Given the risks that are at stake and the structural injustices around borders in which these tactics take place, it is important to point out the courage and desperation that these acts required. This should not be misread as a celebration of refugees’ agency or resilience (Duffield, 2016),

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nor should it be read as an excuse for not discussing the structural implications that border regimes have on people’s lives beyond those very borders. After dangerous journeys and navigating the uncertainty around Europe’s asylum system, some people have been able to obtain refugee status. This can provide them with the opportunity to regain some normality and a more hopeful future. For others, their actions have contributed to either very little change as waiting continues (in Jordan or for asylum in Europe) or has had disastrous consequences, such as deportation or death at sea. Experiences of immobility and uncertainty are deeply grounded in material injustices. But these structural constraints can still be undone. That is what makes the search for exits worthwhile.

Notes 1. See also Chapter 5, p. 111, on Iraqi narrowcasting channels that came into being after the 2003. 2. Ever since, UNHCR Jordan has made efforts to improve its relationship with the Sudanese refugee community. Yet it continues to cast a dark shadow on how Sudanese refugees perceive the humanitarian community and protection in Jordan ( Johnston et al., 2019: 54). It also influenced the perceptions of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, as will become evident in Chapter 7. 3. In Chapter 7 I discuss the many changes in the UNHCR’s communicative structure that occurred in the period between 2015 and 2018. 4. When I sought the permission of the artist, she sent me the original picture which included a much shorter version of the poem.

‫ ﺑﻮ ان ﻧﻮ ان‬-‫ﻳﻮ ان‬ ‫ﻗﺠﻖ – ﻣﺠﻖ – ﺑﺠﻖ‬ ‫ﺣﺘﻰ ﻟﻮ ﺑﺎﻟﺠﺪر ﺑﺲ اﳌﻬﻢ‬ ‫اﺳﺎﻓﺮ‬ UN, Boe N, No N No matter how! will travel! Smuggled, Fuggled, Buggled, Even if in a pot, I will travel The part-sentences must have been added by someone else at a later point, also showing how shared messages can be fluid and subject to change.

4 Prolonged Legal Uncertainties and Their Interaction with Virtual Home-Making Practices in Amman

The last two chapters largely focused on the sense-making practices of Iraqi urban refugees in interaction with UNHCR Jordan and the forced migration regime. The following two chapters zoom in on the mediation of everyday material life in prolonged conditions of displacement in Jordan, specifically in urban Iraqi refugee households. Here, I consider the relationships of Iraqi refugees with their geographical location, beyond the humanitarian context, and how this interacts with digital practices. This is because, alongside and often at the same time as describing a life in waiting, many Iraqi refugees initially described experiencing life in Jordan as ‘comfortable’ These experiences were often related to safety and physical integrity. Life in Jordan was often compared to the lives they had left behind after enduring prolonged conflict. Several Iraqi refugees emphasised how, after years of broken fearful nights, it was only upon arrival in Jordan that they were finally able to sleep again. Nabila – a 41-year-old widow – had initially described her life in West Amman as comfortable. A few weeks later, she described her life in Jordan as that of an open prison, which seems to imply a deep sense of discomfort. Seemingly contradictory, it shows how experiences of (in)security are multilayered and change over time. As my relationship with Nabila developed, she might have felt more comfortable with revealing her discomforts. Like Nabila, some people might have – especially but not only upon first impressions – felt the need to show gratefulness (Nayeri, 2019), which is often part and parcel of the process of becoming-and-being a refugee. Besides, why would I expect people who are also refugees to feel comfortable with expos-

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ing their discomforts to a stranger, as is not only expected during asylum applications but also during the many fleeting interactions with humanitarian actors? The descriptions of everyday life in Jordan also almost always implied or explicitly included the caveat ‘for now’. Life in Jordan was marked out as a temporal, transitional phase. This relates to the limited opportunities for formal employment and for building up a more stable new life. Restricted legal opportunities in place not only limit everyday life in the present; they equally foreclose possibilities for financial and social security and for envisioning upward social mobility and/or a future in Jordan. ‘Stuckedness’ is the feeling and experience that one is not ‘going places’ (Hage, 2004: 112; 2015): of limited social and/or physical mobility. This lack of ability to ‘go places’ was also quite literal because a combination of safety concerns, financial worries and social constraints meant that many of the Iraqi refugees I engaged with largely stayed indoors in the relatively safe space of their temporary homes.

Place Matters In the context of prolonged conditions of displacement, home-making and place-making are perpetually negotiated processes that occur in-between violent ruptures with one’s past and the ongoing ambivalence around the present and future, between the symbolic and the material and between multiple places and space (Brun and Fábos, 2015). In the prolonged stretches of time spent in-between, much of everyday life continues and important social and subjective changes occur (Crawley et al., 2017). The possibilities of technologies for engendering homely feelings (Doná, 2015) interact with the many prolonged legal, socioeconomic and temporal constraints in place. I argue against an understanding of forced and other migrants as ‘matter out of place’ (Malkki, 1995a). As embodied and relational human beings, place matters and influences refugees’ subjective and social experiences of being at home and feeling out of place in Jordan. Place can be considered as an open and dynamic ‘constellation of social relations’ (Massey, 1991: 155). Economic, political and social relations meet and interact in a particular geographical locus, yet many of those relations, experiences and understandings go beyond that specific geographical location as they are constructed through larger power geometries. I scrutinise the meaning of place in the term ‘displacement’ as digital connections to people and places elsewhere are deeply grounded in and interact with the prolonged ambivalence concerning refugees’ geographical place in the world. Shaun Moores’ (2012) work on the embodiment of technologies provides further explanation on the connection between

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place-making and technology use. He draws on the phenomenology of human geographer Yi-Fi Tuan. Places are ‘constituted when locations are routinely lived-in, through repetitive, habitual practices, given rise to affective attachments in which people are emotionally bounded to their material environment’ (Moores, 2012: 27). Virtual and physical presences interact and together contribute to meaningful social and subjective relations about place. If needed, digital connectivity can provide additional ways for not actively engaging with one’s geographical location. But place continues to matter in regard to experiences of being-at-home, while not feeling-at-home (hooks, 1990; Massey, 1994; Young, 2005). Place and home are complex interrelated configurations. Here I understand ‘home’ as a place towards which human beings gravitate; a geographical setting to which a person feels strong emotive, psychological and social attachments. Home-making is the ongoing practice towards seeking a sense of place of one’s own, feeling secure and searching for strong social and psychological attachments (Brun and Fábos, 2015; Morley, 2000). Beyond a physical place, home is deeply related to ideas and imaginaries, to a sense of security and towards the possibility (or restrictions) of having a place of one’s own (Brun and Fábos, 2015). Feminist thinkers have long recognised that the security and stability of a ‘home’ and the sense of belonging it provides are far from guaranteed, given that positive characteristics (care, security) associated with the idea of home tend to coincide with negative characteristics (boredom, potential for control and abuse) (hooks, 1990; Young, 2005). And feeling out of control and uncertain (not ‘at home’) tends to necessitate the need for finding a shelter and community, a place where it is safe to resist, people are recognised as subjects and the dignity that is denied in the public world can be restored. This makes home a complex configuration. In prolonged conditions of displacement, virtual interactions and virtual spaces are known to provide a sense of stability and sociality that one’s physical location cannot offer (Doná, 2015; Leurs, 2014, 2016). The feelings these interactions generate are often fleeting, but they can nonetheless provide a sense of home.

Multi-layered Experiences of (In)Security: Feelings out of Place in Jordan Experiences of (in)security consist of different interacting domains, which I will now consider in more depth. The brackets in (in)security serve to place emphasis on how experiences and feelings of security and insecurity tend to be in flux and are far from straightforward. Experiences of (in)security consist of matters regarding physical integrity, legal and material precariousness, social stability and ontological security. Here I tease out physical

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integrity, financial uncertainty and social insecurity. Ontological security refers to one’s confidence in continuity and reliability in one’s self and in one’s surroundings (Giddens, 1991), and will be discussed later in this chapter. The ambivalence in the lives of the Iraqi refugees in this study relates to everyday experiences in the present, but is equally connected to experiences of violence in the past, sociohistorical positionings and uncertainty about the future. And whereas these experiences are to some extent related to having limited legal rights in Jordan – a temporary stay, not having the right to work – Brun, Fàbos and El-Abed (2017) show that legal recognition alone does not ‘solve’ questions on rights as their study among (formerly) displaced people in Georgia, Sudan and Jordan exposed the ongoing discrepancy between rights, belonging and legal status.

To Whom Should Refugees Turn with Concerns Regarding Physical Integrity? Humanitarian reason (Fassin, 2012) tends to reduce the lives of refugees to only biological lives. The presumption that mere physical survival would ever be enough ignores and reduces refugees’ biographical lives (Brun, 2016). Whereas the Iraqi refugees in this study were most likely safer than that they had been in Iraq, physical security – safety from general and individually targeted violence – was not necessarily a given, as will become clear in the following examples. Aram, an Assyrian Christian and father of two, received a home visit from proselytising Muslims. Aram’s village was raided by ISIS, so this incident at his doorstep was dreadful for him as it brought back memories of that time. In Jordan, religion, like citizenship, is patrilineally ascribed and proselytising is against the law. Aram called UNHCR Jordan, but the agency never responded. Instead, Aram’s Jordanian pastor helped him out and called the police on his behalf, also suggesting the importance and presence of solidarity by host communities (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016). Haydar was walking home one night in Amman when he was beaten up by a group of unidentified men. The 22-year-old Iraqi man did not call the Jordanian police and nor did he or his mother asked for immediate help from UNHCR Jordan. They also did not notify the UNHCR at a later stage about what happened, as they were afraid that recording this violent incidence could somehow jeopardise their chance for resettlement. Power differentials between the UNHCR and refugees can reinforce anxiety rather than trust that the UNHCR can and will provide practical assistance. Technology use can increase risks and alter protection needs. Concerns have been raised about biometric registration and with which state and nonstate actors this personal and sensitive information is shared (LembergPedersen and Haioty, 2020; Madianou, 2019b). But the potentials and dan-

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gers of refugees’ datafication and other forms of humanitarian technology use were not (yet) at the forefront of the worries and experiences of the Iraqi refugees in this study. The digital practices of refugees can also increase visibility and risks beyond the borders of nation-state they sought refuge from (Moss, 2018). This became evident from Ismail’s experience, who left Iraq as his family members had threatened to kill him. An employee of Zain – one of Jordan’s main telecommunication providers, which works closely with UNHCR Jordan – provided these relatives with Ismail’s Jordanian phone number. This enabled them to track him down and threaten him again. Ismail went into hiding and contacted UNHCR Jordan. Consequently, he received priority status for third country resettlement because of his increased protection needs. But despite this clear threat on his life and the priority he received, it took four more years before he was resettled in a third country. The UNHCR’s position in Jordan can be understood as that of a ‘surrogate state’ (Kagan, 2011). It performs functions that are generally performed by a state, yet its abilities to act are heavily restricted by geopolitics. It does not have its own police force and has limited capacities to help people like Ismail. It was also unresponsive to the call for help from Aram mentioned above. Meanwhile, the experience of Haydar and his mother suggests that uncertainty about what UNHCR Jordan can do can also keep people from addressing their immediate protection needs. Living in the Jordanian state, the Iraqi refugees felt that the Jordanian police are only there to police and not to protect them. This is not necessarily dissimilar to experiences of members of Jordan’s host populations and of other refugee populations. In particular, those who are poor and received little formal education have difficulty seeking assistance in relation to legal problems and disputes (HiiL – Innovating Justice, 2017). An important difference is that Jordan’s refugees tend to have less access to the often, long-established social networks (wasta) that tend to be needed in Jordan to work the system than their Jordanian counterparts have access to (UN Women and REACH, 2017).1 Ismail was the only Iraqi refugee I met whose safety in Jordan was at direct risk in relation to his digital traceability. Some people in this study were extremely cautious in terms of what they would pose online. Others were afraid that their transnational connections would impose risks on loved ones back in Iraq or believed that these interactions were listened to. Yet, in 2015, there seemed to be relatively few concerns over surveillance by the Jordanian state among the Iraqi refugees in this study. For instance, several young men who held relatively stable jobs working informally would make mention of their employment on their Facebook profiles. It was also only in response and after ‘Europe’s crisis’ that I noticed more caution on what was posted online, perhaps also in response to the data-scraping practices by countries like Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United King-

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dom in asylum-seeking procedures ( Jumbert et al., 2018; Marino, 2021), and other developments such as the encryption of message platforms such as Viber and WhatsApp. Like the people whose experiences I narrated, all Iraqi refugees in this study were registered with UNHCR Jordan. It is the UNHCR’s mandate to safeguard the physical integrity of the persons registered. Yet these and several other personal narratives of experiences of threats leave the impression that even a narrow understanding of protection for Iraqi refugees in Jordan falls short. Registration with the UNHCR might allow legal presence in Jordan, but UNHCR Jordan’s capacities to safeguard the physical integrity of its PoC seemed rather limited. Physical security – safety from general and individually targeted violence – was not a guarantee for Iraqi refugees in Jordan. Experiences in this regard also interacted with people’s biographical lives, including past experiences, and interacted with identity markers such as gender, religion and sexuality.

Financial Uncertainty Feeling secure goes beyond physical integrity. Experiencing (in)security about one’s place in the world equally relates to financial security and the absence of long-term economic and social prospects (Chatelard, 2016). Despite formal restrictions to work, in eleven of the thirty-five households I visited, there was at least one member of the household who was either informally employed or who was doing odd jobs. For some, the idea of being caught working evoked a ‘palpable sense of deportability’ (de Genova, 2002: 439). Others were not concerned at all about being caught working informally. These perceptions also differed regarding sector – for instance, if one was doing a desk job or working in a shop. Those who had been caught before and had received a fine or a threat that they might potentially be deported to Iraq generally came across as more unsure. Hassan – who had come to Jordan to work in 2000 – bought his first phone in 2002 with the main purpose of knowing where the good business was and to receive warnings about the arrival of the police (Harney, 2013). Several others Iraqi refugees participating in this study were working or had been working as a remunerated ‘volunteer’ with one of many NGOs aiding refugees, as these positions tend to only be temporary. In Jordan’s precarious protection space, such jobs are highly desirable, given that they are ‘safe’ as they are considered as stipends and pay well above the national average wage (Stevens, 2016). Many Iraqi refugees who took part in this study had at least once participated in one of the many vocational training courses that INGOs and CBOs would frequently run. I was often told by (former) participants that they attended these training courses because they provided a sense of community, to learn something new or else as a way

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to spend their time. Also, travel to attend these courses was often paid for. Attendees would often find cheaper means of transportation so the travel stipend could serve as an additional and necessary means of income. The training programmes were often based upon the idea that refugees and their nonrefugee peers could become entrepreneurs (Ilcan and Rygiel, 2015; Pascucci, 2019) as home-based business owners. The intended self-reliance of these programmes only became a reality for very few. Digital connectivity can also enable ways to circumvent the local legal constraints for decent work. One of Nabila’s sons was heavily involved in Amman’s newly emerging start-up scene and had been able to land a relatively secure and decent job as a remote computer programmer for a Dutch NGO. Digital connectivity and his computer skills – taught to him by his late father – had enabled him to circumvent the legal and material restrictions in Jordan and he was therefore able sustain a relatively sustainable livelihood for himself and his family. Another son of Nabila had received a scholarship to pursue his studies in the United States and was now working for a big tech company in Silicon Valley on making the internet globally accessible. Skills in digital connectivity can also provide access to social and physical mobility. Whereas I was aware of the exploitative potentials of the online gig economy (Berg et al., 2018), I was not untouched by tech optimism as I started to consider whether online work could also be a possibility for other refugees in Jordan to circumvent local legal and social constraints to work. More recent innovations introduced by UNHCR Jordan such as mobile wallets (UNHCR Jordan, 2019b) are designed to overcome the many legal constraints that make it difficult for refugees to open a bank account in Jordan. But approaches to refugees’ economic inclusion in Jordan are often short-sighted and decontextualised (Lenner and Turner, 2018). Efforts that promote self-reliance through entrepreneurship – for instance, via homebased business or digital connectivity – draw upon the rather reductive and meritocratic presumption that all people who become forcibly displaced are able to obtain the skills and equipment needed and have the desire to become informalised computer programmers or online workers. And concerns about the lack of social security and protection while working illegally and at the whims of a highly competitive market economy remain. In Chapter 6 I further consider how this affects the importance of rights as refugees are expected to be resilient in their adversity (Ilcan and Rygiel, 2015) and to adopt an increasingly neoliberal focus on self-reliance and innovation (Pascucci, 2019). Aid, savings or drawing upon social networks for financial support were other important, and often complementary means, for sustaining an income. Those who had used up their savings would often seek cheaper accommodation in East rather than West Amman. The structural support from

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UNHCR Jordan, which was aptly referred to as a ‘salary’ (raatib), that some of the Iraqi refugees who had been longer in Jordan were still receiving was complemented by additional support from NGOs and financial help from relatives in Iraq or other countries. Technological infrastructures enabled ways to access resources (for instance, in a bank account) or to receive financial support from elsewhere (Gordano Peile, 2016; Lindley, 2010). These money flows can be considered as integral processes of globalisation from below (Al-Ali and Koser, 2002; Karim, 2003). They are counterflows that interact with sociopolitical realities, but they are also to a large extent dependent on social and political forces, as became evident when in response to 9/11, the ‘money transfer lifeline’ to Somalia was shut down (van Hear and Horst, 2002). The sending of remittances can also result in heightened expectations towards kin and (feel like) increased pressure on those who have made it further, potentially creating or reinforcing new disjunctures (Gordano Peile, 2016; Lindley, 2007). What characterises these different sources of income is that they are all meant to be only temporary. They have expiry dates and can fall away at any point. This further contributes to worries about material certainty, given that life in Amman is relatively expensive in comparison to life in Iraq. Planning requires, to a certain extent, knowing what the future brings. Without any legal and social certainty, this is extremely difficult, further reinforcing concerns about how long they will be able to ‘stick it out’ (Hage, 2015: 4).

Social Instability and Limited Movement In Jordan, much of everyday Iraqi refugee life took place indoors, yet the importance of locality endures. Experiences of (in)security relate to everyday local surroundings. The meanings that are attributed to a space are a combination of material and mediated interactions. Space is produced, represented and lived (LeFebvre, 2003). Those Iraqi refugees who were residing in East Amman were generally struggling more with the materiality of their current lives than those residing in West Amman, given that as a result of the city’s rapid growth and short-sighted urban planning, much of the infrastructure in the East was put in place without any adherence to planning or building regulations (Abu-Hamdi, 2018). Many of the Iraqi refugees hailing from the Assyrian Christian community had regrouped in Hashmi Schmali, a heavily populated area in East Amman popular among Iraqi refugees of all creeds. Prior to their flight, many Assyrian Christians residing in Hashmi had been living in relatively secluded Christian-dominated towns that were taken over and subsequently largely destroyed by ISIS. In response to their personal experiences of the atrocities committed by Islamist terrorists, they had obtained a heightened sense of generalised distrust towards Muslims. Yet they were now physically

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closer to everyday sounds associated with Islamic practices than they had ever been. The adhan – the call to prayer – and the sound of the drums during the fasting month of Ramadan entered their cramped apartments, further heightening the awkward feelings they already had towards the place in which they were now residing. Bad memories and concerns about whether Jordan would continue to be a safe country were only aggravated by experiences of sounds and practices that had been previously distant to them. But it was far from only the Assyrian Christian Iraqi refugees who were struggling with the crowded lives in East Amman. Everyday difficulties were often framed around religious differences or national identity markers. In Chapter 1, I suggested that refugees’ experiences of difficulties perhaps relate more closely to downward social mobility and loss, given that Iraqi refugees came from a predominantly urban middle-class background (Bishop, 2016; Pascucci, 2011) and had not previously lived in such densely populated working-class areas. Sarah Bishop (2016) in her study on US resettlement found something similar: Iraqi refugees who were resettled in the United States would contrast the everyday material struggles of their new lives with the relative comfort of how life had been in pre-2003 socialistoriented Iraq. Assyrian Christian Iraqi and Sabean Iraqi refugees would sometimes emphasise their non-Arabness to further differentiate themselves for other Iraqi nationals. Iraqi (Arab) refugees living in East Amman would often emphasise the presumed Palestinian-ness of their neighbours. Boundary drawing makes it possible to distinguish oneself and to sustain the idea of oneself as different. By saying who you are not or by saying who the ‘others’ are, a process of distinction is performed (Bourdieu, 1991). Differentiating identity markers can serve to make another person feel ‘out of place’ and/or mark them out as not belonging. But if you do not want to belong, maintaining a difference from the people you are sharing a place with might can equally serve a social or subjective purpose. By putting the emphasis on differences – in this case national or ethnic identities – these differences come into being and act to further differentiate oneself from ‘themselves’. This can serve as a way of sustaining the idea of temporariness: living in these difficult circumstances and in this place was only a transitory phase because one does not ‘belong’. Jordan’s particular geographical location could hold a threat for those who have already experienced warfare. This includes concerns that the wars in Iraq and Syria, two of its bordering countries, could spill over, given that the borders were nearby. It also included concerns about whether Jordan’s local population would continue to be hospitable. Anxiety about Jordan’s safety was palpable when on 3 February 2015, a video of the violent killing of a Jordanian air force pilot on Syrian territory by ISIS went viral. Many of the Iraqi refugees found this event to be deeply unsettling, as they were wor-

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ried that this act of violence could have consequences for Jordan’s hospitality to Iraqi and Syrian refugees. In 2015, this was the only occasion – other than when there was a snowstorm – that I noticed there to be substantive interest in Jordanian state TV and Jordanian news in Iraqi refugee homes. On all other occasions, Iraqi refugees largely refrained from watching Jordanian news; it was generally considered to be boring and not of relevance to them personally. There are certainly times when the Iraqi refugees in this study would feel secure and comfortable. And several of the people in this study had excellent relationships with their Jordanian, Palestinian and/or Syrian neighbours. But for those who were not volunteering or working informally, interactions with the host populations were largely limited to mundane interactions with local aid workers, shopkeepers and taxi drivers. For some, this occurred haphazardly, whereas for others, it was a more conscientious act. For instance, I perceive Kholoud to be a lively and very sociable woman. She often engaged in activities with co-nationals run at a local community-based organisation and had friendships with fellow Iraqi refugee women like her, but also with Jordanian, Palestinian, and Syrian women. I was therefore surprised that she told me she largely refrained from interactions with people from Jordan she did not know: ‘I am afraid that because I am Iraqi, I don’t have any strength in the Jordanian society. So, if something happened, I wouldn’t be able to do anything. So, I simply AVOID all that by not making any conversation.’ Outdoors, Kholoud wears an abaya – a black robe-like gown. She wears a veil when there are nonrelated men in her home. She explained it was only upon her move from Damascus – where she and her family had initially sought refuge – to Hashmi Schmali that she changed the clothes she wears from jeans and a shirt to an abaya: ‘They said: Haram [Shame]. You are a woman you don’t have to put on lipstick and uhm … wear trousers.’ She adjusted her outside dress to what she experienced as being expected from her in East Amman. Moving house or to an environment where rent is cheaper can be a means to cut expenses. But moving to a new house can also be another tactic to escape discomfort and to establish distance from conflicting relationships. Since I met Kholoud and her family in 2012, they have moved five times within the same neighbourhood in East Amman for various reasons, including water damage. Their penultimate move related to the alleged drug use of their neighbour. Kholoud and her husband were adamant on the importance of creating distance in this case, since they had little trust in the police and the potential involvement of their sons could further endanger their already precarious situation. In Amman, interactions and movement occur in gendered, classed and racialised ways. In West Amman, there were several Iraqi-owned cafes where Iraqi men could find a home away from Iraq and from their current domestic

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setting. There, they could surround themselves by male co-nationals, the familiar sounds of the Iraqi Arabic accent and visual testimonies of Iraq’s past, for instance through pictures of the late Iraqi king Faisal II. In East Amman, young Iraqi men would also hang out with fellow nationals in cafes, but only if there was some extra money to spend. However, the lack of financial security – for now and the future – often inhibited the ability of young and older Iraqi men to spend money outdoors. In 2015, yellow taxis were the main means of transportation within Amman. This meant sharing a confined space for a certain amount of time with a taxi driver who was most often a stranger. And considering that Jordanian taxi drivers would often make conversation, especially with men, this could create space for unexpected or even violent experiences. These conversations could be entertaining or informative, but they could also become derogatory, hurtful or racist. According to many, the lingering idea that ‘the Iraqi refugee’ was affluent (Chatty, 2015) would result in them more frequently being overcharged for their ride. Much more concerning was an experience recalled by Abu Raheem. This young father who, like many Iraqi Christians, had only recently fled from the violence of ISIS explained how a disgruntled taxi driver had mistaken him for being an Iraqi Muslim and told him off for having left Iraq: You can bury your gold and your money and just go back in ten years. What is the sense of that? And I told him: ‘Listen, I don’t feel safe in my own country.’ And he said: Join Da’esh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS]! I said: “No. I can’t kill no one.’ And he said: ‘But you can kill them! They are infidels. Only the children can’t be killed.

The taxi driver defended the persecution that made Abu Raheem flee, obviously reinforcing his sense of insecurity in Jordan. Many Iraqi refugees would talk with a Jordanian accent as a tactic to disguise their ‘Iraqi-ness’. Changing their dress, their way of speaking and/ or portraying themselves more like Jordanian people can be considered as ways of ‘passing’ (Nakamura, 1995). Uncomfortable experiences in Jordan, particularly in taxis, cut across class and gender. They also intersect with religious identity. Jordan is an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country with a Christian minority. All Shi’a Iraqi refugees I spoke to felt deeply uncomfortable exposing their religious identity in Jordan. Some considered them as infidels (kafir) and/or associated their religious faith with political developments – for instance, reference to Iran, Syria and Lebanon. Portraying themselves as Sunni Muslims made it easier to move around, yet it also reinforced feelings of discomfort within themselves and of not being ‘at home’ in Jordan. As a Shi’a Iraqi refugee woman, Nabila felt deeply uncomfortable in taxis as she would have to interact with strange Jordanian men who might be disrespectful because of her gender, nationality and/or reli-

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gion. It is therefore not surprising that she started using Uber and its local equivalent Careem long before it became a more mainstream alternative to Amman’s yellow taxis. These ride-hailing applications provide something of a safety assurance because of its tracking functions. The awareness that protection is meant to be only temporary can heighten one’s sense of discomfort. Experiences of (in)security in Jordan go beyond having a legal status. They consist of different interacting dimensions and map onto past experiences, and intersect with class, gender, nationality, race and religion. Concerns and actual experiences of violation of one’s physical and bodily integrity and lack of means to ensure financial certainty also undermine feeling socially secure and interact with how local experiences and interactions are perceived. In earlier work (Twigt, 2019), I have argued that these heightened and affective experiences of (in)security have contributed to the need to maintaining an absent presence. The ambivalence that feeling out of place can bring about can also result in ‘active disengagement and affective tactics in response’ (2019: 1). Connected practices of refugees interact with legal, embedded and embodied constraints of living in prolonged displacement, therefore potentially altering refugees’ experiences and practices. Most of their time was spent indoors, in a place in which they generally felt (more) safe, which I will now zoom in on.

Mediated Movements within the Iraqi Refugee Home An apartment in Amman generally consists at least of a salon – the living room where guests are received and where most time is spent – several bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Most often in Iraqi refugee households, furniture was owned by the landlords and regardless of the length of one’s stay in Jordan, there were few personalised objects that mark out the space as home. The practice of keeping a packed suitcase ready is common among marginalised migrants and points to a general lack of security: one can never be certain that there will not be the need for (another) unexpected onward movement (Morley, 2000: 44–45). Although the smartphone serves as the modern-day refugee suitcase as it is a more portable archive (Gillespie et al., 2016), this has not replaced the need for keeping an actual suitcase. Valuable possessions and printed photographs were often tucked away in a suitcase. Kholoud would keep her suitcase in her bedroom, packed with a pair of jeans in the hope that one day she will be reunited with her daughter in the United States, where she imagines she will ‘not to be forced to wear something by society’. Even the poorest family I met owned a TV set, which was connected to a satellite dish and therefore to the same TV channels as in Iraq. The monthly cost of a standard satellite connection was only 1 JOD (US$1.41).

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The verb the Iraqi refugees used to describe time spent in front of the TV can be translated as ‘sitting’ (Qa’da). ‘Sitting’ refers to hanging out, but is also the verb used to describe watching TV. The TV set played a prominent role in the living room. ‘Sitting’ takes place around the presence of the television, indicative of the interplay between the symbolic and the material. Much time was spent in front of the TV, as it was emphasised that there was nothing else to do, whilst browsing on individually owned smartphones. Sometimes content was attentively watched and discussed; at other times, it served a more affective purpose. Media and technologies play an important role in sustaining what Anthony Giddens called ontological security: ‘the confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environment. A sense of reliability of persons and things’ (1991: 92). Media practices can serve to maintain a sense of ‘self’ and stability, even or perhaps especially in times of perpetual legal and social uncertainty. Roger Silverstone (1993) suggested that TV can function as a cultural transitional object: it can provide seriality to everyday life, sustain familiarity and provide a sense of predictability in the midst of everchanging social environments. Along with technological developments, smartphones have gained importance in regrounding ontological security, but have not fully replaced the importance of the TV. In migrants’ lives, satellite TV is also known for supporting one’s self-confidence and a sense of continuity as it enabled people to watch the same shows they watched prior to their displacement (Georgiou, 2012a). I lived for three months in Hashmi Schmali, where I shared an apartment with an Iraqi Assyrian Christian family consisting of Simon and Linda and their baby daughter, Simon’s mother Mama Heba and his brother. The first thing that Mama Heba would do in the morning was turn on the TV. Most of her days were spent on the couch, with the TV on in the background, browsing on her smartphone and playing Candy Crush. She had only bought her smartphone upon leaving for Jordan as she had been told that everyone there used one. She explained that in Jordan, media use had increased dramatically. Back in Iraq, she used to enjoy gardening. But it was during cooking shows that her glance turned into a more concentrated gaze. She would turn up the volume and watch attentively. Her ‘sitting’ is a strong reminder that a dualistic understanding of the ‘gaze/glance’ (Caldwell, 1995; Ellis, 1982) negates the wide variety of in-betweens, the important social and subjective functions of mundane, less attentive TV-viewing practices, and that the different functions of different media outputs have increasingly started to overlap. Mama Heba’s daughter-in-law Linda had noticed an important affective purpose in Mama Heba’s ‘sitting’: ‘When she sees the television, she feels rest’. The TV provided a similar purpose for the mother of Haydar. The

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movement and the sound of the TV made her feel like she was not alone. The TV can thus serve as a companion and create a sense of homeliness. The affective atmosphere of the TV fills the house with familiar sounds and images and provides a sense of belonging and continuity that can temporarily drive out the awkward feelings associated with the situation in Iraq and their current lives in Jordan.

Gendered and Generational Negotiations within the Home Considering how life in Jordan in waiting was gendered and was experienced differently (as was explained in Chapter 2), it is not that strange that especially Iraqi men and boys mentioned a significant increase in the average time they spent on mediated practices after their arrival in Jordan. In Jordan, smartphones and other technologies were crucial, but not so much because – as had been the case for boys and men in Iraq – they enabled outside movement; it was because these technologies provided the opportunity to move beyond Jordan as a geographical place via digital connectivity. Moreover, everyday experiences of uncertainty tend to provoke anxiety and are simultaneously associated with monotony and boredom (Griffiths, 2014; Rotter, 2015). Not knowing what to do with one’s time and oneself in combination with a heightened necessity to find ways to make money and/or ways out of Jordan reinforced their ‘always on’ mentality (Madianou, 2016). The lives of Iraqi women were certainly not devoid of mediated practices, but for many there was simply less time to spare. Gendered expectations – from male household members, female peers and equally from themselves – in relation to hospitality, house-making and childrearing – implied that life in Jordan was not that dissimilar to life in Iraq Gendered and generational power relations played out in people’s households. The constant presence of the husband/father in the household meant that one’s place in the household had to be renegotiated. The news-binging of Iraqi older men was often criticised by their wives and adult and teenage children, who also had to deal with the changed constant presence and position of the husband/father in the household who had previously gone out to work and/or socialise. Abu Mahmoud, for instance, explained that in Iraq, these decisions were taken more communally, but upon his arrival in Jordan, he had turned into a ‘dictatori’. In Iraqi slang, this describes the person who is in absolute control of the remote control and aptly refers to Iraq’s past. Satellite and internet connections enable Iraqi refugees to be active audiences of Iraq media outputs. All Iraqi refugees drew to a certain extent upon ‘talking spaces’ consisting of a large number of televised, online and offline sources to understand what was going on (Gillespie, 2006). Like most of the older men involved in this study, Abu Mahmoud and Abu Mohammed

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largely relied on televised sources. They would spend at least a few hours a day carefully watching and comparing reports by the many different news channels – originating from different countries and affiliated to different political parties and religious sects – on Iraq. Mediated practices in relation to Iraq and specifically in relation to broadcast news on Iraq are a particular source of contestation within Iraqi refugee households, given the cramped domestic space in which much of everyday life takes place and the different emotive registers that broadcasting can evoke among different members. This becomes evident when comparing the accounts of the following couple, Um Maryam and Abu Maryam. Abu Maryam stated: ‘We watch the news, but not always, because it makes us sad or angry. We need some distraction. So, we watch classic movies, documentaries about nature … And we watch music clips.’ Earlier Um Maryam had told me: ‘Yesterday, I saw a beheading of this Iraqi unit and I felt like throwing up. Yes, the TV is always on the news.’ Both mentioned the affective responses that the news can evoke. Yet Um Maryam’s visceral reaction suggests that for her, there was too much news in the home, whereas her husband found it to be balanced. Like David Morley’s (1986) study on TV viewing in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, women’s involvement in money-earning activities could also contribute to more flexibility. Nadia had an informal office job. Her parents would balance and negotiate around their different TV-viewing preferences. In the mornings, when Nadia was out for work, Abu Mohammed would watch the news: ‘Only Iraqi news channels.’ This is also because, for Nadia, the news on Iraq would often result in nightmares. When Nadia came home from work, Abu Mohammed explained: ‘The women choose. Because it is 2 to 1. We watch Arabic drama series. On MBC.’

Carving out a (Gendered) Sense of Privacy Osman found the news viewing practices of his father depressing and was able to retreat with his laptop to his bedroom to engage in his own practices. But unlike Osman, in the smaller homes in Hashmi, such a physical retreat was often not possible. Smartphones were therefore crucial for carving out an individualised yet virtual private space within the domestic confines of the home: to evade the paternal news-binging practices, to move away from the domestic confinement and the constant presence of family members, and to carve out a private sense of place – often occurring through mediated socialities on public platforms – while being in the same physical location. Among Syrian camp refugees in Turkey, the individually owned smartphone was often part of a more shared, collective media ecology (Smets, 2018). This contrasts with what I noticed within Iraqi refugee households in Jordan. Smartphones were often deeply personalised, through stickers and

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cases as well as through choices in what applications had been downloaded. Speaking to dispersed loved ones – with or without one’s headset through a wide variety of VoIP applications such as Viber and Facebook Messenger – coincided with liking pictures on Instagram and chatting with people they had not (yet) physically met, whilst glancing or ignoring the broadcasted warscapes. With the concept ‘context collapse’, boyd (2010) describes how social media has blurred boundaries between different social settings, exposing what would be considered private in some settings. This concept has been rightfully criticised for its Anglo-American focus. Studies have shown how, for instance, urban social media users in southeast Turkey actively appropriate privacy settings and draw upon different online accounts. This enables them to keep their social spheres separated and to accommodate to different contexts and differentialising societal norms and expectations (Costa, 2018). But among the LGBTQ diaspora living in Belgium, it is also the risk of ‘context collapse’ and the associated insecurity that results in multiple online presences (Dhoest, 2016). Saskia Witteborn (2020) speaks of a collapsed context as she describes how female asylum seekers in Germany living in shared and cramped accommodation navigate their lives and how digital practices play out in relation to that highly insecure context. Here, I argue that digital practices, especially those of young Iraqi refugees living with parents, siblings and other family members, made it possible to navigate a sense of privacy through their media use. Privacy relates to the ability to control boundaries between one’s self, others and their knowledge and boundaries between private and public (van der Ploeg, 2005). How this is conceptualised and understood relates to technological changes, but equally to organisational and social settings, classed, gendered and racialised norms, and cultural implications. Feminist scholarship has challenged individualised ideas on privacy, for instance in relation to the idea that the demarcation between public spaces and private spaces is always clearly defined, and have argued for more relational understandings of privacy (Allen, 1988). Nour, a young woman from Basra, would use her smartphone to listen to music, read poetry and talk to her friends in Iraq, Lebanon, Australia and Hashmi. The interplay between different media technologies and their characteristics enabled the ability for shared experiences beyond mere contact: to sustain an active role in people’s present lives rather than only in the past. Nour and her friends have access to the same satellite channels and they discuss the most recent developments in TV series online. This suggests the importance of understanding the environment of polymedia (Madianou and Miller, 2011). This concept refers to the opportunity to choose between the different characteristics of multiple media forms – TV and social media – and the very interactions between these different media forms. These inter-

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actions enabled Nour to holds on to a sense of continuity and ontological security (Georgiou, 2012a). Through personal communication, popular culture and its interplay, she managed to regain as sense of self and a temporary escape from prolonged uncertainty. Her virtual practices enabled her to temporarily overcome the boredom of living in Jordan. For others, like 21-year-old Zakaria, seeking digital escapes was about getting away from worrying and sad feelings related to separation. Zakaria was by himself as he was awaiting reunification with his nuclear family in Sweden. Computer games and online chatrooms provided an escape from the realities of waiting: ‘I am trying to get over time. By escaping. This is my escape path.’ Several Iraqi refugees were using online courses to learn specific skills – ranging from English and French to mechanics – that might be useful for the future and/or at least give a sense of purpose while living in Jordan. Mediated practices are influenced by the time available, the lack of physical space or movement, technologies available and personal preferences. But social and cultural gendered, situated norms and experiences of (in)security also influence mediated practices and movement in offline and online spaces. Gendered and generational control involved in mediated practices are contextual (Costa, 2016). Several Iraqi women did not put any of their own pictures online, but they would share pictures via messaging platforms. Instead, the picture used for their Facebook profile would be one of their children, their husband, a flower or a celebrity. Kholoud’s online profiles contained a photograph of her husband (Facebook), the image of an Arabic saying (WhatsApp) and a flower (Viber). For her, her online presence immediately related to her temporary presence in Jordan: K: If I travel, the first thing I will do when I get to the airport, I want to take the picture of the whole family and put it on the Facebook right now. And when I get to America, I can take a picture of myself and put it on the Viber and the WhatsApp. Me: But, why not here? K: No. When I take a picture of myself and put it on the telephone it will make me more happy if it is a picture outside. Not here in Jordan.

Kholoud was unclear about the exact reason, but it seems that the social control and constraints she had come to associate with life in Jordan had infiltrated her online presence. Her online presence – how she represented herself – not only contrasted to how she imagined things in the future. She would often put on her lipstick and voluntarily pose for the donor reporting and marketing strategy of the local CBO that is largely run on private donations from the United States. Perhaps she was imagining herself already in the geographical location in which these donors were based.

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Nabila, a highly educated veiled woman, had no issue at all with putting her pictures online and was puzzled why some of her Iraqi female friends were reluctant to do so. She asked several of her friends and found out that some Iraqi men did not allow their wives, daughters and mothers to share any of their pictures as they were concerned that other men could use these for their pleasure. And, according to Nabila, some people – men and women – were ‘afraid from hackers, to take this picture’. Her findings resonate with Nour’s explanation on why she did not display any pictures of herself on Facebook. The young Iraqi Christian women whose mediated home practices I earlier described also decided to not display pictures of herself on her Facebook account: ‘I don’t put my picture on Facebook. Someone might take my picture and use it. My brother warned me for this. So, I have a picture of Tuba [Büyüküstün], this Turkish actress. With Viber I am not worried about this.’ Nour considered Viber to be a more private and secure communication tool that she only used with people she knows. Facebook was more public and was therefore more easily misused. She differentiated her Facebook profile by selecting a picture of her favourite actress. Across religious faiths then, control and concerns for privacy seemed mostly focused what and how girls and women of all ages would expose and share online. Historically and across cultures, the digital presence of women and girls has received and continues to receive more scrutiny (Allen, 1988; Witteborn, 2021). But research on digital privacy in Arab Gulf States shows rather similar approaches to online privacy and their linkages to gendered expectations of female modesty (Abokhodair and Vieweg, 2016). I noticed much less control over what violent or sexualised images people would be exposed to, as also became evident in the honesty of several Iraqi young men. My questions about their online practices would often be met with giggles. They told me that they would often browse for pornographic videos. Media and communication technologies do make transgressions of social and cultural norms possible, yet these practices also follow cultural- and context-specific lines. One young woman in this study was transgressing cultural norms as she maintained a romantic relationship with a young Iraqi man living in the same neighbourhood. They would often talk over WhatsApp while her father was sitting next to her, watching the news. Digital technologies have pluralised social settings, connecting us and enabling us to engage simultaneously with different physical and virtual spaces alongside and aside from each other (Moores, 2012). But being ‘always on’ (Madianou, 2016) and ‘connected’ might feel to others who are physically present as being disengaged. In particular older refugees like Mama Heba and Abu Mahmoud were struggling with newer technological developments, not because it would enable their children to cross particular social norms or because they found it more difficult to use, but because it resulted in other ways of ‘being together’ and ‘doing family’ (Madianou and Miller, 2011). Abu Mahmoud stated:

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For me, for me, it used to be better. Before, it was easier, simpler and happier. More fun. We were a family. We would sit together; my wife, Amal, Osman … I would tell some story, some talk… and my wife also, I am joking. You are joking. We are family! But now … I am sorry … everybody (makes an inward downward-looking gesture) this … Crazy! Everybody is crazy! When he is on his uhm phone.

Abu Mahmoud had children living in the United States, Iraq and an Eastern European country, but when he expressed missing the presence of his children, he was referring to his children Amal and Osman who were seated right next to him. He held on to a nostalgic sense of ‘family’. In the pre-smartphone living room, family members would equally have been bored, distracted and/or occupied with domestic and emotional labour (Morley, 1986). Yet, in his view, being at home is now less an act of being together, as it is evident that his present children are now engaged with people, places and practices elsewhere. Present in the same physical place, the different household members have created multiple spaces for themselves through their digital practices. Meanwhile, Abu Mahmoud’s son Osman was hopefully looking forward to what he hoped would be his future life in the United States, and along with his parents, he was awaiting family reunification with his resettled brother. There, Osman imagined becoming ‘part of society’, a citizen like his brother before him. His ideas around actively partaking in American society contrasted starkly with the absent presence he and many Iraqi refugees like him had cultivated around being in Jordan. In the United States, Osman, would become an active citizen, whereas in Jordan, he was perceived to be and therefore perceived himself as a rights-optional guest.

Conclusion The multi-layered experience of (in)security among Iraqi refugees has contributed to unhomely associations to life in Jordan and further contributes to an understanding that life in Amman is temporary. But experiences and acts of waiting, as shown throughout this chapter, are not static: people are affected by what they see, hear and experience when they are displaced. Family dynamics change, experiences of space and place become interspersed with online worlds, and connections and gendered norms are simultaneously maintained, transformed and challenged. For the Iraqi refugees in this study – residing in prolonged legal, temporal and spatial uncertainty – digital connections played a crucial role in maintaining a sense of normality. The mediated practices of the Iraqi refugees in this study should be understood amidst, and in response to, a layering of past and ongoing structural oppressions and local circumstances. Mediated practices can be an essential way of coping and of obtaining a sense

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of privacy, but equally they can contribute to further establishing distance from the location in which they are geographically residing or from family members.

Note 1. A different example shows the importance of social connections for overcoming legal barriers. Research showed that Syrian refugee women and Jordanian women alike were experiencing gender discrimination in Jordan’s labour market, but that the Jordanian female job seekers were believed to be able to draw upon their connections (wasta) to overcome these barriers (UN Women and REACH, 2017).

5 The Mediation of Hope Digital Technologies and Affective Affordances in Iraqi Refugee Households

One of the families I often spent time with in 2015 with was the family of Mahmoud and Osman. I met Abu Mahmoud in 2015 after his son Mahhoud, who I met in Jordan in 2012, put me in contact with his parents and siblings via Facebook. At that time, they had been waiting for 18 months to be reunited with Mahmoud and his young family, who had since been resettled in the United States. As I described in the last chapter, their father, Abu Mahmoud, had become a ‘dictatori’ and I regularly spent time with him drinking coffee and eating biscuits while he would share glimpses of his frustrations in response to what was shown on TV. Osman, Mahmoud’s 21-year-old brother, kept himself busy with volunteering for an NGO, learning English and using his tablet to contact his Iraqi-born girlfriend in Sweden. As an additional methodological technique, I asked Osman and several other people I frequently engaged with to take pictures of their everyday life in the hope that this would contribute to a more representative narrative.1 Osman only took one picture, depicting his bed with his laptop and smartphone on it. When we discussed this picture, he emphasised the importance of these devices and related it to his physical location: For me it depends on the country more than the idea of having internet or a tablet or not. In Jordan … the moment I wake up. It would be a tragedy if I would wake up one day without anything. It would be a tragedy, here in Jordan. But I don’t think so in the USA or outside … Even in Iraq, it [not having access to the internet] would be OK.

For Osman, access to digital technologies was vital in Jordan. In this chapter, I further explore why, beyond the importance of carving out a private

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sense of space and obtaining information, digital connections were crucial in Iraqi refugees’ experiences of in-between-ness in Jordan. The answer lies somewhere near their capacity to enable a bridging of time and place to the past as well as the future. This is crucial for refugees because many conflict-affected migrants reside for years in the Global South, in a legal and social limbo as they wait for what the refugee regime calls ‘durable solutions’ – repatriation, settlement or resettlement – or for other ways to travel onwards. The importance of digital technologies in these prolonged experiences of uncertainty goes beyond instrumental (informative and material) and social (to sustain social networks) affordances and includes the significance of what I call affective affordances. This is the ability that digital technologies have to spread sentiments such as hope, but also of dread and despair. Waiting is a deeply affective phenomenon for its ‘not yet’ status simultaneously acts a as promise as well as a threat (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 3). Transnational interactions and the movement of images and sounds can move the bodies of Iraqi refugees from one affective state to another (Wise and Velayutham, 2017), even if and perhaps especially if actual travelling and mobility are restricted. In situations of prolonged displacement, remaining hopeful and sustaining optimistic outlooks to the future requires hard work (Pedersen, 2012: 141). Holding on to hope implies an active attitude, is relational and is deeply infused by cultural production (Berlant, 2011), as becomes evident in this study.

Transnational Affective Attachments The focus of this chapter is on the role of transnational connections that are enabled via digital technologies. Approaches such as ‘transnationalismfrom-below’ (Al-Ali and Koser, 2002) and ‘globalisation-from-below’ (Karim, 2003) enable closer scrutiny in relation to people’s everyday practices. There is substantial overlap between the concepts of globalisation and transnationalism, but according to Al-Ali and Koser (2002: 2), the main difference is that an emphasis on global processes moves away and decentres from the specific geographical location and material realities in which people reside, whereas transnational processes are anchored yet transcend national territories (2002: 2). However, this anchoring is far from straightforward in prolonged refugee situations and within the many other in-between states in which many of the world’s migrants find themselves. Material and symbolic realities of borders and nation-states constrain and therefore also influence people’s attachments. Belonging is an emotional attachment, a feeling of being at ease and of being ‘at home’ (Yuval-Davis, 2012: 10). This sense of (not) belonging is

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a perpetual and performative process that is (re)shaped through everyday experiences, one’s physical reality and mediated, affective practices. Migration is a process of disorientation and reorientation (Ahmed, 2006: 9), of finding one’s way in place and feeling home (again). In the previous chapter, I discussed the home-making practices of Iraqi refugees in this study. But if ‘home’ is understood as an ‘on-going project entailing a sense of hope for the future’ (Hage, 1997: 103), what do home-making practices in prolonged uncertainty then mean? Where do people place ‘home’ if it continues to be unclear where the future is located and mediated attachment to Iraq as ‘homeland’ reinforces the need to reorient oneself not only beyond Jordan, but also beyond Iraq? I bring together the work of two affect scholars, Lauren Berlant (2011) and Sara Ahmed (2013), to further understand how mediated attachments enable people to stay optimistic and endure the present, yet hopefully orient themselves towards particular futures. Their work enables me to further understand affective affordances. Affect is a prelinguistic, relational and social phenomenon. I understand it as different from emotions in that it is inbetween and in interactions with bodies, emotions, mediated infusions and reason. The movement of affects are dynamic, open and flexible processes entangled with cultural meaning-making, material processes and social relationships (Wetherell, 2015: 9). Ahmed (2013) draws upon Marxist theory as she explores how feelings can circulate, resonate and accumulate over time, therefore obtaining affective value. Affects project desires into the future but draw upon elements of the past. This makes some orientations more likely and specific images, ideas and figures ‘sticky’. Affects cluster and group around these, but the circulation of affects requires ongoing labour. The ‘stickiness’ around the stereotypical figure of the ‘refugee’ becomes evident in Adam’s explanation as to how he chose (not) to depict his everyday life. I had also asked Adam to take pictures of his everyday life. Just like Osman, he was twenty-one years old at that time and took pictures of his bed. As explained in Chapter 1, Adam would often emphasise the importance of his laptop and iPhone about his life in Jordan as ‘a waiting stop’. But how Adam presented his life was connected to his awareness of what would be expected from him. Adam took four pictures in total – a picture of his argileh, a picture of his bed, a picture of the TV and a selfie. He told me: ‘I am not going to take a picture of the laptop, because so many people don’t have a laptop.’ The ‘many people’ here does not refer to any people, but to refugees (in Jordan). Adam is conscious that his laptop might not ‘fit’ with the stereotypical representation of a ‘refugee’. Perhaps, given that he knew I am writing about refugees’ experiences in Jordan, he also wanted to present what he believes would be a ‘truer’ representation of refugee life. He was accurate in the sense that most people I spend time with only had access to a smartphone to connect.

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Koen Leurs’ (2014) notion of transnational affective capital connects Ahmed’s work (2013) with that of Pierre Bourdieu’s differentiation between economic, social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). As the Somali migrants in Leurs’ study who are residing in legal uncertainty in Ethiopia have only limited access to forms of economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital, mediated connections have become a crucial resource for managing precariousness. His findings resonate with what I observed among the Iraqi refugees residing in this studies, as transnational connections enable feelings to bridge distance and evoke affective responses such as feeling ‘happy’ or being ‘together’. But considering the structural and persisting difficulties that the people in his study were experiencing, Leurs (2014) questions whether the emotions brought about by virtual interactions are only a temporary suspension of everyday precariousness or whether they leave behind a more lasting impression. Lauren Berlant’s book Cruel Optimism (2011) provides additional insights into the more lasting effects of mediated ideas, images and interactions. Berlant focuses on people’s constructions of the future to enable endurance in the present. In a similar fashion to the work of Ahmed (2013) and the study by Ghasan Hage (2003) on worries and hope among the white working class, Berlant’s study is geographically located in western societies. She explores how despite apparent deteriorating economic and social conditions, people held on to fantasies of the ‘good life’. Especially when there seems to be no realistic option for material betterment in the present – and despite the realisation that it is most likely that life will not get better – there is the need to hold to optimism. This optimism is cruel, not only because it most likely will fail to materialise but also because it allows the endurance of precarity: the promise will most likely keep people from establishing change. Holding on to the promise of upward mobility and the ‘good life’ can then become the actual obstacle to changing one’s circumstances. In a later article, Leurs (2016) returns to his question on the lasting effects of transnational affective resources. He argues that the fantasies of his Somali informants reflect a Berlantian sense of ‘cruel optimism’: ‘In articulating their daily routines, it seems their subjectivity is completely future oriented. They feel stuck, their life is at a standstill, and they live in total dependency of loved ones and strangers abroad’ (Leurs, 2016: 28). Leurs’ notion of ‘total dependency’ seems to preclude agency. Especially in relation to humanitarian relief, development aid and prolonged refugee situations, the notion of ‘dependency’ has been heavily debated (Harrell-Bond, 1986; Horst, 2006; Jansen, 2008). It is the rather ill-defined act of relying on others, for instance, to sustain oneself or to undertake action. It is often used in opposition to ‘self-reliance’ as the exemplary neoliberal ideal of hyper-individualised independence. It shows similarities to the stigmatised discourse on social

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welfare regimes in the Global North. However, the focus on dependency and the push for self-reliance in humanitarian settings largely relates to the UNHCR’s impetus for decreasing humanitarian assistance in prolonged refugee situations. Refugees’ dependency on their own personal networks is instead lauded as a positive sign of ‘community resilience’ (Easton-Calabria and Omata, 2018: 9). Relying upon others is perhaps an essential feature of human life (Fineman, 2006). But beyond the question of whether and, if so, how transnational networks, humanitarian programming or other social interactions can evoke a sense of powerlessness, another important question is how agency operates amid paralysing constraints. This is where the works of Ahmed (2013) and Berlant (2011) meet. Ahmed’s focus on labour and the unequal productions of affect that also take shape in reference to past experiences connects to a Berlantian understanding of optimism as something that is construed in and around making do in the present that can be cruel. Berlant’s understanding of optimism also overlaps with Hage’s (2003) understanding of hope, as both are attachments to life. The main difference is that hope tends to be (more) future oriented. Digital technologies play an important role in maintaining these affective attachments and in spurring and sustaining hopeful outlooks towards the future. Imaginations help people live and accept their situation in the moment, simply because of the perceived and expected change their lives will undergo when they enter the future in another place, wherever that may be. The rupture between expectations of the world – what was promised – and what has materialised tends to make time more vividly felt (Bourdieu, 2000: 208). When certainties are persistently undermined, the need to hold on to the promise only seems to increase (Schielke, 2015: 228). With the lack of safe and humane alternatives, giving up on the attachments and/or investment (time and dreams) made in the promise is also not a real option. Digital technologies then operate as orientation devices. They spur the imagination, enabling different members in Iraqi refugee households to maintain a hopeful outlook for futures elsewhere.

The Impressions That Virtual Intimacy Leave Behind Like Osman’s brother Mahmoud, I met Adam, Kholoud and their other family members in 2012. We stayed in contact over Facebook and WhatsApp. Unlike Mahmoud, Kholoud and her family were still in Jordan in 2015. After nine years she still described her situation as waiting to travel. During that time, her daughter Samar was given priority by the US government for resettlement as Samar’s newborn child was diagnosed with a severe illness.

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Samar is now living in the United States. Adam emphasised how his sister is still the ‘happiness in his family’. From the money Adam obtained from doing odd jobs, he bought his mother a new smartphone. This enabled Kholoud to maintain an active role in the lives of her daughter and granddaughter, despite the physical distance between them. But the ability of technologies to annihilate distance tends to disappear as soon as more personal, often embodied, care is needed – for instance, during times of illness, conflict and crisis (Wilding, 2006), and the ubiquity and pervasiveness of technologies have also made it more difficult to conceal life’s difficulties (Baldassar, 2007). This was clear in Kholoud’s life. Her granddaughter is often hospitalised and when this is the case, Kholoud and her husband reversed much of their day/night rhythm to accommodate the time differences between them and the United States. I often caught Kholoud watching videos of her granddaughter while beating herself on the chest – a gesture suggesting the pain she felt for being physically separated, her worries and the frustration for not being there to support her daughter with the care of her sick child. Virtual intimacy does not and cannot replace her longing for physical intimacy or her dream to live close to her daughter again. The digital ever-presence of loved ones leaves behind impressions and alters one’s everyday experiences in displacement. The affordances of multimediality and simultaneity – the ability to see and talk to each other at the same time despite distance – enable Samar’s digital presence within the household. They talk for hours with the help of VoIP applications like Skype, Facebook and Viber. These applications are used interchangeably as the quality of the connection shifts. Further dispersal of family members and friends all around the globe also tends to require a wider variety of communication applications because not every application works and/or is popular in every geographical location. In the household of Kholoud and many other Iraqi refugees, the more communally shared TV as well as more individualised smartphones were almost ‘always on’ (Madianou, 2016), providing different input from a wide variety of sources and access to a wide variety of functions. The video clips that Samar sent to her mother’s Viber account provided Kholoud with the means to build up a digital archive and to acquire a sense of a shared history. Kholoud also often shared electronic postcards, jokes, recipes and dietary advice with more distant family members and friends, hence navigating different kinds of digital closeness. Among many of the people in my studies, leaving recorded messages via applications like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger was also especially popular. The layering of different technologies with different potentials of use as well as the emergence of smartphones integrating different functions within one device (Madianou, 2014) provide multiple scales of maintaining digital intimacy and different ways of present-

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ing oneself. Networked technologies are continuously restructuring information flows and alter how human beings interact with each other. The emotions associated with Samar’s mediated presence, in conjunction with her physical absence, resonate with other research on transnational relationships (Alinejad, 2019; Baldassar et al., 2016; Leurs, 2014; Madianou and Miller, 2011). Transnational communication with friends and family in other countries is crucial in terms of maintaining relationships with distant loved ones and can bring about positive feelings and means of coping and dealing with offline hardships. But the feelings brought about by these connections are not always pleasant and can make the physical distance and forced separation more vividly felt by the participants. It is important to situate digital connectivity within the precarious contexts in which forced and other migrants find themselves. Some might consider online contact as safe, whereas others like the Eritrean refugees in the study by Opas and McMurray (2015) felt that reaching out to loved ones in Iraq could potentially endanger them. Aram’s parents and several of his siblings are in Iraqi Kurdistan. He self-censored his messages as he did not want his family to suffer from any potential consequences. Fear can also grow the greater the distance, especially when ideas are already ‘sticky’ (Ahmed, 2006). Aram’s anxieties about life in Jordan as an Assyrian Christian Iraqi might have been the result of his own experiences in Iraq, but they were reinforced by distant family members whose understanding of Jordan’s context was based on orientalist mediated images of the Middle Eastern region: ‘They call us from like, USA or anywhere: “Take care!”’ Opportunities for transnational connectivity also intersect with other characteristics, such as age and literacy. Abu Raheem’s elderly parents, who were still in Iraq, did not know how to use the internet and did not have access to a mobile phone. His friends would sometimes go to his parent’s house so that his parents could see Abu Raheem on the screen of their smartphone and talk to him. His parents-in-law would also sometimes call their landline to check on them on his behalf. But even if sustaining transnational contact is relatively easy and loved ones are doing well, distance hurts. In response to a televised commercial depicting a heteronormative romanticised Arabic family, Adam remarked: ‘We used to be like that … all together. Now, all we have is Viber.’ Contact via smartphone is only a pale substitute for how life used to be, while romanticised representations of ‘doing family’ on TV reminded Adam of what has been lost. Transnational digital intimacy cannot be a substitute for physical co-presence. Physical or virtual presence does not replace and/or displace the other. Instead, digital developments have enabled a more complex array of multiple presences that take place alongside and aside from each other (Diminescu, 2008).

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Reorienting ‘Home’ The mediated presence of Iraq, affective attachments to Iraq and digital interactions with people residing in Iraq brought about a wide variety of ambivalent emotive registers. Connections to Iraq can evoke a longing for how life was in the past and can simultaneously give rise to uncomfortable feelings and unpleasant memories associated with Iraq as a home and a place. Reasons for seeking refuge differ, yet the forced component – including loss and violence – has the potential to influence specific affective attachments, which also becomes evident in people’s mediated practices. Many of the Iraqi refugees I spent time with still had loved ones in Iraq. And especially if these close relatives or friends were residing in areas that were known to be unsafe or if they belonged to a persecuted group, worries and concerns played out in people’s media behaviour. Given the speed of connectivity, news about developments in Iraq would sometimes spread faster transnationally than it did locally. When Warda was still living in Baghdad, she received a phone call from her cousin living in Sweden who had seen on an online news report that her house had been destroyed. At that point, Warda was not at home: ‘When I came back, I saw that my house was ruined.’ Enhar was surprised by the media practices he had noticed among fellow Iraqi refugees. They ‘keep browsing on Facebook for hours. Until 4 AM, 5 AM in the night … I am surprised by what these people are doing. There is something more important to do’. For Enhar, his daily life consisted of ‘tea, cigarettes and sleep’, given that digital technologies could also serve as messengers of more suffering, destruction and even death: ‘Every time I open Facebook I find myself in a tragedy. Of someone I know who has been killed.’ Um Maryam found out via Viber that one of her relatives had been killed in front of his shop. Both Enhar and Um Maryam are Sabean-Mandean, a religious minority, specific to the Shatt-el-Arab region that is not attached to Islam or Christianity. This minority has been highly persecuted since 2003 and are now threatened with extinction. But while Enhar turned away from Facebook, for others Facebook and its personal communication tool Messenger had become crucial for checking up on the wellbeing of loved ones and friends still in Iraq. Abir and Muadh were deeply concerned about the wellbeing of the brother of Muadh and his family, who had become internally displaced in Iraq. At the time that I interviewed them, they were worried that Baghdad’s Shi’a population could take reprisals against the internally displaced Sunni population in response to the violence carried out by ISIS. Muadh follows Iraqi news channels and obtains additional information via Facebook. He explains: We send messages to our families when something happens close by … When an explosion happens close by. Like, in Baghdad, in Iraq in general, everyone

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is calling everyone. So, if you call anyone, they will tell you: this one is alright, your family is alright, brother is alright, our cousins are alright.

Many of the Iraqi refugees continued to be active audiences of Iraqi media outputs. In Jordan, Iraqi refugees can follow the same broadcasters as they would in Iraq. These included the government-run Al Iraqia, Iraqi news channels such as Al Baghdadia and Al Sharqia, and transnational news channels such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. Older Iraqi refugee men, like Abu Mahmoud, would largely rely on and compare televised news reports. Younger Iraqi refugees drew upon Facebook pages and applications of the same news broadcasters and/or read what Iraqi friends and relatives in and outside of Iraq would state about local events. The Iraqi refugees were a very critical audience, continuously contrasting and contesting what different TV channels, websites and people’s posts said. Being critical does not mean not being partisan; a person’s religious beliefs, background and personal experiences certainly played a role in terms of which channels were trusted more. Nevertheless, most people I met were continuously trying to read between the lines of different news channels and beyond simplified distinctions, and no channel was fully trusted. To further understand their critical news-viewing practices, it is important to know how the 2003 invasion contributed to important shifts regarding Iraq’s media space, and how these shifts are believed to have contributed to the escalation that occurred afterwards. During Saddam Hussein’s regime, the country had been largely closed off from the transnational media landscape, emerging in the Middle Eastern region in the 1990s (Kraidy and Khalil, 2009; Sakr, 2007), and the press was the subject of tight control (Al-Rawi, 2012). There were two state-controlled and heavily censored TV channels and a later-established youth channel showing censored Western films and music. But counterfeit videocassettes could be obtained. Several people I spoke to did own a satellite dish, even though getting caught with one was formally a capital crime. The ousting of Saddam Hussein’s regime opened the door first for satellite TV and then for the internet. The former state-controlled media collapsed, resulting in a fragmented and rapid multiplication of smaller broadcasting outlets. I was told by several Iraqi refugees how this had contributed to people being classified along ethnic and sectarian lines, which had already been essentialised by US-imposed policies. Abu Mohammed, a retired engineer, explained how he believed Iraq’s media landscape contributed to the differentialising tensions and violence: ‘The TV channels, they insisted on saying this thing that the Shi’a part of Iraq, the Sunni part of Iraq, the Kurdish part of Iraq … And they kept saying it for years, till the people believe it: this is not our area.’ Different channels with different political leanings would hold different truth claims. Especially men across all age groups would interpret the hap-

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penings in Iraq in a way that would sometimes sound like a depersonalised political game as they would analyse how the United States, Saudi Arabia (the dominant Sunni force), Iran (the dominant Shi’a force), Israel, Russia and Turkey were playing out their proxy wars, first and persistently in Iraq of course but also in Syria, Yemen and beyond. Comparing different news channels provided additional insights into who supported who and why, as well to be able to gain foresight into what could happen in the region in the future. It was the Qatari-based broadcaster Al Jazeera that Iraqi refugees unanimously considered as having played a decisive role in provoking tensions in Iraq and deemed untrustworthy. Al Jazeera’s reporting has been the subject of scrutiny by a wide variety of actors with different political leanings since it was founded in 1996. My interest here is not on the accuracy of Al Jazeera news broadcasting, but on why was it that the broadcasting of Al Jazeera evoked such strong affective registers According to Ismail, it was this channel that first actively started to distinguish people based on their religious background. Omar held Al Jazeera responsible for providing al-Qaeda with a platform for broadcasting its abduction videos, therefore enabling the Islamist organisation to spread its message.2 But perhaps the strong response also relates to the broadcaster’s focus on the suffering of civilians ( Jasperson and El-Kikhia, 2003). In an increasingly connected world, distinctions between what is close by and what is distant and who watches who (or oneself) become increasingly blurred. El-Nawawy and Iskandar (2002) suggested that Al Jazeera tends to focus on opposing radical sides in political conflicts. The news broadcaster has also been accused of sensationalism (Gunter and Dickinson, 2013: 11–12). This echoes the words of Khalil: ‘Al Jazeera makes you think we are all going to hell. It exaggerates.’ And Michael argued that the channel ‘puts [out] fake news. They make everything so horrible’. Whereas most images of violence leave distanced Western spectators untouched (Chouliaraki, 2013), for those for whom the events are closer in proximity – whether physically, to loved ones or personal experiences – the mediated depictions of violence are hurtful and much too reductive of a much more complicated and complex reality. The mediated and situated experience of Khaled gives a bit more insight into how this works out. Khaled is a 23-year-old Iraqi man. Most of his life up to that point had taken place outside of Iraq. He only lived there for a short spell just after the war in Syria had started in 2011. He was therefore able to contrast what he had seen broadcast about Iraq with what he was experiencing in real life: During Ramadan or Eid … Someone exploded himself. And the bridge. And the people there, from Sunni or Shi’a, they didn’t say: he was Sunni or Shi’i. They just cleaned the area and … nothing else … But in the media, they show

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like: they are hating themselves, they are always in a fight, they are always in a war, you know.

Khaled described a memory of a bomb explosion, but instead of the violence, he also observed how the people present tried to create a sense of normalcy, something that is not newsworthy for international broadcasters. Given that this is not televised, mediated warfare is not or might not be perceived as a ‘true(r)’ representation of life in Iraq and simultaneously provides a much too visual (too real) representation of the actual violence that loved ones are surrounded by. Many of the Iraqi refugees struggle with the tensions their attachments to Iraq bring about, as they can evoke worries, painful memories and serves as reminders of what was lost. Abu Mahmoud has a turbulent relationship with his own TV-viewing practices: ‘I cry … I know it is so sad to watch it. Especially concerning my country. More than once I decided to stop. But then after one week, I have to watch again.’ Abu Mahmoud tried to hold on to his attachment to Iraq, but every time he turned towards Iraq, he was overwhelmed by loss. Whereas he would sometimes try to stop watching news on Iraq, he was simply not able to let go. The first months following their arrival in Jordan, Omar also kept watching his favourite show discussing local developments in Baghdad, but after a few months, he stopped watching news about Iraq altogether: ‘I feel that … I become not a part of that society. So, there is nothing going on there that will affect my life.’ He detached himself and instead focused all his attention and energy on finding ways out of Jordan. Most Iraqi refugees in Jordan had given up on a future in Iraq. They were actively trying to balance their feelings of loss with the emotional closeness they also felt to the country and their memories of better times in Iraq. Holding on to specific positive and symbolic attachments relates to having and holding on to positive memories. Memories are mediated, embodied, embedded and sensorial (Keightley and Pickering, 2012). Ismail fondly recalls smells he associates with Baghdad: ‘I miss the smell of Baghdad, I miss the … when we are cleaning the streets and it is so hot the water becomes like make uhm, you can smell something different. You can smell it in every place, especially in Baghdad as the weather is so hot and the street becomes so hot.’ Ismail’s words suggest a nostalgia, a deep longing for and affection towards the past. What makes his memory even more distant is that many of his friends are no longer in Baghdad: some got killed, whereas others sought refuge, just like he did. He is deeply aware that present-day Iraq is different and that sustaining social relationships is challenging: ‘Yes … for Iraqi people, it has become so hard to keep someone in your life. Because if you try to stay in Iraq, maybe he is killed, or maybe he is travelled.’ Ismail’s biograph-

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ical life (Brun, 2016) – a life that is grounded in a past and has an outlook on a logical continuation to the future – is ruptured. The unravelling of Iraq has made maintaining a sense of continuity extremely difficult: people who played a central role in Ismail’s life are no longer there and neither is he. But mediated sounds and images also enabled Ismail to reground himself and to obtain a sense of ontological security – a sense of continuity of self. Al Rasheed is one of Ismail’s favourite TV channels, showing old images and videos of Iraqi streets: I start watching. Ooh! It is this place! I remember. Wow. The images are accompanied by old Arabic songs. Emotional songs about the country. OK? About Baghdad, about Baghdad days in the past, OK? And it will become more beautiful … It is with our soul, OK? It is so an emotional thing for some songs, and I am watching and sometimes I start crying and they are put these songs, not in this situation now. They are put these songs on pictures in the past. Baghdad from the past when Saddam Hussein was president.

And even though he had given up on a future in Iraq and has broken with his family, he remained convinced: ‘I will still follow the news on Iraq. Whatever happened, whenever I was living, uhm, on the moon, OK? Or the sun. Haha. It is still my country.’ Nour, a 22-year-old woman, listened to music and chatted with her geographically dispersed friends on WhatsApp when her father was comparing what different news channels said about Iraq. Occasionally, she would watch the news with him, but she preferred to watch drama series like Bab el Hara, a popular show based in Damascus during the mandate period of the 1930s. The series depicts what Marwan Kraidy and Omar Al-Ghazzi (2013) described as ‘neo-Ottoman cool’: a nostalgia towards earlier times and a critique of Westernisation and the current chaotic developments within the region. ‘You see a simple life, a sense of community, it is not like now’, Nour stated. Her words suggested nostalgia – a longing for the past when life was better – which coincides with her recurring emphasis that there was ‘no future’ in Iraq, only a past. Amal, Abu Mahmoud’s youngest daughter, was, like Nour, also a fan of Bab el Hara. She explained: ‘All people, they are together. For example: Muslims, Jews, Christian. All people, they don’t care about religion. But they are caring. They are Syrian.’ In their dealing with their own experience of sectarian divides and violence towards religious minorities, these two young women tried to hold on to an alternative, idealised representation of the past. Nostalgia goes beyond being a sentimental retreat from the present in response to experiences of loss. Its meanings can also contribute to a hopeful future-orientation. Particular aspects, dynamics and characteristics of a (better) past can serve as the basis for imagining potential futures: ‘Nostalgia can then be seen as not only a search for ontological security in the past,

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but also a means of taking one’s bearing for the road ahead in the uncertainties of the present’ (Pickering and Keightley, 2006: 921). Nour stated: ‘I read once: if you want to punish people, you have to smash their culture … We are not people of culture anymore.’ Through Bab el Hara, she held on to parts of that culture that resonated with her. Beyond recognition of their loss, some ideas they associated with Middle Eastern culture, such as community and care, might carry significance for how they would imagine the future. Nostalgia can carry positive dimensions associated with a wish for change and therefore engages with the present and provides insights into aspirations for the future. Simplified differentiations between ‘new’ and ‘old’ – not only in regard to different types of technology forms but also between the past and future – ignore the fact that everyday sense-making practices in the present are always mediated and situated, infused by the past in the present and influenced by thoughts on the future. Nour went on to discuss the most recent developments in this and other televised drama series on online channels and actively compared what she heard of her friend’s new life in Australia to what she saw on TV as she was hoping to be resettled to Australia. The spatial dynamics of life in waiting – the pain of physical separation and the reliving of loss – play an important role in how Iraqi refugees in Jordan reorient their future away from Iraq. Perhaps equally as important as the situated and mediated idea that there are ‘no futures’ in Iraq is that due to prolonged legal and social uncertainty, there are ‘no futures’ in Jordan either. As embodied, relational and affective human beings, this can reinforce the need to orient oneself elsewhere. In his state of in-between-ness, Abu Mahmoud not only focused on Iraq; he also reached out to the possibility of finding a new place he could call home. In the summer of 2015, he was hopeful of the idea that Germany was welcoming refugees. Yet he preferred to be reunited with Mahmoud in the United States. Like him, many other Iraqi refugees project their image of their future homes as close to their relatives. This preference goes beyond convenience: the home is imagined as an idealised site of continuity and familiarity, and being able to map out a future in a safe place together with one’s loved ones would somehow restore this.

The Impasse of Immobility Seeing and hearing about lives lived elsewhere, in particular of ‘similar others’ – Iraqi nationals who were refugees like them – plays a crucial role in how Jordan is experienced as ‘being stuck’. This experience is twofold. First, for many Iraqi refugees in Jordan – the busyness of distanced friends and family members reinforces the notion that their time in Jordan is wasted by waiting. Abu Nicholas was a 29-year-old father of two. He was not only

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tired of waiting and of searching for ways out of Jordan but was also tired of waiting for his friends to pick up the phone: ‘They tell me: we were busy, we were working, we couldn’t pick up the phone. So, I told them: whenever you call me, I won’t call anymore. Because you know I am not working. I always have time. And it is tiring.’ Remaining hopeful in waiting and not being allowed to work is hard work. Abu Nicholas’ own experiences of uncertainty were contrasted with those of friends and relatives who had made it elsewhere and who were able to rebuild their lives and were busy doing so. Their opportunities reinforced his despair. Adam also underscored his own lack of social mobility through seeing and hearing of the actual physical mobility of distanced friends and family members: first by plane, then by cars and bicycles. This became evident when he discussed the pictures that his friends would share with him. Pictures of a lot of good things that I just want to do … that he is uhm riding a bicycle, he is climbing a mountain, going to a pool … But here, you can’t move an inch without money … It is making me sad, but I don’t show it, because he was like me, but he got the chance to travel, so…

Adam compared the Western active lives his friends were living with his own lack of opportunities in Jordan. It hurt even more since his friends were once in a similar situation to him. His words and experiences were not only linked to his legal situation but also to his lack of financial capital: if he had money, he could ‘move’ either physically away from and/or socially within Jordan. The experience of (im)mobility therefore not only relates to lacking the option for physical mobility, but also refers to limited possibilities for social and existential mobility within Jordan. As these two examples show, the hope for outward and upward movement are closely related. To some extent, the narratives above can be considered examples of mobility envy (Hage, 2015: 5), yet their experiences seemed much more self-inflicting. Adam, for instance, would worry about what was ‘wrong’ with him rather than why it was that his friends were more ‘lucky’. Within the broader context of accelerated global and neoliberal capitalism, bodies are oriented individualised ways. With the possibility of upwards social mobility, one’s own lack of mobility is perceived as a personal failure. Meanwhile, those who have migrated onwards might also feel social pressure to prove that their new life is indeed as successful as they had hoped for (Tuckett, 2016). This success might be exaggerated on social media platforms. Adam was highly aware that online images were often manufactured and did not necessarily represent (all of) reality. He knew that his cousin in the United States has put himself into debt in order to buy a car. But as Adam rightfully remarked, this was still more than he could do in Jordan. Experiences of (im)mobility and – as I will show in the next section – the imagination of the future are interpreted and negotiated through one’s

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situational, gendered and generational context. Like migration, adolescence connotes a journey (Grabska, 2016). It is a temporal context-specific stage of becoming. A more detailed gendered and generational analysis is beyond the scope of this book, yet it is important to note that the perceived lack of opportunities for coming-of-age mobility were closely linked to uncertainty about outward mobility, restricted rights in Jordan and gendered expectations and roles. Adam, for instance, stated that he would ‘love to have a relationship with a girl … but as a refugee. I can’t’. Adam considered having the financial means to take care of his partner as a prerogative for engaging in a romantic relationship, given that in Iraqi sociocultural norms this is expected from men. Parents were also worried about what they consider as the stalled lives of their children. All of Naima’s daughters had obtained university degrees and had fairly stable jobs in Jordan. But the family had been selected for resettlement and had been waiting for this for over six years. Naima explained that she attributed the waiting experience to her daughters’ reluctance to get married: ‘They were all thinking all the time of America, they know the culture, the system, the society, the system of employment, the history. They also prefer to watch American TV. They especially were crazy about Friends.’

Orientation Devices: Imagining the ‘Good Life Elsewhere’ The affective atmospheres within Iraqi households move back and forth between hope and despair. Being considered ‘out of place’ (Malkki, 1992) further pushes the Iraqi refugees to orient themselves beyond the virtual: to other physical places where futures are deemed possible. The virtual is used to conceive these other physical places. Beyond comparing what policies and opportunities there were for migration to Western countries, online and offline interactions and interpretations of mediated images and information serve to actively negotiate preferred locations for imagined futures elsewhere, always in interaction with personal circumstances and sociohistorical backgrounds. Many but certainly not all the Iraqi refugees I spoke to expressed how they preferred to go to the United States. For some, this preference for a future in the United States related to the relatively extensive US resettlement programme and, closely related to this, the presence of close relatives in the United States made it the most desirable goal. Adam’s preferred country was the United States, not only because his sister Samar was living there, but also because he believed it to be the best country for combining work and studying as he emphasised how his life had been on hold: ‘I am twenty-one years old! I have done nothing in my life!

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I didn’t even go to college.’ To me, Adam was still very young, but he felt he had already lost too much of his life waiting. Samir, another young Iraqi, stated: ‘Every day I ask one of my friends, about the best one … They all say America.’ In contrast, Michael came to a different conclusion from Samir’s friends and Adam. Michael had a degree in psychology and believed that ‘in America, your only chance is to go to the market and sell vegetables’, whereas in Canada, the government would enable him to continue his studies. For him, ‘Canada is the country of opportunities.’ My initial response to the hope many Iraqi refugees expressed to travel to the United States was one of surprise, considering the destructive role that the country plated in Iraq’s unravelling. Abu Mahmoud explained: ‘We have a saying in Iraq: treat the disease with the cause. So, the cause is the States and the cure is the States.’ His words suggest that the American neocolonial entanglements make it more likely for Iraqi refugees to turn and orient themselves towards that very country, also because it can be held accountable for their current situation. But the Iraqi refugees in Jordan were also touched by the logic of capitalism or by the American-dominated media landscape and optimism it could also evoke. Optimism, Berlant argues, is ‘a social relation involving attachments that organize the present’ (2011: 14). It is the complexity of being bound to life. This optimism and preference for a future life in the United States is deeply mediated and pre-dates 2003. One of the most renowned English-speaking Iraqi bloggers writing by the name of Riverbend therefore expressed her annoyance with the orientalist imageries that Iraq American audiences had. In 2004, Iraqi nationals were already deeply connected to American popular culture: ‘We watch American movies, we listen to everything from Britney Spears to Nirvana and refer to every single brown, fizzy drink as Pepsi’ (Riverbend, 2005: 295). Riem, a 26-year-old economist I frequently spent time with, emphasised how she was looking forward to starting her life anew and told me: ‘I still have the American dream. I have to. I want to be a nurse because I love Grey’s Anatomy.’ Riem’s American dream was directly inspired by Grey’s Anatomy, whereas Ismail – a 33-year-old Iraqi man – found hope in the blockbuster film Titanic: ‘In the US, life is not easy. But when you have a dream as lot of society will support you to make your dreams come true.’ The understanding that especially in the United States – in contrast to Iraq and Jordan – aspired futures could be realised is a source of inspiration and hope. Through regular digital connections with relatives and friends in Western countries, there is increased awareness that life in Western societies is nothing like what is seen on TV or on the internet, but this doesn’t stop the dream of imagining better futures elsewhere. Like Adam, Riem is fully aware of the difficulties that her sister was experiencing in the United States, yet this did not seem to register against her actual hopes. It seems that the

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intimate digital presence of faraway relatives and friends makes imagining living elsewhere a more realistic option instead of a faraway dream (Vigh, 2009). Kholoud started to wear an abaya upon and in response to her arrival in East Amman. She looked forward to wearing the jeans she kept in her suitcase, upon her resettlement when she would be reunited with her daughter. Aspirations for freedom sometimes blur out and exist with accepting other limits on freedoms, rules and control that Western countries impose. At other times, they result in negotiations. Kholoud wore a hijab for religious and societal reasons, and I was curious as to her ideas on what living as a veiled woman in the Midwest would be like, as this was where her daughter Samar lives. She explained: ‘I would wear my hijab but including that I would wear a hat.’ Demonstrating her perception that Islamic symbols are not welcomed in such contexts, she held this and her inability to wear jeans in Jordan as distinct, although outwardly they represented the same limitation. This by no means suggests that there is no criticism or rejection of how life in Western countries is imagined. Explicit and implicit concerns were raised regarding potential anti-Muslim/anti-Arab sentiments, alcohol consumption and also housing prices, cultural differences in relation to gendered and generational expectations, and whether they would be able to buy the food they liked. The more conservative Christian and Muslim Iraqis alike were concerned about how to maintain their religious and cultural practices. They would emphasise their wish for a freedom they had come to associate with Western countries and the one they missed in Iraq and Jordan, while equally voicing their concerns about different conceptions of romance, love and sex – especially in relation to premarital sexual relationships and same-sex relations. In Chapter 3, I described how Omar and Zeineb eventually decided to travel irregularly, but how Omar’s drive to leave coincided with anxiety. This anxiety not only related to the journey but also to living in a Western country. Would he be able to hold on to his faith? Would he – trained as an engineer – have to ‘humiliate himself’, as he put it, by doing unskilled work? And would his two young daughters – growing up in a Western country – think his opinions were old-fashioned? Omar’s deliberations point to the world’s interconnectivity. He was not only deeply aware of the struggles he would most likely face; he also realized that ‘even’ in Iraq, he would not have been able to control his daughters for seeking romance and love, as he explained that he had seen how in Iraq Facebook was used by women (and men of course) to pursue extramarital relationships. Osman explained how he imagined life in the United States: ‘Living a good life. Maybe for some time I would go partying, to cafes, mixing with people in general. I am considering this. I will be part of the society, but to

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a certain degree.’ He envisioned a balanced life, enjoying Western freedoms and rights while holding on to his religious practices and sense of self. His use of the word ‘good life’ again resonates with Berlant, as she argues that attachments to the ‘good life’ and social upward mobility can make difficult lives bearable. Fantasies of the ‘good life’, Berlant argues, are deeply related to actual experiences of precarity and crisis as well as to cultural production. Especially when there are no promises for material betterment in the present, there is the need to hold on to the idea that life in the future will be meaningful. The orientations of Iraqi refugees not only relate to the postcolonial remnants of the British Empire and US-led neocolonial destruction (Dewachi, 2017); the containment strategies of these and other Western countries (Berman, 2011) also make imagining feasible alternatives increasingly limited. Adam certainly had his preferences, while being aware that the ultimate decision was not up to him: ‘As an experienced refugee … I would just go anywhere because I am looking for my rights.’ The hope for a future elsewhere also propelled many Iraqi refugees to spend ‘waiting’ time in ways that were considered (more) meaningful. ‘If you spend your time learning something, you are not losing your time’, Khaled said. The need to underscore one’s abilities to use ‘waiting time’ meaningfully resonates with the neoliberal and individualising ‘innovation turn’ described in Chapter 6. Khaled was an ambitious young Iraqi man: ‘I always spend time on the Internet to learn something.’ But the progress he and many other Iraqi refugees aspired to was closely linked to imagined futures elsewhere. Learning English was especially popular. English language skills could be of use in the distant future in the aspired future country or even in the nearby future, as knowing English tends to be useful for acquiring a relatively stable and safe job at an NGO. English language courses at NGOs were popular, and people would draw upon English-spoken television series such as The Simpsons and language-learning applications on their smartphones to improve their English. Yet the uncertainty about how and where the future will be makes it difficult to know how to further prepare oneself in the present for that future. Already fluent in English, Khaled signed up to numerous e-courses, ranging from mechanics to French. The circulation of information, stories and rumours of people who have managed to migrate and improve their lives might allow one to imagine a ‘good life’ elsewhere, yet further closes down the space for a more radical imagination that recognises how struggles are interrelated. And comparing lives elsewhere amid structural difficulties does not end after the journey has been completed. Adam’s uncle lived with his family in the Netherlands. I have visited them several times to hand over parcels from Amman or, vice versa, to collect gifts for Kholoud. Like her aunt and cousin, his teenage daughter compared her own experiences in the Netherlands with those of what she sees and hears of that of fellow Iraqi nationals elsewhere. She

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contrasted how she perceived life in Jordan to be with the struggles of her nuclear family. After years spent waiting in an asylum-seeker centre, they now have a status and live in a council estate in my former hometown. They continue to struggle with the language, health issues and, related to these, difficulties with finding employment while performing the racialised gratefulness (Nayeri, 2019) that the Netherlands expects from recognised refugees. During one of my visits, she asked me why it was that her aunt and other Iraqi refugees, residing in Jordan, were dreaming of coming to Europe. She believed life in Jordan was better, considering that there they spoke the same language and the climate and culture was more similar to how life used to be.

Conclusion In everyday living with uncertainty, hope is deeply mediated. Sustaining hope is an active, tiring process of constantly orienting oneself towards potentialities for security, given the limited abilities for a safe and secure life in Jordan or Iraq. These dreams of a better life elsewhere can also be an act of not giving in to the given context and to continue to negotiate for something better and coming into being in interaction with mediated practices. Though their affective affordances and their pervasiveness, digital connections spur emotions and leave behind impressions; they can reinforce a longing to be physically together as well as dread for the future of and in Iraq. Temporal experiences of the everyday and of movements in life are also refracted through the experiences of similar others, Iraqi nationals like them who did get the opportunity to travel. Digital technologies can serve as orientation devices (Ahmed, 2006: 4) that enable forced migrants to dream and direct their hopes, investments and attention to places elsewhere beyond Jordan and Iraq. Whether these imagined futures elsewhere will ever happen remains uncertain. Digital connectivity enables the ability to not give in to the situation, but it is by no means the solution for prolonged legal and social insecurity and might in fact reinforce feeling disconnected. Yet living without it would indeed, as Osman put it, be a tragedy. In Osman’s experience of in-between-ness – in-between Iraq and another place where a future is deemed possible – digital technologies are vital to making life in Jordan bearable and to staying hopefully oriented towards the future, against all odds.

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Notes Parts of this chapter were previously published as Mirjam Twigt, 2018, ‘The Mediation of Hope: Digital Technologies and Affective Affordances within Iraqi Refugee Households in Jordan’, Social Media + Society 4(1): 1–14. 1. The pictures taken by Adam, Osman and several others are not shown in this book, given that their resolution was too low for publishing purposes. 2. Connectivity can leap over broadcasting, as became clear in the ‘dystopian appropriation of [the] hypermedia space’ by ISIS (Kraidy, 2017a). The clear (and largely online) media strategy of ISIS of making violence spectacular built upon the recognition that images can operate as weapons, especially if it builds upon a ‘Hollywood visual style’ that brings ‘affects of terror in familiar form’ (Kraidy, 2017b).

6 Post-humanitarian Shifts in Jordan’s Protection Space

Borders breed loss and conflict, but they also breed profit. —Jennifer Hyndman, ‘Border Crossings’

As of May 2019, the UNHCR had registered the biometric information of more than 2.7 million people who had been seeking protection and/or assistance in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey and Syria (Buckholtz and Raven, 2019). For this purpose, the international organisation draws upon the biometric technology Eyehood developed by ‘iris-recognition solutions’ company Irisguard (2021).1 The UNHCR started using biometric technologies in 2002, initially for the allocation of aid. UNHCR Jordan was one of the first UNHCR operations to make widespread use of biometric information for refugee registration (UNHCR Innovations, 2016). Concerns have been raised not only regarding the potential risks, but also regarding what successful outcomes could potentially bring about ( Jacobsen, 2015). As EU legislation ensures that a similar datafication of the lives and bodies of EU citizens would not be possible, Imad Malhas – founder of Irisguard – was asked about the legitimacy of biometric registration procedures: ‘When refugees flee war, they become citizens of a country called UNHCR until they return to their country or are resettled. Does this country UNHCR not have the right to own the data of its citizens?’ (Nedden and Dongus, 2017). Contrary to what Malhas suggests, the UNHCR is not a country. Despite aspiring chants of refugee populations in Egypt and Morocco that they ‘live in a country called UNHCR’ (Moulin and Nyers, 2007) and the likening of the UNHCR’s role in Jordan (Kagan, 2011) and beyond (Slaughter and Crisp, 2009) to a ‘surrogate state’, the UNHCR is and remains an international organisation, and people registering for protection are not its constituents. The UNHCR cannot provide full access to rights of refugees

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(Stevens, 2015). And means to hold the UNHCR accountable for any perceived wrongdoings are extremely difficult given the legal immunity that UNHCR holds as an international organisation ( Janmyr, 2016), the inherently unequal power relations in humanitarian settings, and other complex local and international legal realities. The lack of sustainable solutions for the prolonged legal and social uncertainty that many of the world’s refugees encounter can provide an explanation for the hope that the UNCHR and its partners project on to new technologies to create new and innovative solutions for what are deeply socioeconomic and political issues. This is increasingly considered to be an adequate way of ‘doing’ humanitarianism. The ethnographic approach of this study enabled me to foreground the accounts of Iraqi refugees and their experiences with technologies over what humanitarian practitioners, donors and private businesses say that humanitarian technologies do. The potentials and dangers of the increase in refugees’ datafication and other forms of experimentations were not (yet) at the forefront of the experiences, worries and aspirations of the Iraqi refugees in this study. To some extent, this relates to how humanitarian practices were deployed differentially, based upon nationality, and the time at which ethnographic research took place. Along with the rest of humanitarian programming, tech-oriented initiatives available in 2015 were largely focused on the much larger Syrian refugee populations and their Jordanian non-refugee peers (Pascucci, 2019; Turner, 2019; Wagner, 2017). And it was far from clear to what extent the UNHCR’s increased deployment of ‘accountability technologies’ (Sandvik and Jacobsen, 2018) to assess vulnerability also applied to non-Syrian refugees. But recent research has also shown that the knowledge and the agency that Syrian refugees in Jordan have regarding humanitarian data practices is fairly limited (Schoemaker et al., 2021). This points to limitations in the UNHCR’s practices concerning informed consent that go beyond Jordan’s protection context (The Engine Room, 2020a, 2020b). But bypassing and benefiting from bypassing human awareness and autonomy are also part and parcel of how surveillance capitalist technologies are designed and operate in practice (Zuboff, 2019). It was only in 2016 that the UNHCR pushed for greater recognition for refugees’ own connected experiences and sense-making practices. The report ‘Connecting Refugees’ (UNHCR, 2016a) has been rightfully criticised for its ‘traces of the colonial discourse of the European saviour, bringing telemodernity to the deserving poor’ (Witteborn, 2018: 22). Beyond lack of communication with and representation of refugees in the design and application of technologies in humanitarian operations (Scott-Smith, 2016), there also continues to be a lack of recognition for what technology-driven interventions mean for the lives and experiences of people seeking refuge. Here, I consider two ongoing shifts regarding the deployment of technologies in refugee

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governance and how this has made Jordan’s protection space increasingly post-humanitarian – biometric registration and the ‘innovation turn’, which has the aim of making refugees self-reliant. I largely rely on secondary sources and academic literature. In the next chapter, I draw upon follow-up research conducted in 2018 to explore shifts in humanitarian communication in the period between 2015 and 2018. I question the logic and idea that technology use and connectivity would contribute to accountability and if so, to whom.

Data Ideology in Humanitarian Operations Obtaining, ordering, classifying and assessing information is foundational to humanitarian operations, as it is through schemes of legibility that decisions are made regarding what kind of assistance is provided and to whom. Faith Cowling (2020) shows that, in the Lebanese Emergency Response Plans, humanitarian processes of making legible are gendered, relational and contingent on sociomaterial networks, which includes the power that is increasingly attributed to expert knowledge and data. Our human inability to comprehend and find solutions is used in favour of be(com)ing a ‘citizen of the world of data’ (Duffield, 2019: 21). What Mark Duffield calls the figure of the ‘homo inscius’ is the ignorant neoliberal subject who relies on data, technologies and techniques to provide what are presumed to be neutral, objective and impartial answers. Technologies and increased connectivity enable organisations to count, trace and track urban refugees who were previously more ‘invisible’. They therefore engender new potential forms of control and humanitarian governance. A combination of technoscientific remoteness and the trust put in the objectivity of technologies can serve to strengthen the idea that humanitarian operations are neutral, ignoring the dominance of seemingly ‘transparent’ European knowledge systems and the racialised and gendered bias of technologies (Browne, 2015; Madianou, 2019b; Achiume, 2020a). As accelerated capitalism and digital developments have interacted with humanitarian operations, the field of relief and aid has come to be involved in a post-humanitarian and technocolonial turn. Critiques on the distancing scripts and othering processes by which humanitarian actors often operate have been longstanding (Agier, 2011; Fassin, 2012; Harrell-Bond, 1986; Hyndman, 2000; Malkki, 1995a; Nyers, 2006). Yet technological developments have further restructured the organisation and nature of international space, movement and mobility, and interact with other significant developments that influence humanitarian operations, including the securitisation of aid (Duffield, 2010; Smirl, 2008), and the implicit and explicit efforts of states to prevent spontaneous migration under the guise of humanitarian efforts.

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Post-humanitarianism does not act beyond, but in relation to humanitarianisms (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Pacitto, 2015). Humanitarian cyberspace and humanitarian connectivity are still humanitarian (Sandvik, 2016b). Adding to Duffield’s work on post-humanitarianism (2019), I understand the ‘post’ within post-humanitarianism in line with Homi Bhabha’s (1994: 9) take on postcoloniality: ‘a salutary reminder of the persistent “neo-colonial” relations with the new world order and the multinational division of labour’. I consider post-humanitarianism as the continuation of rather problematic tenets associated with humanitarian operations, in conjunction with and accelerated by private partnerships and technologies. These include the focus on emergencies, temporariness and compassion instead of rights (Brun, 2016; Fassin, 2012). The ‘emergency imaginary’ (Calhoun, 2004: 3) of crisis tends to strip the contextual landscape of its material and cultural complexities. Combined with an emergency-driven competitiveness and the idea that refugees would be somehow outside of the law ( Jacobsen, 2015), this provides ample space for humanitarian organisations, donor countries and private companies to conduct and experiment with digital technologies in refugees’ lives. There is a rather unsubstantiated hope vested in technologies that seems to prevail over the recognition of rights and the need to safeguard against present and potential risks for people seeking refuge, which would legitimatise the idea that humanitarian settings in the Global South are ideal testing grounds for experimentation – for instance, with vaccinations, genetically modified food products and with other forms of technology. Embedding interventions and technologies within humanitarian practices that were previously considered as dangerous, problematic or unacceptable has gained normative and scientific affirmation among Western actors ( Jacobsen, 2015). Humanitarian organisations have increasingly started to work with private entities, directly aligning aid with business (Bessant et al., 2015; Betts, Bloom and Omata, 2012; Betts and Bloom, 2014; Betts, Bloom and Weaver, 2015; Duffield, 2001; Madianou, 2019a, 2019b; Meier, 2015; Scott-Smith, 2016). This is partly driven lack by the limited substantial funding for humanitarian crisis combined with humanitarian neophilia: the love for newness often in combination with private partnerships (Scott-Smith, 2016). All big tech companies – Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, etc. – have now developed partnerships with UN agencies and/or other humanitarian organisations. Many of the thousands of public-private partnerships within the humanitarian realm can be considered problematic, for many of the involved companies are equally involved in operations involved in matters such as racialised technology-driven border control and artificial intelligence (AI) for predictive policing (Madianou, 2019a). Irisguard, the above-mentioned company that has provided the biometric technology used by the UNHCR and the World Food Programme

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(WFP), the UN agency focused on food shortages, has its roots in national security: Eyehood, the earlier form of its biometric technology, was used to identify irregular migrants residing in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (Nedden and Dongus, 2017). The WFP has also received scrutiny for its US$45 million partnership with Palantir. This software firm is known for its work on advanced biometrics, but also on predictive policing, intelligence and immigration enforcement, and is associated with the works of Cambridge Analytica and the CIA. Palantir does have not access to the personal data of the WFP’s beneficiaries (Parker, 2019), but metadata can equally be used to trace and monitor people, and could create significant risks for people seeking refuge (International Committee of the Red Cross, and Privacy International, 2018). Other UN organisations like the UNHCR and UNICEF have data-sharing agreements with the WFP (UNHCR, WFP and UNICEF, 2020). A focus in humanitarian programming on ‘start-ups’, ‘boot camps’ and ‘disruptions’ (Pascucci, 2019) shows how the language of the humanitarian arena (Hilhorst and Jansen, 2010) has become infused with that of Silicon Valley (Scott-Smith, 2016). Data and data mining have increasingly become central to humanitarian operations; yesterday’s minerals are today’s data (Madianou, 2019a: 3). The constitutive roles of digital innovation and datafication reinvigorate and rework colonial relationships of dependency and operate on the ‘ruins’ of colonial legacies, further explaining what Mirca Madianou calls this technocolonialism (Madianou, 2019b). Madianou discerns five competing logics within technocolonialism. These include the logics of humanitarian accountability (embracing criticism), audit (productivity and ‘success’), capitalism, solutionism and securitisation. Technologies feed into and interact with these logics, for instance, regarding the logics of audit. ‘Accountability technologies’ (Sandvik, 2016a) are increasingly used to assess eligibility for aid and to distribute assistance. Whereas these technologies are said to contribute to consistency, accountability and transparency, the political dimensions that underlie interpretations of vulnerability are obscured. They function as an anti-politics machine (Ferguson, 1994), as sociopolitical questions are increasingly transformed into technical problems. And as responsibility is absorbed by the machine (Duffield, 2019: 93), the means to hold someone (a person or organisation) accountable for errors tend to diminish ( Johns, 2017). International donors, policymakers, government leaders, international organisations and academics are displaying a particular optimistic outlook towards the development described above (Ali Salah et al., 2018; Bessant et al., 2015; Betts, Bloom and Omata, 2012; Betts and Bloom, 2014; Betts, Bloom and Weaver, 2015; International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, 2013; Meier, 2015; UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2013). Important critical voices have been raised on how

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the widespread deployment of technologies interact with and potentially reinforce refugees’ already precarious circumstances and infringe refugees’ rights (Duffield, 2019; Hayes, 2018; Hosein and Nyst, 2013; Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2018; Lemberg-Pedersen and Haioty, 2020; Leurs, 2020; Macias, 2020; Madianou, 2019a, 2019b). In-depth research that focuses on the actual situated experiences of refugees targeted by humanitarian technology continues to be sparse (Ong, 2019), although there have been some recent publications on this matter (Molnar, 2020; Schoemaker et al., 2021; The Engine Room, 2020a, 2020b). Here I briefly situate two digital developments within Jordan’s protection space: UNHCR Jordan’s practice of obtaining biometric information of people registering for protection and the ‘innovation turn’ with the purpose of stimulating refugees’ self-reliance. These are just two elements of a larger infrastructure of ‘accountability technologies’ ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2018). My aim is to show that by cherrypicking only specific rights, other rights can become infringed.

Biometric Registration as Default Practice in Registration for Refugee Protection ’Biometrics’ literally means ‘measurement of life’ and refers to the technological measurement and processing of unique bodily characteristics, such as a person’s fingerprints or irises. It can be used to determine who a person is (identification) or to establish whether someone is the person they claim to be (verification) (Ajana, 2013). In 2013, UNHCR Jordan was one of the first UNHCR operations to make widespread use of ‘iris-scanning fraudproof biometrics’ for refugee registration (UNHCR Innovations, 2016), given that the agency sought to mitigate the potential for overcounting Syrian refugees in Jordan as had been the case in 2006–7 in relation to refugees from Iraq (Lenner, 2016). The emphasis on fraud here refers to low-level fraud, for instance if people would seek food assistance more than once. It ignores that most fraud in humanitarian operations occurs earlier in the supply chain and purports a suspicious mindset towards refugees (International Committee of the Red Cross, the Engine Room and Block Party, 2017). It also negates the potential for errors and the limited means that refugees have available to them to seek recourse if an error is made, let alone by a machine ( Johns, 2017). In 2015, two years after UNHCR Jordan started registering information, the UNHCR published its Data Protection Policy. This document makes mention of the importance of safeguarding informed consent (UNHCR, 2015b). By now, obtaining biometric data has become default practice in UNHCR’s refugee registration procedures. Recent publications in differ-

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ent refugee protection contexts have shown however that the information provided to those registering is still limited and that the ability to say no is severely constrained (The Engine Room, 2020a, 2020b; Schoemaker et al., 2021). An important consideration is whether, in these circumstances, informed consent can ever be meaningful considering the involved power dynamics (Macias, 2020; Madianou, 2019a). There is a tendency to present obtaining biometric information from people seeking refuge as either an uncontroversial and simple technique (UNHCR DPSM, 2015) and/or as a solution, specifically in reference to those people who lack access to or have inadequate state-issued documentation (Kingston, 2019; Manby, 2019). The imperative of ‘Leaving no one behind’ (Stielike, 2019; UNHCR, 2018b) is used, as is the desired UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.9: to provide, by 2030, legal identity for all, including birth registration. A digital identity is increasingly conflated with a legal identity and is used to justify procedures aimed to make the world’s refugee and migrant bodies countable, traceable and machine-readable (Stielike, 2019; van der Ploeg, 2005). Becoming a ‘citizen of the world of data’ (Duffield, 2019: 21) requires that the data of other (non)citizens become readily available. Biometrics can, among many other things, speed up registration, improve the potentials for registration – especially for people without papers – and increase the accuracy and potential for aid distribution. However, its deployment and potential effects are far from simple, considering that it contributes to vast amounts of personal sensitive data and that it interacts with the already precarious and vulnerable circumstances in which many of the world’s refugees find themselves. Limited discussions on the digital rights of refugees contrast starkly with the attention given to the privacy concerns and datafication of EU citizens and the legislation put in place to safeguard against these risks, further exposing how risks and rights are deployed differentially ( Jacobsen, 2015). Combined with the humanitarian imperative – it is better to do something than to do nothing – this further provides the space for forms of experimentation with technologies that would not have been permitted if it would have concerned European citizens. The lack of legislation and implementation of law aimed at regulating data technology use in humanitarian settings in the Global South, and the idea that refugees are somehow outside of the law enable widespread data experimentation. Making all refugees countable is not the same as making all refugees count. Often, data serves as a means to prove to donors that one is accountable via a more careful counting. This process only reinforces technological optimism, which relates in particular to the potential of technologies to produce and analyse large amounts of data (Duffield, 2019; Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2018; Sandvik and Jacobsen, 2016). The drive for newness and the

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need to innovate – to search creatively for solutions in a crisis environment of scarcity – is in and of itself considered to be a credible justification for unyielding authority ( Jacobsen, 2015). As of 30 April 2020, 86% of all Syrian nationals registered with UNHCR Jordan had been registered using biometrics (UNHCR Jordan, 2020). In 2019, a total of 84% of all Iraqi nationals registered with UNHCR had undergone biometric processing (UNHCR Jordan, 2019a). But whereas UNHCR Jordan was one of the first operations to record biometric data upon registration, the first experiments with biometrics took place on the borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan in UNHCR return programming in the early 2000s. These techniques not only mirrored the techniques that nationstates deploy to boost their (often extraterritorial and outsourced) 9/11 securitisation policies ( Jacobsen, 2015); it was also the US Department of State that urged the UNHCR to do so and provided earmarked funding for it. It was also in response to 9/11 that the UN agency became more concerned with order and security. It took on an increasingly suspicious approach towards the world’s migrants and refugees, as its emphasis was increasingly on the categorisation of refugee bodies deemed worthy of protection rather than ensuring protection (Betts, Loescher and Milner, 2012). Technologies interact and therefore shape sociopolitical realities. Datafication can contribute to additional protection needs of the ‘digital refugee body’ (Hosein and Nyst, 2013; Jacobsen, 2015: 9) and can heighten security and privacy risks (Crisp, 2018) for people who already find themselves in especially vulnerable circumstances. There seem to be relatively little policies in place for when technology fails or falls into the wrong hands. And whereas the persistence of data and the ability to access it from a distance might not be an issue in the present, biometric samples taken today can potentially be (mis)used by not-yet-invented future technologies (The Engine Room, 2020a, 2020b; The Engine Room and Oxfam, 2018). As a result, refugees seem to be made more vulnerable by the very agencies that were established to protect them. Questions like who ‘owns’ the data, who has access to it and how secure the data is stored are crucial, given that the UNHCR’s responsibility to protect people seeking refuge has been compromised before as a result of its leniency towards donors and state actors (Sandvik and Jacobsen, 2016). Data-driven partnerships with companies such as Palantir, Irisguard and many others have raised many concerns, including the potential ‘function creep’ (Ajana, 2013) – that data that is collected for one particular purpose is used for very different purposes. For instance, in continental Europe and the United Kingdom, biometrics have been used to criminalise migration. There is also the possibility for mission creep (Sandvik, 2021) – for instance, if the UNHCR started to provide welfare services to nondisplaced persons because it has processed the data to do so.

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And the possibility that data falls into the wrong hands – of state or nonstate actors – can have potentially devastating consequences because, in contrast to aggregate data, biometric data is directly linked to one’s individual identity ( Jacobsen, 2015; Kingston, 2019; Lemberg-Pedersen and Haioty, 2020; Madianou, 2019a). Many state actors have already expressed interest in the UNHCR’s data and/or already work closely with the UNHCR to integrate such data into their own registration systems. The Jordanian government has a data-sharing agreement with the UNHCR. The government of Malaysia asked the UNHCR to share its biometric refugee data, also in the hope that this could help the country to enforce its efforts on targeting transnational crime (Lee, 2017). Jordan is, not unlike Lebanon (Cowling, 2020), considered as an ideal place to trial promised shifts in humanitarianisms, including localisation and case assistance. In 2007, the use of ATM cards for cash assistance to Iraqi refugees was considered as innovative measure (UN News, 2007). This was guided by the argument that cash assistance instead of in-kind assistance would increase refugees’ autonomy and dignity. In the Syria Refugee Response, iris-scanning technologies have been used as new and innovative means of cash assistance. In practice these actually constrained the freedom and flexibility for Syrian refugee families to decide for themselves where and how to spend their aid money as shopping was allocated to particular supermarkets and food products and only selected household members were able to pay (Kingston, 2019: 41; Staton, 2016a; Turner, 2018: 238–40). The use of biometric information to further the automation of cash-based interventions also suggests that this personal and sensitive information was used for another purpose than for the purpose – registration – it was originally collected. One of the few examples in which people seeking refugee protection actively and successfully resisted the UNHCR’s deployment of biometric technology was in the Rohingya Response in Bangladesh. There the biometric registration system – involving the UNHCR, the Bangladeshi government and private partners – only provided the option to Rohingya refugees to register as ‘Myanmar Nationals’, further contributing to the symbolic erasure of ‘Rohingya’ as an ethnic identity (Madianou, 2019a; The Engine Room, 2020a). Technologies can reinforce exclusions by reducing variety and complexity. That humanitarian categorisations tend to operate along rather Western-centric reductive lines is not particularly new. In the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’, many of the refuge-seeking Iraqi nationals found themselves reminded of the US-imposed ethnosectarian divide, as they were required to categorise themselves according to Sunni or Shi’ite affiliation. But the deployment of technologies provides the guise of being objective and neutral, while reductive digital inscriptions made can have long-standing effects. In 2013, an advisory body to UNESCO warned that international agencies ought to be careful to not act as monoliths in response to increased

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global connectivity (Kingston, 2019: 41). And in her most recent report, Tendayi Achiume (2020b), the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, pointed out that especially in border and migration contexts, ‘governments and UN agencies are developing and using emerging digital technologies in ways that are uniquely experimental, dangerous, and discriminatory in the border and immigration enforcement context’. But in 2018, the UNHCR argued that giving everyone ‘access to a legal and digital identity’ requires the ‘capacity of a single entity’ and collaboration with governments and the private sector (UNHCR, 2018b). Its 2025 goal is to be a ‘trusted leader on data and information related to refugees and other affected populations, thereby enabling actions that protect, include and empower’ (UNHCR, 2019b). The obtaining and storage of biometric data tend to be outsourced to private companies. To what extent can and should these private companies be as ‘trusted’ as the UNHCR in terms of protecting people’s most personal information from exploitation and extraction, other forms of potential misuse and/or falling into the wrong hands? Potentially in response to similar criticism and concerns as mentioned above, self-sovereign identity (SSI), user-controlled and decentralised forms of digital identity that are closely linked with the distributed ledger technology blockchain have gained traction in the humanitarian sector and interest of the UNHCR. But as Margie Cheesman’s (2020) ethnographic enquiry shows, the promise that this technology provides more control and ownership to refugees is already complicated by bureaucratic and commercial interests. In May 2019, UNHCR Jordan was describing its latest innovation: its implementation of self-renewal methodologies as a means to ‘empower persons of concerns as data owners’ (UNHCR Jordan, 2019d). UNHCR Jordan now prides itself on giving back (access to) deeply personalised information to the people it represents. Considering that the UNHCR Data Protection Policy (UNHCR, 2015b) states that the UNHCR holds the right to share data with any third party it deems appropriate (on the condition that it affords a similar level of data protection as the UNHCR’s policy) and that UNHCR case files are considered as permanent records, I question whether that promised ‘ownership’ consists of more than only the means to validate and update personal data.

Jordan’s ‘Innovation Turn’: How the Jordan Compact Coincides with an Emerging Start-Up Culture In February 2016, the Jordan Compact was issued, which was intended to allow the entry of 200,000 Syria refugees into Jordan’s formal labour markets, not including the employment sectors that are closed for nonJordanian workers.2 Ever since its implementation, the Jordan Compact has

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been closely monitored by humanitarian practitioners as well as academics. There has been much variance in the assessments of its success (Barbelet et al., 2018; Hunag et al., 2018; International Rescue Committee, 2017a; Lenner and Turner, 2018).3 Lenner and Turner (2018) make a strong argument that whereas the Jordan Compact has been labelled a ‘policy success’ by achieving a consensus, the limited attention it paid to important contextual factors of Jordan’s labour market as well as the lives of refugees made it unlikely that it will be able to achieve what it intended to do: to reinvigorate Jordan’s economy and provide Syrian refugees with the opportunity for decent work. The influential book on economic inclusion by Alexander Betts and his Oxford colleague Paul Collier (2017) can be considered the blueprint of this political commitment for restricted labour integration. It resonates with much of the earlier work by Betts and his Refugee Economies team on the ‘innovation turn’. Betts, Bloom and Omata (2012) argued that the humanitarian sector should abandon its antipathy towards the private sector and instead ought to embrace a ‘new’ more business-minded approach targeted at the economic inclusion of refugees. Humanitarian actors had been long been ready to embrace the ‘innovation turn’. Prior to the implementation of the Jordan Compact, programmes and practices that were previously grouped under the UNHCR’s livelihood programming, including vocational training and strengthening entrepreneurship skills, had already been rebranded as ‘innovations’ (Easton-Calabria, 2015; Easton-Calabria and Omata, 2018). And many UN agencies had established ‘innovation labs’ (Bessant et al., 2015; Bloom and Faulkner, 2015). But even if the argument is made for bottom-up innovation, Bloom and Faulkner’s (2015) description of ‘labs’ as a ‘safe haven for experimentation’ resonates with colonial history and the history of warfare, as well as the potential for exploitative misuse of vulnerable subjects as test objects ( Jacobsen, 2010, 2015). Experimentation often ends up in exploitation. Throughout their work, Betts and his Refugee Economics team emphasise that ‘innovation, technology and the private sector are not a panacea for refugee crises’ (Betts, Bloom and Omata, 2012: 16), and that the involvement of states, donor government and international organisations continues to be crucial in order to safeguard refugee protection and regulate safe working environments. But in their book, Betts and Collier (2017: 235–36) optimistically presume that corporations and states have the capacity and willingness to prevent the compromising of labour rights, low wages and other means of exploitations. And the idea behind ‘refugee economies’ (Betts, Bloom and Omata, 2012) is that it is intended to connect refugees’ employment to their local surroundings. In practice, the Jordan Compact had rather the opposite effect, as the aversion of the Jordanian host state to support long-term integration was partly reconciled by a push for a refugee-driven zonal economy

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away from Jordan’s broader labour market (Lenner and Turner, 2018: 12). Heaven Crawley therefore rightfully commented that Betts and Collier’s book draws upon the problematic presumption that capitalism can ‘come to the rescue of the refugee system’ (2018: 27) and that employment would immediately translate into refugees’ empowerment. The actual success of humanitarian programmes in relation to refugee work tends to be defined by a wide variety of factors, including the political and legal context, the extent and types of economic opportunities within the local labour market and, for instance, the capacity and willingness of refugees to invest in localised livelihoods, given future uncertainties ( Jacobsen and Fratzke, 2016; Lee et al., 2020). Upon my return to the field in the winter of 2018 I noticed, alongside and beyond the Jordan Compact, that there had been a shift of Jordan’s humanitarian realm towards ‘private partnerships’, self-reliance and an emphasis on tech-oriented innovations. As most refugees in Jordan are not legally allowed to open a bank account, mobile wallets were introduced to enable them to overcome this local hurdle (UNHCR Jordan, 2019b). As of November 2018, urban Syrian refugees were legally allowed to run some types of home-based business (Government of Jordan, 2018) to increase decent opportunities to work (especially for Syrian refugee women) and to tap into Jordan’s gig economy (Hunt et al., 2018). UNHCR Jordan (2019c) had established a partnership with Google to create connected learning in crisis contexts that coincided with a wide variety of other e-learning oriented initiatives to increase access to education and employment for young people in Jordan. Normative humanitarian scripts of what would define a ‘good refugee’ have shifted. Only a few years after the Iraqi refugees were blamed for being too demanding (Dodd, 2010; Pascucci, 2011: 50), the somewhat similar middle-classness of Syrian refugees was celebrated for its entrepreneurial spirit (Turner, 2019). Their ‘entrepreneurship’ was used to distinguish them from ‘African’ ‘dependent’ refugees, further exposing the racialised hierarchies of humanitarian work. But whereas the involvement of private partners combined with the accelerated potentials of digital connectivity might have been ‘new’, a focus on refugees’ self-reliance is not (Easton-Calabria, 2015; Easton-Calabria and Omata, 2018). Framed as a means of empowering refugees, similar past initiatives have been used as a political tool to reduce aid (Easton-Calabria and Omata, 2018) and/or mitigate onward travel to their own countries ( Jacobsen and Fratzke, 2016) and have not been particularly successful in establishing dignified work for refugees. The prime responsibility is assigned to individualised refugees to make do in suboptimal conditions (Scott-Smith, 2016). Rather than mutually benefiting refugees and refugee-hosting economies, Suzan Ilcan and Kim Rygiel (2015) make a convincing argument that a too reductive focus on refugees’ economic inclusion is ultimately disempowering: it

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serves to downsize structural support or guaranteed rights and simultaneously influences subjectivities as it aims to produce refugees into Western-modelled individuals who, in environments of scarcity, are required to weigh up all options and risks and have to take responsibility for their choices/decisions. These shifts towards ‘resiliency humanitarianism’ and responsibilising refugees that Ilcan and Rygiel (2015) describe in reference to the UN System ‘Cluster Approach’ in camp settings also occur beyond refugee camps, as became evident in the shifts in humanitarian programming in Jordan’s urban refugee population. A foregrounding of developing skills to make refugees potentially employable and exploitable reconstitutes refugees in terms of potential labour and shifts away from an understanding of refugees as (also) political subjects. It encourages refugees to consent to the conditions of their lives and renders superfluous matters such as the ‘increasing securitization of migrants and refugees to the everyday demands for human rights, recognition, and social justice’ (Ilcan and Rygiel, 2015: 344). Jordan’s ‘innovation turn’ included increased attention for entrepreneurship and start-ups that did not base their selection upon status or nationality, but upon merit. These mostly target Jordan’s young unemployed population, including Syrian and Iraqi refugees, and refugees with other national backgrounds, given that lines between refugees and citizen-subjects are increasingly blurred in informal economies in the Global South (Duffield, 2019). In Jordan, unemployment is particularly high among the youth: 36.7% of those aged between fifteen and twenty-four are unemployed (International Labour Organization Statistics Database, 2019). Despite their legal status – and sometimes just because of the lack of a secure legal status as this makes them the most striking examples for overcoming structural adversity – young people are increasingly charged with being their own change-makers. Social problems are increasingly depoliticised as responsibility is shifted to the individual, and hubs, incubators and hackathons are set up to inspire young people to make the most of themselves. On 27 January 2019, I attended the graduation ceremony of one of such programme at the futuristic-looking coworking space Zain Innovation Campus (ZINC), which was open for a wider public. Based at the heart of Jordan’s ICT sector, ZINC is considered to be at the centre of what developmental narratives have optimistically referred to as the Arab ‘start-up spring’ (Ahmari, 2015). This refers to the economic changes, including the increase of public-private partnerships (PPPs), that have occurred following the 2011 uprisings (Pascucci, 2019). Thirteen young graduates, six of whom came from a refugee background, had obtained the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ReACT Certificate in Computer and Data Science. This programme consisted of a two-week offline crash course at the beginning, followed by online modules, English tutoring and a well-paid and well-supervised internship with sponsoring Middle Eastern tech and logis-

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tics companies. The MIT ReACT programme can contribute to an immediate improvement in the lives of the selected young people and their families. This includes being in a community of like-minded peers, having the ability to be paid and validated as an intern, and being able to build up a network. Setting up a supportive learning environment in which outstanding young people including refugees can gain access to opportunities to which they would otherwise not have access can be incredibly important. Yet this programme focuses on the best and the brightest, and their abilities to not only withstand adversity but also to thrive within these adversities. This became evident during the Commencement Speech during the graduation ceremony. The Vice President for Open Learning at MIT addressed the young graduates. He told them that they needed to be able to innovate, reinvent and manage themselves in order to be successful: it was necessary to become the CEO of one’s life. He emphasised the achievements of graduates who have managed to learn so much, despite the many obstacles they had already faced. This, the speaker argued, made them ready to face any future challenge, despite and simply because of the heightened need to adapt to a future that is characterised by the automation of work and the increased global scarcity of decent employment. Some of the young people I later spoke to thought this speech to be very inspiring. But it made me rather sad, for I imagined this could also be interpreted as a heavy responsibility. In the absence of full economic and social rights, questions concerning livelihoods tend to take on an increasingly neoliberal focus on self-reliance and innovation. Participants in such programmes certainly negotiate the heavily individualised expectations of the programmes with their own ‘more-than-individual’ engagements (Pascucci, 2019). But it can also evoke tensions, given that it interacts with a context of lacking legal rights and limited opportunities. When I spoke a month later to the Executive Director of the MIT ReACT programme,4 he explained that the aim of the programme was to ensure that the skills of gifted adolescents should not be lost: ‘Refugee youth should have the opportunity to access higher education opportunities in the same range of competitiveness that the rest of the world does … I like to think that, but for circumstances, these students would have found another way to MIT, or Harvard.’ He stated that competitive programmes such as this one should come to exist alongside other, less meritocratic, educational opportunities for refugee youth. The question then remains as to what extent private companies are equally willing to invest in providing opportunities for not as ‘gifted’ or not as young refugees, and, if so, what these companies would expect in return. The increase in involvement of big business and tech companies confirms that a focus on economic solutions has taken precedence over the pursuit of political solutions for refugees. Some of the involved companies will certainly have good intentions. But while this might provide companies with good publicity and/or data, it tells us something about the state of

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humanitarianism. In need of funding to finance support and/or inspired by humanitarian neophilia, it seems that there have been attempts to integrate the ‘exceptional’ state of being a refugee (with its corresponding lack of guaranteed rights in practice) into capitalism more directly.

Conclusion In this chapter, I discussed two shifts in humanitarian practices – default registration of biometrics and the ‘innovation turn’ – and how this relates to Jordan as a refugee-hosting country. Whereas obtaining biometric data can create potential new protection risks and significant dangers for exploitation, extractivism and misrepresentation, a short-sighted focus on refugees’ economic inclusion via digital connectivity or home-based reinforces expectations on refugees to be resilient in their adversity. Few would disagree with the central tenet in Betts and Colliers’ book (2017): refugees’ right to work is a crucial element of comprehensive refugee protection (Pascucci, 2017). And it is crucial to seek possibilities to also provide protection to people who do not have access to legal documentation. What I question in this chapter is how ‘innovative’ measures taken to address specific and urgent issues can interact with structural constraints and discussions on the right to refuge and refugee rights. The two shifts discussed here come together in the belief that experimentation with new technologies and private partnerships in and with refugees’ lives is a ‘valid’ and logical way of doing humanitarianism, and that Jordan is the ideal location for putting that into practice. An emphasis on ‘loss’ in crisis – of a generation (from accessing education) and of people who would not be able to register – justifies immediacy and experimental approaches but comes at the price of a loss of rights. And digitisation and a resilience-oriented economic inclusion can also feed into each other. For instance, Ilcan and Rygiel (2015: 344) show how in the UN System’s ‘Cluster Approach’, registration data was used for a wide variety of other purposes tied to ‘resiliency humanitarianism’, such as identifying particular skills of individuals and tracking their participation. Humanitarian neophilia (Scott-Smith, 2016) – the love for often technology-oriented newness in combination with private partnerships – partly comes about because technologies provide hope that there is an easier way out of being at a loss amid the world’s complexity. This optimism can create a blind spot. A short-sighted embrace of technological developments and private partnerships has the potential to heighten refugees’ vulnerabilities and can entrench the deeply asymmetric power relations between refugees and agencies established to provide refugee protection. Connectivity can serve to sustain distance and is used to sidestep important sociopolitical discussions on rights, and instead paves the way for refugees’ more immediate

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inclusion into global capitalism. This is used to justify containment practices of refugees in suboptimal conditions in the Global South, who certainly have a voice but often cannot afford to voice dissent. The chapter should be read as an argument against the unfettered optimism projected onto technologies. Whereas it raises many concerns about neoliberal and technology-driven forms of humanitarianism, is not an argument against technology. As in all human lives, technologies are a given in the lives of refugees. And, indeed, for some, the ‘innovation turn’ or a digital identity can provide an opportunity to which they would otherwise not have access. But the pressing question remains whether and, if so, how refugees, migrants and those who aim to act in solidarity can draw upon the potentials of digital connectivity while mitigating its manifold risks and challenges.

Notes 1. Whereas Irisguard’s website states that it are based in the United Kingdom, the newspaper article by Nedden and Dongus (2017) states that the company is based in the Cayman Islands. Members of the supervisory board include the former director of the British foreign intelligence services MI6 and the former International Security and Homeland Security Advisor to George W. Bush. 2. The International Labour Organization – Regional Office for Arab States (2017: 22) reports that as of January 2017, the seventeen professions closed to foreign workers in Jordan included administrative and accounting professions, clerical professions, telecommunication jobs, jobs in sales, most technical professions (including mechanical and car repair), engineering, education and some professions in hospitality. At that time, the criteria to define these closed occupations were not set. 3. After exempting Syrian refugees from having to pay work permit fees and extensive ‘campaigning’ (Tiltnes, Zhang and Pedersen, 2019: 113) by the Jordanian government and international agencies to formalise and register refugees’ employment, numbers from Jordan’s Ministry of Labour have shown that as of December 2019, a total of 176,920 work permits have been issued. These numbers seem to include the annual renewal of permits. The Norwegian Research Institute FAFO found that, in comparison to its earlier survey in 2014 before the Jordan Compact, access to employment for Syrian refugees had improved considerably in 2017–18. Yet considering that only one-third of people employed had a work permit, this begs the question of the extent to which this increase is due to the Jordan Compact. 4. Interview with MIT ReACT’s Executive Director, 20 February 2019. He also pointed out that one of the challenges of running the programme related to the infrastructure of online learning environments: ‘I don’t believe that any of the major online education platforms were built for a low bandwidth environment.’

7 Fast-Forward to 2018 Technologies towards Accountability for UNHCR Jordan’s Persons of Concern

It is only by understanding that the way in which we do things is as important as what is done, that we will be able to move beyond the existing categories of north/south; donor/beneficiary; saviour/saved that dominate and constrain current international politics. —Lisa Smirl, ‘Building the Other, Constructing Ourselves’

The post-humanitarian move in terms of Jordan’s refugee protection context has increasingly shifted towards innovation, biometrics and other ‘accountability technologies’ ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2018). Here I consider steps taken in relation to communication with refugees and if these changes have resulted in more accountability towards UNCHR Jordan’s Iraqi Persons of Concern (PoC). I understand accountability as ‘a problem of communication that mediates asymmetrical power relationships’ (Madianou et al., 2016: 964). This understanding is not dissimilar to the understanding of the UNHCR at its headquarter level of Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP): ‘an active commitment by humanitarian actors and organizations to use power responsibly by taking account of, giving account to and being held to account by the people they seek to assist’ (UNHCR, n.d.b). It therefore recognises and provides space to discuss the role of power within humanitarian relations. I explore broader recognition by the UNHCR of digital connectivity (UNHCR, 2016a) and communication with communities (CwC) in prolonged displacement (UNHCR, n.d.c). In the period between 2015 and 2018, a CwC associate was appointed at UNHCR Jordan, an automated answering system was introduced for UNHCR Jordan’s helpline and more at-

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tention was given to what were called Community Support Centres (CSCs). This coincided with a dwindling in international funding for Jordan’s refugees from US$1,720 million for 2017 (Husseini, 2018) to US$966.9 million in funding for 2019 (Jordan Times, 2020), leaving a substantial shortfall in relation to what was budgeted for Jordan’s Response Plan and making decisions on how to allocate money and time for aid extremely difficult. A decrease in funding for relief tends to necessitate communication with refugees, if only to make them aware of what the potential consequences of budget cuts are for their already uncertain circumstances ( Jack, 2016). This was also recognised by UNHCR Jordan’s Senior External Relations Officer:1 ‘There is a lot of work that needs to be done from UNHCR’s side, in terms of explaining that cash assistance and resettlement are not entitlements per se.’ But it was my understanding that the many refugees I had spoken to over the years were deeply aware that consideration for resettlement or cash assistance was not a right available to everyone, and it was this awareness that spurred questions like: how did selection work? And why was it that, unlike Syrian refugees, non-Syrian refugee populations residing in Jordan did not receive similar restricted work rights? In this chapter, I aim to further examine the challenges faced in relation to humanitarian communication, what humanitarian communication produces and to what extent there is space for more accountability towards affected populations, given the intrinsically unequal power relations inherent in the international protection regime and Jordan’s temporary protection context, by which UNHCR Jordan’s staff is also constrained.

Communication Technologies as ‘Accountability Technologies’ Communication with, participation by and accountability towards refugees, and the understanding that new technologies can enable the achievement of this have gained traction within the international refugee regime. The rather belated recognition by UNHCR headquarters of the importance of digital connections in refugees’ lives coincided with increased traction in humanitarian relief for the need to be accountable towards people affected through CwC (Madianou et al., 2016; Mosel and Holloway, 2019). Among humanitarian actors and practitioners, much hope was projected onto newer communication technologies for increasing humanitarian accountability, as they can make establishing two-way communication between humanitarian actors and affected persons easier (Madianou et al., 2016). This would increase opportunities for affected people to make their voices heard and would enable affected communities to ‘organize, coordinate and respond to their own problems’ (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Cres-

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cent Movement, 2013: 13). It is therefore not that surprising that when I spoke to UNHCR Jordan’s Senior External Relations Officer, he proudly remarked that UNHCR Jordan’s operations were not only known for their innovations, but also for their ‘level of engagement with refugees’.2 The increased attention on communication and communities is closely linked to recognition of the importance of participation. Goal 6 of the 10 determined goals in the Grand Bargain, signed during the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in Istanbul in 2016 by eighteen donor countries and sixteen relief organisations, including the UNHCR – is rather boldly formulated as a ‘Participation Revolution’. It is defined as: to ‘include the people receiving aid in making the decisions that affect their lives’ (Metcalfe-Hough et al., 2018: 11). Participation and accountability both depend on more horizontal forms of communication, with and within communities, and have been developed in response to persisting power imbalances in development and humanitarian relief (Wilkins, 2000). Criticism of humanitarian relief for being directed one-way is longstanding and persisting (de Waal, 1997; Duffield, 2019; Harrell-Bond, 1986; Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2016; Krause, 2014). An evaluation of the Sphere project and the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP) – the two main initiatives of the last twenty years geared towards improving accountability and that in 2014 merged to form the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS) – showed that accountability was still largely prioritised and directed towards donors at the cost of accountability towards affected populations (Krause, 2014). Finding a balance between what tends to be described as downward and upward accountability (Madianou et al., 2016: 977) continues to be struggle. This word choice used in the humanitarian lexicon can be read as how organisations position themselves as in-between mediators between the Global North and the Global South, and implies a hierarchy. Instead, I distinguish between accountability towards donors (including donor countries and the host country) and accountability towards people targeted for humanitarian relief. Humanitarian accountability goes beyond the UNHCR alone and extends to the entire humanitarian realm. What makes the UNHCR’s responsibility somewhat different is the agency’s mandate to protect refugees. In reference to this mandate, the Rwandan genocide and developments in Kosovo in the mid-1990s highlighted how political dynamics could undermine the UNHCR’s ability to provide protection ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2016: 7–8). Subsequently, high-profile scandals concerning mismanagement and exploitation further exposed that the agency’s own activities could result in harm (2016: 8–9). Since 2006, the UNHCR has assumed a more normative take on accountability that goes beyond merely financial and managerial accountability (2016: 9). Yet the question is to what extent this has fully resulted in improvement of accountability towards the UNHCR’s PoC.

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The UNHCR’s ‘Emergency Handbook’ (UNHCR, n.d.b) provides a rather improvement-oriented take on the agency’s history with accountability. The perception that the UNHCR seems to have of itself – that ‘persons of concern are at the heart of its accountability framework’ ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2016: 14) – has been rightfully challenged in an edited volume on the UNHCR’s struggle for accountability. Kristina Bergtora Sandvik, Katja Lindskov Jacobsen and their fellow contributors (2016) found that radical improvements in the UNHCR’s accountability to PoC have yet to be achieved. The UNHCR’s accountability procedures continue to be largely voluntary and internal in nature, and tend to leave the role and responsibilities of (signatory) states – which are key for ensuring refugees protection – out of the equation ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2016: 15–16). The UNHCR’s sphere of action has expanded and includes a large number of implementing partners, further limiting the potential for accountability. As part of the neoliberal turn of humanitarianism, funding states have increasingly withdrawn from providing aid directly, yet continue to regulate and control. They have outsourced relief to humanitarian agencies instead, but as their main funding bodies, they put considerable pressure on ‘outcomes’ and ‘impact’ (Madianou, 2019a; Madianou et al., 2016). Amidst the persisting difficulties for safeguarding accountability towards affected populations, much hope has been projected onto the potential for technologies. Issues that are deeply political such as ‘eligibility for assistance’ are increasingly viewed as matters that can easily be resolved with the help of technologies ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2018; Sandvik and Jacobsen, 2016). This optimism also comes from the idea that there would be ‘an all-encompassing accountability solution’ ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2016: 17). The UNHCR’s presumption that technologies simultaneously improve both upward and downward accountability requires caution, given that the information these technologies provide tends to be largely directed at the donor (Hilhorst, 2002; Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2016). Given that the participation of affected populations in humanitarian settings tends to be regarded as ‘time-consuming in a time-pressured context’ (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance, 1998), the appeal of technologies and their promise of quicker, easier and more inclusive participation and accountability is not surprising. The affordances of mobile and social technologies – approachability, availability and immediacy – are often considered as easy means to strengthen transparency and accountability (Cone, 2012; Sandvik, 2016b) and further expose the hope projected onto technologies to solve or sidestep issues that are deeply political. During the 2013 humanitarian response to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, a technology-driven approach towards AAP and CwC was first put to the test (Madianou et al., 2015; Madianou et al., 2016). Affected populations were encouraged to send questions and complaints via text message

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so that their concerns could be addressed. Local and humanitarian power relations and associated behaviour – such as gratitude, dependency and fear of withdrawal of aid – influenced what affected people would message about. More importantly, the people affected did not receive any feedback on the text messages they sent. The feedback loop was not closed: there was no response that acknowledged the reception of their message or whether steps were subsequently taken (Madianou et al., 2016: 970–71). Instead, the information in their text messages was aggregated into spreadsheets, which were then forwarded to donors who had been pushing for evidence on how funding was spent. Technology had rather reinforced a disconnect between humanitarian actors and affected populations, had further amplified the pre-existing power symmetries and suggested that an audit culture – directed at donors – seemed to be at odds with an accountability culture to affected populations (Madianou et al., 2016; Wigley, 2015). There have been similar findings in the field of development studies: technology used for communication with and accountability towards affected persons tends to fall short and often increases rather than decreases the inequalities addressed (Tacchi, 2011; Waisbord, 2008). A too narrow focus on ‘voice’ alone tends to negate that within humanitarian and development settings, the space for listening tends to be rather limited (Madianou et al., 2015; Tacchi, 2011). Securing effective accountability of affected populations is an extremely complex process, given that accountability requires the possibility to verbalise and enforce change, and the possibility to exit by breaking the relationship (Hilhorst, 2002). In humanitarian settings, affected populations often have limited possibilities for voicing concerns or for saying no, as has become evident in recent research on the increased deployment of biometrics for refugee registration and the limited possibilities for resistance to this in such constrained environments (The Engine Room, 2020a, 2020b). In the rest of this chapter, I draw upon empirical data obtained in the winter of 2018–19 to consider changes in UNHCR Jordan’s communicative infrastructure. I respond to what I consider to be a too optimistic and too short-sighted take on the potential of technologies towards increased accountability to refugees, given what the humanitarian context and humanitarian communication produces. The search for accountability towards affected populations is an incredibly complex process. It is something that can never be completely done ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2016), especially considering how it is situated in the midst of local realities and the economic and political power structures inherent in humanitarian operations (Madianou et al., 2016). I point to the need for structural change, which is different from the neoliberal push for individuals to work harder and/or differently. The aim of this chapter is not to find out who or what is ‘right’, but what can be done better in terms of ensuring accountability for Jordan’s refugees, given the difficult realities in which refugees and people seeking to aid them find themselves.

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Notes on the Methodology in This Chapter In contrast to the other empirical chapters, this chapter draws upon followup fieldwork conducted in the winter of 2018–19, as UNHCR Jordan allowed me to conduct observations in its main registration centre and in relation to its helpline service.3 I was able to hold several in-depth interviews with UNHCR staff members working across different units.4 I also draw upon UNHCR Jordan’s reporting on its communicative practices. In November 2018, I also organised a dissemination session to discuss findings of my Ph.D. research with Iraqi refugees. Some but not all of the twelve attendees had contributed to the 2015 research. Too often, the outcomes of research are not shared with participants (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2012). All attendees to the workshop were living in very similar uncertain circumstances to those of 2015 and expressed more interest in a discussion of their ongoing experiences than in discussing life three years earlier. Much of their focus was on their difficulties regarding communication with the UNHCR. Their narratives suggested that they experienced rather limited benefits from UNHCR Jordan’s increased emphasis on technologised and community-driven dialogue. Critiques on humanitarian operations often fail to question what could be done to resolve things (Kagan, 2005). With the help of the dissemination workshop participants organised in November 2018, I have drafted some seemingly simple suggestions which will be discussed later on in this chapter. I also question if these gaps can be bridged, given how they relate to such matters as power and control that are intrinsic to humanitarian governance. I understand humanitarian governance as the Janus face of humanitarian assistance made possible by humanitarian reason: ‘Its ethics of care meets the will to control’ (Barnett, 2013: 389; Ticktin, 2011). The humanitarian ethos to help the most vulnerable (care) is equally used to justify interference (control) over those deemed to be in need of care and therefore carries with it strong elements of paternalism. The ethnographic material drawn from long interactive experiences with Iraqi refugees in Jordan in 2015 and the relationships that I have established with urban refugees in Jordan (and specifically Iraqi refugees) over the years play an important role in how I came to understand how the UNHCR’s communication works out in practice. Finally, responses from UNHCR Jordan staff on earlier writing played a role in the analysis. A complex topic such as this one requires thorough in-depth research, if only because – especially given the context of legal and temporal precariousness and humanitarianism – many different, and often not mutually exclusive, interpretations and realities coexist. To further comprehend what seemed to be rather conflicting accounts, the input of my Iraqi research assistant – registered with and recognised as a refugee by the UNHCR – was crucial.

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As he joined me on the tour around UNHCR Jordan’s registration centre, he was able to compare his own experiences as a refugee to the more formal and optimistic story that we received as researchers. My interpretivist view of social reality implies that there are a multiplicity of subjective accounts of truths that are informed and talking from different points of view (Haraway, 1988; Mosse, 2006). If anything, the different interpretations of changes made – by UNHCR staff and refugees – make it possible to explore how different positionings – in particular that of a beneficiary/(potential) donor/aid worker/researcher – and interpretations take place in humanitarian contexts and why it is that particular connections to aid recipients can actually be interpreted as contributing to distancing. Let me demonstrate this with the following example. Ever since the Senior External Relations Officer joined UNHCR Jordan’s operations in January 2018, there has not been a single refugee protest. His explanation for this is as follows: ‘To me that is a sign that things are better. The thing is, as much as you can you should listen … and uhm … there are ways for people to express their frustration, there is responsibility for UNHCR to communicate and channel and uhm, to seek a solution to be found for as far as we can.’ He foregrounds the importance of listening and during our conversation expressed awareness about the particular difficult circumstances in which many of the Sudanese, Somali and Yemeni PoC live. But his interpretation of the reason why there have not been any protests is rather optimistic and decontextualised. The tragic developments among the Sudanese protestors in Jordan in December 2015 (Staton, 2016b; Williams, 2016), further discussed in Chapter 3 closed off this limited means of seeking accountability. They have also spread fear among PoC with other national backgrounds. One of the Iraqi participants in the dissemination workshops believed that it had become illegal to protest. Another participant stated: ‘How does UNHCR claim to protect our human rights? The people who were arrested were actually in front of UNHCR themselves.’ If even the vicinity close to UNHCR Jordan’s premises is not a safe space to voice a form of dissent and to be protected while doing so, where in Jordan would be?

UNHCR Jordan’s Communication Practices with Urban PoC: An Open Channel? As of February 2019, the month during which my research assistant and I received a tour around UNHCR Jordan’s registration centre and the helpline service, those registered with UNHCR Jordan as POC totalled 762,420 people. This included 671,579 Syrian people, 67,600 Iraqi nationals, 14,457 Yemeni people and thousands of PoC from other national backgrounds (UNHCR Jordan, 2019e). Accommodating the needs of all these people,

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including their needs for information and communication, is extremely challenging. This further explains the importance of multiple ways to connect. Not all refugees have access to the same sources of information, different technologies tend to coexist and perform different functions, and different needs and concerns tend to require different forms of communication. The term ‘open channel’ was used by several UNHCR Jordan staff members5 when they referred to the different ways that are available for PoC to obtain information and/or to reach out to the UN refugee agency. These include visiting UNHCR Jordan’s registration centre in order speak to a UNHCR staff member in person, making a phone call to UNHCR Jordan’s helpline service, responding to UNHCR Jordan’s Facebook page and/or paying a visit to one of the twenty-five community centres6 nearby. UNHCR Jordan’s staff recognised that newer technologies did not replace the needs for other ‘older’ means for communication or people’s needs for physical interactions. Different ways of interaction were complementary, and I was told that these communicative practices also enriched UNHCR Jordan’s staff with greater understanding of expectations and feedback. Here I discuss the changes made and show how each form of communication had its own limitations.

Visiting UNHCR Jordan’s Registration Centre, Receiving UNHCR Jordan’s Service Guide and Home Visits It was estimated that 268,186 of Jordan’s PoC were residing in Amman at the time of follow-up research ( Johnston et al., 2019). UNHCR Jordan’s largest urban registration centre was receiving on average 3,000–5,000 people a day. This included people who had made an appointment for registration, for notification of changes regarding their family compositions, or for the annual renewal of their refugee documents. On an average day, there were 30–50 interviewers and four supervisors with more legal knowledge attending to the needs of the people present.7 PoC could also approach the office without an appointment for what was referred to as ‘counselling’: enquiries about services and/changes regarding their status. Upon registration, biographic and biometric details were obtained from every person, older than five years. Iris scans started with children who were four years or older. I was told that newly registered, Arabic-speaking PoC would receive an Arabic hardcopy service guide. The guide is also available digitally and provides an overview of what refugees’ rights are and what services are available for them, depending on their national backgrounds. On that cold winter day in February 2019, we were shown around by one of UNHCR Jordan’s Reception Officers, who showed us UNHCR Jordan’s Registration Centre, which consists of two large waiting areas: one for reg-

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istration/renewal and another waiting area for ‘counselling’.8 To streamline waiting, people receive a token with a number and a letter on it, signifying their number in the queue. Those wishing to register or renew their documents have to wait for approximately four hours, after which they are received in one of the seventy-nine caravans marked out for their function: ‘registration’, ‘protection’, ‘resettlement’. The wait for ‘counselling’ is shorter. Two big TV screens are provided to update on the progress of the queue. As far as my Iraqi research assistant recalls, these have been broken ever since he registered many years earlier. In both waiting areas, there is a blue postbox for ‘petitions’ and a red postbox for ‘complaints’. The boxes are opened by a multifunctional team and applicants receive a response accordingly.9 When I asked her what people usually write, the Reception Officer sighed as she told me the letters they most often receive concern people asking questions regarding resettlement. The grey and grim waiting areas are barrack-like halls, barely heated by two gas heaters. Hundreds of people – women, men and children – are waiting on wooden benches. These waiting places contrast starkly with the reception area where my research assistant and I had been received: a bright, centrally heated reception space, decorated with colourful refugee-made artwork and comfortable couches. Whereas I noticed differences in space, my research assistant was rather annoyed by the following: PoC are usually asked to hand in their mobile phones upon entering waiting areas. When we entered, through the backdoor, we did not receive a similar request. Our presence was read differently. The cold waiting areas and the interview caravans signify a temporariness that contrasts with the much more welcoming office building in which the UNHCR receives donors, fellow aid workers and researchers. There might be multiple reasons for these differences in atmosphere, including the sheer number of people that visit UNHCR Jordan. UNHCR Jordan might also be tied to potential governmental regulations, given that the ground on which its office is geographically located is owned by the Jordanian government.10 Paying closer attention to these different differentiating material spaces further exposes the ‘differential modalities of movement, living, bargaining and interacting’ (Smirl, 2008: 238). In its role as mediator, the UNHCR justifies its presence and sustains dichotomising power relations as it differentiates between benefactors and beneficiaries. This certainly can serve a purpose – for instance, keeping the refugees away from the press. But the organisation prioritises giving a literally warmer welcome to (often Western) donors over providing a more welcoming environment to the individuals it is concerned about. Located in West Amman, it is relatively distant from where most of Amman’s refugees were residing. The centre consists of two very distinct spaces and realities, which operate next to each other. UNHCR Jordan’s office is a physical and symbolic manifestation of how the organi-

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sation mediates between refugees entering via one door, and donors, journalists and technical experts who are received via the other door, existing alongside and next to each other, without much possibility for interaction. UNHCR Jordan also organises home visits, which are carried out following registration, a request or after moving from one of the camps to an urban refugee setting in the case of Syrian refugees. Home visits are outsourced to a research company called Mindset, as this makes it possible to sustain a notion of neutrality. Humanitarian outsourcing to implementing partners also obscures who is accountable and tends to limit recourse if mistakes are believed to be made ( Janmyr, 2014). Mindset provides UNHCR Jordan with the information it needs to determine refugees’ vulnerability. This then results in the potential allocation of cash assistance or consideration for resettlement.11

Obtaining Information via UNHCR Jordan’s Helpline Service UNHCR Jordan’s helpline service is an important source of information for UNHCR Jordan’s PoC. In December 2017, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology was installed. Cisco, an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Silicon Valley, has promised that the Contact Centre Enterprise Technology it uses will ‘deliver a connected digital experience’ (Cisco, 2019). Its automated standardised responses are informed by surveys and focus group discussions held in 2018 and are regularly updated, drawing upon the feedback of refugees.12 Since August 2019, the IVR system also includes an English-language version (UNHCR Jordan, 2019f) for PoC who do not speak Arabic. More complex and emergency calls are answered by one of the fourteen UNHCR staff members to discuss the matter in more detail and/or to refer them to the designated unit or team. My research assistant and I were told that these account for approximately 20% of all phone calls. All phone calls to the helpline are recorded.13 The phone line is also linked to the Refugee Assistance Information System (RAIS), a Web-based assistance management platform used by the UNHCR, implementing partners and donors to coordinate providing assistance and to ‘enhance accountability’ (UNHCR, 2019c). The helpline using IVR technology is available 24/7, whereas UNHCR Jordan’s helpline staff members are available from Sunday to Thursday from 8 AM to 4 PM to answer phone calls. People registered with the UNHCR can receive a UNHCR SIM card from mobile telecommunications company Zain for free that will enable them to make free phone calls to UNHCR Jordan’s helpline service as well as to other Zain SIM cardholders.14 The installation of IVR potentially marks a significant improvement in the UNHCR’s communication with refugees. Before IVR, UNHCR staff were only able to

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respond to 60% of those calls (REACH, 2017: 22). Ever since the helpline was automated, the number of phone calls that have gone unanswered has been very few (UNHCR Jordan, 2018a). Moreover, in their assessment of the communication and information needs of Syrian refugees residing in host communities, REACH (2017) found that many participants wanted the helpline to expand its capacity and to provide more topic-specific information. In 2017, the helpline received an average of 45,000 phone calls a month (UNHCR Jordan, 2018a: 1). Since the instalment of IVR, this went up from a rather stable average of 150,000 calls a month15 to a further increase in the last months of 2018. In November 2018, 584,606 phone calls were made to the helpline (UNHCR Jordan, 2018b) and in December 2018, 573,271 phone calls (UNHCR Jordan, 2018c). This significant increase in phone calls during that period related to people’s questions regarding UNHCR Jordan providing additional cash assistance to help refugee households prepare for the winter. But, perhaps more importantly, since then, an appointment for the annual renewal interview could be made by calling the helpline (UNHCR Jordan, 2018b). Prior to this significant change, PoC needed to visit and wait at UNHCR Jordan’s office simply to make an appointment for renewal.16 UNHCR Jordan publishes the monthly Helpline Dashboard online. These one-page reports provide insights into the helpline’s operations. Information is provided on the frequency with which individuals would call, a breakdown in the nationality and the gender of callers, and the average time a phone conversation took. For example, an average conversation in July 2019 lasted one minute and one second (UNHCR Jordan, 2019g). Given that the Helpline Dashboards are published in English and that they are also presented on Reliefweb – the largest humanitarian information portal, it seems that these are produced for fellow staff members, humanitarian workers, donors, journalists and researchers. Since November 2018, the Helpline Dashboard also provides insights into the main reasons why people call (UNHCR Jordan, 2018b). For instance, in November 2018, the main reasons for calling were assistance (80.9%), registration (9.2%) and resettlement (3.8%). The numbers from the summer of 2019 show a striking increase in resettlement-related questions, in particular in June 2019 (17.9% of all phone calls) (UNHCR Jordan, 2019h) and in July 2019 (18.7% of all phone calls) (UNHCR Jordan, 2019g). Numbers such as these can provide helpful insights into changes and concerns, and can provide reason for UNHCR staff to look further into those changes. Perhaps a change in policy or rumours have reinforced uncertainty and/or hope about resettlement. Without access to more in-depth information, this remains guesswork. Numbers and statistics give an insight into trends. They do not give insights into people’s more in-depth reasons for calling or into their expe-

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riences of the phone call. To gain more insight into the latter, UNHCR Jordan’s helpline staff would sometimes call people back to assess their experiences and receive feedback. UNHCR Jordan’s Helpline Officer stated that the helpline is meant to establish two-way communication.17 But the initiation and direction of these calls (who decides to call whom, when and why) and the local and humanitarian power relations in which these are embedded (including potential feelings of gratitude towards receiving aid and/ or fear about the repercussions of complaints) will at least to some extent limit the space in which PoC will feel comfortable in providing comprehensive feedback (Madianou et al., 2015; Madianou et al., 2016). Iraqi refugee participants in the dissemination workshop discussed their experiences of the changed helpline. An Iraqi woman stated: ‘They may answer their phone, but you get very little … And now they have added these automatic answers. Press 1 for this, Press 2 for this.’ Her remarks made me question whether and to what extent an automated helpline service can serve as a technique for remote management (Duffield, 2019) and can therefore actually hinder or even close down possibilities for communication and relationality. The UNHCR’s helpline is intended for UNHCR’s PoC. Access requires a UNHCR registration number and a personalised security code. But to gain more insight into what information the helpline provides and to further understand different positions, two Iraqi refugee friends helped me to call the helpline in March 2019. They also assisted with translating and paraphrasing what was said from Arabic to English. Therefore, I use the pronoun ‘we’ here. Any mistakes made are my own: We call the helpline. A friendly human(-sounding?) voice guides us through an option menu. Our first choice consists of whether 1) we are a registered refugee, 2) we are new to UNHCR Jordan or 3) we have troubles with the policy, the governments or at risk of deportation. We choose option 1. Another option menu follows. The options we can choose from are the following: Press 1 if you need to renew your documents. Press 2 if you call for cash assistance. Press 3 regarding access to health and medical services. Press 4 for any other kind of services. Press 5 for resettlement.

We are reluctant to press Option 1, as my friend does not need to renew their documents. We press Option 2 for information on cash assistance and hear that my friend is not eligible for cash assistance. If we wish to ap-

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peal, we need to come to the UNHCR’s office in West Amman. The line is disconnected. We call back. Option 3 and Option 4 require more personal information and we are reluctant to provide this. Upon choosing Option 5 – regarding resettlement – we are told: Resettlement is not a right for everyone. UNHCR will determine who gets selected for consideration based upon their situation, especially those who are in danger will be considered for resettlement. UNHCR has no relations with [the] Special Immigrant Visa (SIV)18 and has nothing to do with family reunification by the embassies. In case you have been interviewed by the resettlement section, they will contact you with any updates. If you know you have been selected but have not yet received an interview and it has been six months, please press 1.

This response might provide some additional insights into why people called with resettlement-related questions – for instance, that being considered for resettlement is not a right, nor is it linked to family reunification or the SIV programme – enabling those who used to work for the US Army or the US government in Iraq to be resettled. There is no option to have an actual conversation. We hang up the phone. The persisting difficulties regarding obtaining information on procedures in relation to resettlement, let alone communication about one’s personal progress, will be discussed later in this chapter. But like the option regarding cash assistance, there is no information provided on how the decision is done or the opportunity to ask questions or have a conversation. During my visit to the helpline, I was told that some people would try to shortcut the system because they prefer speaking to a person. They would, for instance, press Option 3 – the emergency number – if they had a question about cash support. In these circumstances, people who call are directed back to the system and back into the loop.19 The helpline is not the medium or place for conversations. This relates to its technological infrastructure. IVR works via a logical answering tree – the technology narrows down rather than opens options to obtain more information, to question, to disagree and/or to seek recourse if one believes an error or mistake is made. The speed in which the system knows about the eligibility of my friend for services was impressive, and it is important to note that prior to IVR, 40% of phone calls went unanswered (REACH, 2017), which would have prevented any means to seek information and/or communication in these cases. Yet, it seems difficult to not get pigeonholed in or to simply be pushed out of the system. This is understandable given the large number of daily calls the helpline receives and UNHCR’s limited capacities. But if not the helpline, were there other ways for more horizontal communication and to obtain more comprehensive information?

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Participation and Communication with Communities at Community Support Centres Visiting UNHCR Jordan’s registration centre for ‘counselling’ remained an important way to be able to ask open-ended questions. But the CSCs, based close to where refugee populations are residing, were established to provide a more easily accessible way to enhance support to Jordan’s refugees. As of February 2019, there were twenty-five of these centres,20 situated in areas with large refugee communities and supported by local and international partners. Twenty-three are run in cooperation with the Jordanian Hashemite Fund for Human Development ( JOHUD). Except for the Nuzha centre, the CSC communities consist of refugees with one particular national background and their nonrefugee peers living in that vicinity. Three of the CSCs in Amman are specifically targeted at refugees with an Iraqi national background and nonrefugee populations living close to where the centres are located. These centres are located in Hashmi Schmali, Marka and Sweileh ( Johnston et al., 2019: 57), which are known as areas where many Iraqi refugees live. The Nuzha centre, which was initially established in June 2017 as a Syrian and Jordanian community centre, became in March 2018 the centre for refugees from all nationalities as well as for members of the host communities. Three times a week, the UNHCR helpdesk enables UNHCR’s PoC to renew their documents there and to enquire about their status. Johnston et al. (2019) found that refugees with a Yemeni and Sudanese national background had overwhelmingly positive experiences with this centre. But because its staff were focused upon helping as many people as possible, the space to develop relationships was limited and engagements were perceived as a ‘one-off’ ( Johnston et al., 2019: 57). The CSCs operate under the umbrella of the UNHCR. On average, I was told, a CSC consists of ten volunteers from the refugee community and ten nonrefugee volunteers.21 The Jordanian government does not allow elections, so instead volunteers are selected based on the idea that they are well-respected within their community. Selected volunteers for the CSC are trained in UNHCR’s protection language.22 Social, cultural, recreational and educational activities are organised, and people can also just go there to hang out. Activities relating to political associations and religious activities are not allowed. Volunteers are advised to tell community members with resettlement-related questions that they should direct these to the UNHCR staff members of the Resettlement Unit. I was told that the idea of the CSCs is that they are homely places, with the goal of supporting peaceful coexistence.23 After my interviews with UNHCR Jordan staff, I visited the Iraqi-targeted CSC based in Hashmi Schmali. I did not find it a particular ‘homely’ space – it was cold and the furniture was largely worn down. Several young Iraqi boys were hanging out at the centre, as I was told school

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fees for Iraqi refugee children are no longer covered. On that day, the UNHCR office was closed. Participatory and community-led approaches have been used since the 1970s in development. Essentialised and romanticised notions of the ‘local’ and the homogenised ‘community’ were foregrounded at the cost of paying attention to the intrinsic local, national and global politics involved (Duffield, 2019: 65). This either contributed to a status quo or reinforced already-unequal power relations that participation aims to address (Kapoor, 2002: 114). Participatory approaches can place additional burdens on local communities – for delivering information, stories and viewpoints – but tend to fail to result in the social changes that were promised (Mayoux, 1995; Mosse, 1994). Meanwhile learning from social interactions is often cut short as the willingness and space towards change is often again in the hands of the facilitator (Kapoor, 2002: 111). Lessons regarding the potential harmful effects of participatory and community-oriented approaches, and their capacities to reinforce rather than mediate distances are extremely important in the context of refugee protection and humanitarian accountability. Within an international protection context – which includes and goes beyond the UNHCR’s limited capacities and the precarious rights of refugees and the communities of which these are part – being willing and able to provide the space needed for successful participation might be even more difficult. In practice, the space available to include ‘the people receiving aid in making the decisions that affect their lives’ defined by goal 6 of the Grand Bargain, the ‘Participation Revolution’ (Metcalfe-Hough et al., 2018: 11), seems rather narrow, not only in relation to the precarious protection context and by also in relation to the UNHCR’s humanitarian relief models (Ward, 2014) and their rather empty rhetoric on ‘rights-based approaches’ (Stevens, 2015). In 2001, the UNHCR’s Executive Committee emphasised the importance of community development. But Noel Calhoun (2010: 6), at the time of writing a senior UNCHR staff member, stated that the space for participation and accountability depends not only on the ability but also on the willingness of local UNHCR operations: ‘Participation and the impact of that participation depends entirely on the goodwill of the UNHCR office, with refugees powerless to hold the office accountable if it does not implement refugee preferences.’ Participation and community-led approaches in humanitarian programming can easily feel ‘misleading’ (2010: 10) simply because the recognition of refugees’ rights, including rights to participate, continues to be so limited. It seems that UNHCR Jordan’s attention to CSC has been reinvigorated, perhaps also given the increased humanitarian attention for accountability and communication with communities and the Grand Bargain’s focus on participation. In the period between 2010 and 2019, much has changed in

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relation to the Iraqi refugee population in Jordan: for instance, access to services has decreased and the characteristics of the Iraqi refugee populations has changed substantially, making it difficult to know whether Calhoun’s (2010) findings continue to apply to the current Iraqi refugees. But as these are spaces associated with the UNHCR, visits and questions are likely to be shaped around legal concerns, financial assistance and the only available durable solution: third country resettlement. I did not find the CSC in Hashmi Schmali to be popular among the Iraqi refugees living there. But there certainly were communal spaces where Iraqi refugees would go to in order to hang out with fellow Iraqi refugees. Kholoud has been a frequent visitor of the local community-based organisation (CBO) ever since she came to Jordan, an organisation that at the time of writing is still much frequented by Iraqi refugees. An important point regarding the limitations for discussing politics and resettlement at CSCs begs the question of whether attendees would be able to discuss anything concerning the UNHCR’s procedures and the restricted rights that refugees and other PoC encounter. These are political issues that deeply affect people’s everyday personal lives.

Online Communication with Communities In line with a community-oriented approach and the UNHCR’s increased recognition that much of refugees’ sense-making takes place in online spaces, UNHCR Jordan appointed a Communication with Communities Associate (hereinafter ‘CwC Associate’) at the end of 2017. The CwC Associate kept track of what were the most urgent and frequent questions and concerns across the different units of UNHCR Jordan and much of his work also focused on online communication. The internet and social media are known to be the main sources for Jordan’s refugees to search for information on UNHCR Jordan’s policies. And as in 2015, Facebook and WhatsApp continue to be extremely popular. The CwC Associate is the administrator of the official UNHCR Jordan’s Facebook page and there he shares the information that UNHCR Jordan deems crucial for UNHCR Jordan’s PoC. This includes matters such as university scholarships available to refugees in Jordan or changes in government regulations regarding home-based businesses for Syrian refugees.24 In the summer of 2018, UNHCR Jordan also released short informative videos about the three issues that tend to raise the most questions – resettlement,25 cash assistance26 and the helpline27 – on its Facebook page. The resettlement video was by far the most popular, receiving 49,376 views. In comparison, the cash assistance video received 9,371 views and the helpline video 7,946 views, suggesting that refugees were particularly seeking for more information on resettlement.

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Together with a colleague, the CwC Associate also follows what information is shared on non-official Facebook groups that are known for discussing UNHCR Jordan’s operations.28 If they noticed that false information was being spread on these channels, they would intervene by selecting what they considered to be the appropriate communication tool. One way of intervening is, for instance, by using bulk SMS. This is quite costly, but can be used to specifically target the location where the rumour was spread.29 Each CSC also had its own WhatsApp group on which information can be shared. Official information on these WhatsApp groups is circulated as a JPEG file to ensure that it would not be modified. Responding to rumours also happened proactively. To prevent the spread of misinformation, the CwC Associate was in contact with the administrators of the biggest Facebook (Syrian) refugeeoriented groups used in Jordan. An agreement was reached that they would first verify any UNHCR Jordan-related information. I was told that UNHCR’s Facebook page enabled two-way communication because people were able to comment on any post made by UNHCR Jordan. Given the difficult circumstances in which UNHCR’s PoC find themselves, people sometimes could react rather critically or emotively. Criticism targeted at the UNHCR was left in place, but comments that were considered abusive, insulting or demeaning were removed.30 This does not make the communication two-way. Mindful that responding to everyone would simply be impossible for one person, as the CwC Associate is trying to navigate the information and communication flows of what could be as many as 762,420 people, these modes of interactions can have distancing effects. As was also noted by one of the Iraqi attendees of the dissemination workshop: ‘They don’t reply to any Facebook messages.’ This person’s feedback might indeed be used to alter UNHCR Jordan’s practices, but the lack of a personal response seems to reinforce the distance he already perceived between him and UNHCR Jordan. In a similar fashion to the findings of Madianou and her team (Madianou et al., 2015; Madianou et al., 2016) on SMS messages in humanitarian settings, UNHCR Jordan’s Facebook loop is not closed. An analysis by the IOM showed that in humanitarian settings, not receiving a response is likely to result in ‘distrust and lack of engagement’ (Hartmann et al., 2014).

Addressing (Some) Persisting Information and Communication Needs So far, I have considered important changes in the UNHCR’s communicative infrastructure. Old and newer means of communication with UNHCR Jordan have come to exist alongside each other, expanding the choices and ways for refugees to reach out to the organisation. Yet I have also shown

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how the different available ways of communication have their own limitations. A visit to UNHCR Jordan’s ‘counselling’ is costly – also considering that it is quite far from where most refugees live – takes a lot of time and is uncomfortable. The information on the helpline service is clear and accessible, but its technological infrastructure leaves little space for asking questions. The feedback loop of UNHCR’s Facebook page is not closed and what can be discussed at CSCs is limited. A wider variety of means to connect with the UNHCR can have an additional consequence, which is not uncommon in bureaucratic practices: more ways of being sent from pillar to post. The information-seeking refugee can be told he they are not using the right platform for the question they seek to address. And if the suggested channel is used, a similar response follows: that the wrong medium was used. This can result in the person in question feeling even more misheard than before. A participant in the dissemination workshop asked me the following question: ‘Have you seen the appeal box?’ He was talking about the blue and red postboxes I and my research assistant saw at the UNHCR Registration Centre that would enable refugees to voice their demands and concerns. Before I could respond, he continued: ‘They don’t reply to any appeals.’ His choice of word – ‘appeal’ – signifies the impression that he believed a judicial decision was made by the UNHCR on his behalf that he could object to and equally pointed to the unaccountable power of UNHCR Jordan, as was discussed in Chapter 2. As I draw upon long interactive experiences specifically but not only with Iraqi refugees in Jordan, I have the impression that his experience – of not receiving a response to a letter or email sent to the UNHCR – is not unusual. Over the years, I have met many Iraqi refugees in Jordan who mentioned never having received a response to the numerous letters and emails they sent containing questions, specifically about their consideration for resettlement. The participant who had asked me if I had seen the postboxes continued: ‘These things. Do not actually matter. They don’t respond to us … They don’t do anything … The only time when we actually get a response is when we go to UNHCR, and the only thing we get, the feedback from UNHCR is that the person, who is talking to us, says: “I am only a registration person”.’ He might have come to UNHCR Jordan on a day that was not a ‘resettlement’ day. During our visit to UNHCR Jordan, my research assistant and I were told that Tuesday and Wednesday are the days when staff members of the Resettlement Unit were present for ‘counsel’. My research assistant – who was considered for resettlement to the United States and had been seeking advice on what to do considering that the Trump administration had been stalling US resettlement – had not been aware that there were specific days allocated for this purpose.

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UNHCR Jordan is rightfully careful regarding its communication about resettlement. False information and wrong interpretations about resettlement tend to spread fast ( Jansen, 2008). And the procedural and often very case-specific and ever-changing complexities around resettlement make providing detailed information extremely time-consuming and expensive. Only the UNHCR Resettlement Unit has access to this information, and people working there are careful to not provide information that is not accurate or to step on the Resettlement Unit’s toes. And resettlement officers are often difficult to reach, given that they are often ‘inundated with requests’ (Sandvik, 2011: 18). UNHCR Jordan’s Senior External Relations Officer therefore pointed out: ‘You cannot give to one refugee dedicated information on one specific resettlement case, because then, to be fair to everyone you should be able to give the same to others … And that is why there are some different ways of communication.’31 During this conversation, he stated that ‘if someone is really looking for information that is meaningful, he probably knows the channel’.32 In the absence of enduring solutions and persisting prolonged uncertainty, even the most comprehensive communication can fall short (Danielson, 2012). But whereas I am mindful of the logistical, financial and legal constraints under which UNHCR Jordan’s staff operate, in the following section I explore if – in line with the Senior External Relations Officer’s claim – ‘meaningful’ information is indeed accessible if and when refugees seek for it.

Access to Information to Explain Differential Procedures Based on Nationality In 2018, during the dissemination workshop and in informal conversations with Iraqi refugees, I noticed distress about the further decrease in international assistance and, related to this, the belief that UNHCR Jordan was operating under a ‘double standard’, as one of the Iraqi participants stated. UNHCR Jordan often receives similar messages.33 In informal conversations with humanitarian practitioners I heard this was related to the lack of adequate donor support and the differences in legal and social circumstances in which refugees with different national backgrounds in Jordan find themselves. Whereas that might not be untrue, UNHCR Jordan could more clearly communicate the reasons why some services or rights are only available for refugees with specific national backgrounds and that this is not due to preferences of UNHCR Jordan or its individual staff members, but because of the demands of international donors. Donor policies play an important role in how aid is directed. Since 2012, most of the funding for refugee protection has been allocated to aid Syrian

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refugees and vulnerable Jordanians as part of the Jordan Response Plan ( Johnston et al., 2019; Mennonite Central Committee, 2017). In practice, this meant that there has been structurally less support for non-Syrian refugees in accessing services such as education or healthcare, as well as access to fewer legal rights. For those Iraqi refugees who had been in Jordan for years, it might be particularly painful that aid was once earmarked for the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’ and that they had been the target population. Iraqi and other non-Syrian refugees in Jordan are not able to obtain work permits through the Jordan Compact like Syrian refugees are and are not allowed to run home-based businesses. Most of all, the Iraqi attendees participating in the dissemination workshop emphasised that they wanted the right to work in a similar fashion to Syrian refugees in Jordan. UNHCR Jordan has, in line with its mandate, continued to provide refugee protection to non-Syrian refugees despite the limited funding available for this ( Johnston et al., 2019: i). But earmarking has further contributed to the exclusion of non-Syrian refugees from humanitarian coordination structures. There is a particular lack of information and engagement with Yemeni, Sudanese and Somali refugees (Mennonite Central Committee, 2017: 33). I was told that upon registration, the procedures around earmarking are clearly explained to PoC and why it is that nationality ‘matters’ and how this influences access to rights. But I found that among the Iraqi refugees I spoke to, there was little understanding of the reasons behind this differential treatment. Strong statements were made such as ‘UNHCR does not have transparency or honesty’. The gap between what the UNHCR says and what refugees say is stark which, suggests, if nothing else, miscommunication. UNHCR Jordan’s ‘Service Guide – August 2018’ (UNHCR Jordan, 2018d) distinguishes what health services are available for Syrian and non-Syrian refugees and contains an explanation of how Syrian nationals can obtain work permits. It does not provide information on why it is that access to these services differs according to nationality. UNHCR Jordan’s English-written operational updates – directed at donors, implementing partners and technical experts – provide more information on earmarked, unearmarked and ‘softly’ earmarked funding. Refugees can access this if they go to the portal and are able to read English, but it is not directly targeted at them. There is a difference between the UNHCR’s mandate – to not differentiate based upon nationality – and what protection UNHCR Jordan offers to people of different nationalities. This was also observed by participants in the dissemination session: ‘UNHCR works with a double standard. First and foremost, they say: we are treating people in a way that does not discriminate regarding religion, gender, the region … but at the same time when it comes to resettlement or cash assistance, they help people who have a specific religion or a specific nationality.’ By not providing more information on how

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UNHCR Jordan’s operations are limited and restricted by its funding, the trust that UNHCR Jordan is equally representing them is reduced. The understanding that UNHCR Jordan holds decisive power regarding who to help and in what way can reinforce how particular experiences are read as discriminatory: ‘UNHCR staff are more often disrespectful to Iraqi nationals than to people with another nationality’ or ‘It is not just about different access to services. They treat us differently’. Johnston et al. (2019) also found amongst Sudanese and Yemeni refugees and asylum seekers in Jordan the perception that assistance was withheld from them based upon their nationality. The UNHCR’s advocacy efforts with international donors might take place closed doors, but that would not prevent the organisation from being more open in its efforts to actively pursue fuller recognition of refugee/human rights. In 2018, as in 2015, the question that forced migration scholar Barbara Harrell-Bond already asked in 2002 persists: would it not be more honest and therefore more humane to more fully explain that the limited availability of aid, including financial assistance and the provision of durable solution, relates to scarcity (2002: 69)?

Access to Information on Determining Vulnerability and Selection Procedures beyond Nationality Information provided to Jordan’s refugees on how their vulnerability is assessed and what criteria are used is structurally lacking. REACH – a joint operation between two INGOs and the UN Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT) – found that Syrian refugees in Jordan, similar to the Iraqi refugees in the focus group, had many questions on the procedures regarding consideration for cash assistance and resettlement. This related to them not being aware what criteria were used for the automated Vulnerability Assessment (REACH, 2017: 25–26). Relationships marked by protection and care can easily slip into becoming (or experienced as) paternalistic or authoritarian (Barnett, 2013: 389). A more salient finding in the REACH report was that the lack of information was deliberate. In relation to the Vulnerability Assessment Framework (VAF), the UNHCR was ‘reluctant to publicly share entitlement criteria in order to prevent potential exploitation of the system’ (REACH, 2017: 26). This suspicious mindset that stereotypes ‘the’ refugee as a potential trickster is a clear example of the Janus face of humanitarian governance: the need to sustain order and control under the guise of care. It continues to be unclear to what extent VAF applies and is used to determine the vulnerability of non-Syrian refugees. I was told by UNHCR staff that the same indicators are used to determine prioritisation for non-Syrian refugees and asylum seekers,34 but there are also concerns regarding the broader applicability of the VAF (Mennonite Central Committee, 2017: 35).

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Accountability towards affected populations is hindered by a suspicious outlook, which is inherent in the reductive and controlling implications of humanitarian governance (Barnett, 2013). VAF would contribute to ‘transparency’, whereas RAIS and UNHCR Jordan’s web-based assistance management system are said to ensure ‘enhanced accountability’ (UNHCR, 2019c). One complicating factor concerning the VAF and other similar assessment systems used in Lebanon and Egypt is that these are highly technical tools for calculating vulnerability and determining needs, and that that humanitarian staff on the ground are often also not made aware of how these assessments work (Cowling, 2020). But the information that is available on the operations of VAF and similar assessment systems is unequally distributed. The highly technical and English-written ‘Vulnerability Assessment Framework Population Study 2019’ (Brown et al., 2019) provides much greater insight on what criteria are used.35 This information is publicly available, but it is not easily accessible for most refugees. Donors, aid workers and researchers’ needs for information are prioritised in their function as ‘experts’ to determine how to assess who is suffering the most (Fassin, 2012). This might facilitate and improve coordinated efforts to aid refugees, but also provides the impression that a paternalistic mindset and fear of low-level fraud ( Jacobsen, 2015) keeps the agency from fully informing refugees in relation to this topic.

Conclusion: Persisting Challenges for Horizontal Humanitarian Communication Finding the balance between accountability towards donors and refugees is complex but not necessarily always conflictual ( Jacobsen and Sandvik, 2016: 4). Some challenges – such as providing more accessible yet official information to refugees on procedures and policies – can be resolved quite easily. And it is a central part of the UNHCR’s understanding of AAP: ‘giving account to … the people they seek to assist’ (UNHCR, n.d.b). The other two parts of AAP – being able to listen to and being held accountable – are more complicated, given that they seek to address asymmetrical power relations that are deeply embedded within humanitarian operations and their interaction with the local and international contexts. These power relations and issues around control become clear, for instance, in the information that is provided, the need to control (the message or the topic) and the direction of communication. Taking greater responsibility for providing the people ‘served’ by the UNHCR with adequate information on procedures, policies and practices that significantly affect the lives of these people would clearly be in line with what the UNHCR and the humanitarian community at large stand for,

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given their increased attention on accountability to affected populations and participation. Clear messages by the appropriate messenger can potentially reduce uncertainties relating to the lack of trustworthy news and information sources and the vulnerability of people to misinformation (Wall et al., 2016), and could also contribute to refugees having more trust in (rather than ‘just’ dependency on) in the UN agency. I shared an earlier and shorter version of this book chapter with the staff of UNHCR Jordan in which I made a similar argument. In this I wrote: ‘Many of Jordan’s refugees are already experts in refugee law, through a patchwork of personal experiences, UNHCR’s information provision and alternative online and offline sense making.’ Recognising this, I argued that UNHCR Jordan should take what I then called more ‘ownership’ regarding providing comprehensive and accurate information to PoC concerning its operations. Subsequently, the Senior External Relations Officer I had earlier interviewed sent me an email asking me why I did not explore further the possibility of these ‘experts’ organising and holding information sessions with those refugees who had a more limited understanding of particular processes, for this would be, as he put it, ‘what a community-based protection is all about’.36 I wonder if this suggestion would be possible and, if so, responsible, given the difficulties for applying more participatory approaches embedded in a precarious context and the power relations inherent to humanitarianism. UNHCR Jordan’s approach to community-led protection as I interpreted it discourages the possibility of discussing issues that can be perceived as political (for instance, matters relating to differential rights for refugee populations with different national backgrounds), considering the legal position that Jordan’s refugees occupy. Approaches towards participation and collective action, much like legal empowerment programming, are deeply political. Much like legal empowerment programming ( Jones, 2015), the willingness and space that they require to address structural issues pertaining to everyday difficulties of refugees living in a precarious protection context tends to be limited. If stripped of its political dimensions, community-oriented and participatory approaches are likely to be co-opted by efforts relating to neoliberal connectivity that increase rather than decrease structural inequality. Humanitarian approaches for participation and AAP tend to take place alongside and aside from the UNHCR’s approach towards strengthening local and often informal communities in the Global South in enduring duress (Clements, 2019), often in coordination with the involvement of the private sector. Community-based approaches can easily result in a shift away from rights and towards an increase of pressure on responsibilised individuals (as part of a community) who cannot verify if their interpretations of policies are the correct ones and who are already making do in suboptimal conditions. The concerns addressed in this chapter do not mean that changes in UNHCR Jordan’s communicative infrastructure and the good intentions of indi-

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vidual UNHCR staff members are not meaningful. Instead, I point to caution for using ‘participation’ and ‘accountability towards the affected population’ as empty rhetoric, as I also actively search how the UNHCR’s accountability can be experienced as (more) meaningful by Jordan’s refugees and can actually enable affected populations to hold humanitarian actors accountable. Can refugees be more included in the UNHCR’s decision-making in ways that would not feel as ‘misleading’ (Calhoun, 2010: 6)? And if so, how? Being considered trustworthy and responsible in terms of providing information to affected populations might eventually do more than providing the false impression that there is room for questions. Providing adequate information about UNHCR Jordan’s procedures and its limitations – for instance, regarding criteria used to assess vulnerability, earmarking and consideration for resettlement – could potentially contribute among refugees in Jordan to feeling that they matter and for trust in a humanitarian system that was put in place to serve them. If anything, providing information is the fair and humane thing to do. This is what accountability and participation is all about.

Notes 1. Interview with UNCHR Jordan’s Senior External Relations, 25 October 2018. 2. Ibid. 3. Observations at UNHCR Jordan’s Registration Centre in Amman and UNHCR Jordan’s helpline service, 27 February 2019. 4. Interview with UNCHR Jordan’s Senior External Relations Officer, 25 October 2018; interview with UNHCR Jordan’s Communication with Communities Associate, 10 December 2018; During the field visit on 27 February 2019, in-depth conversations with the following UNHCR Jordan staff members took place: the Communication Protection Officer, the Communication with Communities Associate, the Assistant External Relations Officer, the Registration Officer, the Helpline Officer and the Home-Visit Officer. 5. Conversations with UNHCR Jordan’s Assistant External Relations Officer, Communication with Communities Associate and Community Protection Officer, 27 February 2019. 6. Communication with Community Protection Officer, 27 February 2019. 7. Conversations with UNHCR Jordan’s Registration Officer, 27 February 2019. 8. Conversation with UNHCR Jordan’s Reception Officer, 27 February 2019. 9. Ibid. 10. Conversations with UNHCR Jordan’s Assistant External Relations Officer, 27 February 2019. 11. Conversation with UNHCR Jordan’s Home-Visit Officer, 27 February 2019. 12. Conversation with UNHCR Jordan’s Helpline Officer, 27 February 2019. 13. Ibid. 14. Conversation with UNHCR Jordan’s Registration Officer, 27 February 2019.

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15. Interview with UNHCR Jordan’s Communication with Communities Associate, 10 December 2018. 16. Ibid. 17. Conversation with UNHCR Jordan’s Helpline Officer, 27 February 2019. 18. The Special Immigrant Visa (SIV). This Visa was available to those Iraqi nationals who had worked for the US armed forces or the US government, and who could prove their persecution was related to their former employment. 19. Conversation with UNHCR Jordan’s Helpline Officer, 27 February 2019. 20. Conversation with UNHCR Jordan’s Communication Protection Officer, 27 February 2019. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. https://www.facebook.com/UNHCRJordan/videos/2270509172966042. 26. https://www.facebook.com/UNHCRJordan/videos/1089881941168033. 27. https://www.facebook.com/UNHCRJordan/videos/2296139290403030. 28. Interview with UNHCR Jordan’s Communication with Communities Associate, 10 December 2018. 29. Ibid. 30. Written feedback from UNHCR Jordan’s Communication with Communities Associate, received 8 April 2019. 31. Interview with UNCHR Jordan’s Senior External Relations Officer, 25 October 2018. 32. Written feedback from UNHCR Jordan’s Senior External Relations Officer, received 8 April 2019. 33. Written feedback from UNHCR Jordan’s Communication with Communities Associate, received 8 April 2019. 34. Communication with UNHCR Jordan’s Helpline Officer, 27 February 2019. 35. These indicators include welfare, dependency ratio, coping strategies, documentation status, income, shelter, access to health, education, access to hygiene and sanitation. These are ranked as low (1), moderate (2), high (3) and severe (4) vulnerability, based upon particular contextually determined vulnerability thresholds, eventually resulting in a person’s VAF score. This also explains what the cut-off points are for determining particular aspects of a case as (3) highly vulnerable or (4) severely vulnerable (Brown et al., 2019). 36. Written feedback from UNHCR Jordan’s Senior External Relations Officer, received 8 April 2019.

Conclusion (Dis)Connectivity and the Politics of Hope

We are all in this together, but we are not one and the same. —Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge

In this book I have considered how being connected, via digital technologies, interacts with the everyday experiences of Iraqi refugee households residing in Jordan’s capital Amman. Drawing on ethnographic research, largely conducted in 2015 and follow-up research in 2018, I have shown how information, images and interactions with elsewhere play out in what are meant to be temporary homes. Transnational connections are constitutive of Iraqi refugee life in Jordan, with its particular social and material constraints, its precarious legal contexts, and the involvement of humanitarian infrastructures. So far, most studies that provide a more critical and contextual understanding on digital connectivity in the lives of refugees and other migrants residing in precarious legal circumstances tend to have Western countries as their main site of enquiry. And despite an increase in attention on technology use within humanitarian settings in the Global South, in-depth studies that move beyond a utilitarian view on refugees’ connectivity (Awad and Tossell, 2019) in such settings continue to be thin on the ground. This study seeks to address this ‘high-tech orientalism’ (Chun, 2003) and its potentials for dehumanising and othering people who seek refuge. Beyond recognition that the globalised availability and accessibility of digital technologies is also a reality for the world’s refugees, it is important to situate how experiences of becoming and being displaced often necessitate making sense in a new, uncertain context and sustaining connections with geographical separated family and friends. This makes digital connectivity crucial in the lives of many refugees and other migrants in marginalised, (il)legalised (de Genova, 2002) settings.

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This recognition is not a reason to celebrate connectivity as a solution for persisting legal, social and material marginalisation. Whereas many of the world’s refugees are connected to transnational and globalised broadcasting media and there is an increase in technology-mediated means for sustaining meaningful relationships with people elsewhere and across borders, digital technologies are simultaneously and increasingly deployed to impose (neo)colonial practices, to close off borders and to sustain legal restrictions that keep refugees from (re)building more dignified lives. Capitalism has piggybacked on digital connectivity, which has enabled its acceleration (Duffield, 2019). There is nothing advanced about this form of capitalism: the hypermobility of capital, data, consumer goods and a few people has coincided with a further destabilisation of local and social structures and heightened potentials for exploitation and extraction (Braidotti, 2019; Madianou, 2019a). Accelerated capitalism and digital developments have interacted with humanitarianism. The field of relief and aid has come to be involved in a post-humanitarian (Duffield, 2019), technocolonial (Madianou, 2019a) turn. There is an increased reliance by humanitarian operations on machines and data. The datafication of aid includes the widespread deployment of biometric registration (Lemberg-Pedersen and Haioty, 2020; Madianou, 2019b) as well as a wider conversion and articulation of other information, concepts and procedures into machine-readable format. This includes the proliferation and experimentations with ‘digital humanitarian goods’ (Sandvik, 2021), including distributed ledger technology (Cheesman, 2020), often guided by efforts to engender forms of self-reliance in suboptimal circumstances (Ilcan and Rygiel, 2015; Scott-Smith, 2016). People who feel forced to leave their homes might certainly have different and often more crucial needs to connect than those who were able to leave in more privileged circumstances or who are able to stay put. But by focusing on individual potentials, post-humanitarianism is feeding into the meritocratic thinking of neoliberal capitalism. The structural lack of engagement with rights and with the situated sociolegal contexts in which the lives of many displaced people take place is problematic and not only because it renders post-humanitarian projects as fleeting. A short-sight optimism for quick techno-fixes can aggravate existing legal and social uncertainties, as the deployment of technologies and the digital inscriptions they make tend to map onto persisting structural inequalities concerning legal status, class, race, gender, etc. The lives of people residing in prolonged conditions of displacement should not be reduced to a state of exception (Agamben, 2005). Instead, continuous and overlapping states of exceptions (Alijla, 2020) – a state of emergency and crisis, for experimentations, for securitisation and border violence, and for legal

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immunity – are used as an excuse to place refugees even further outside of humanity. A central argument throughout this book is that the interactions of technologies with the situated legal and material experiences of refugees are neither a good nor a bad development. The binary logic of ‘either/or’ is still the default position. It is important to give primacy to the ‘and’ and ‘as well as’ (Hage, 2020). The simultaneous acceleration of structural exclusions and inclusions (Lucht, 2012: xi; Sassen, 2014) plays out and interacts with the lives and subjectivities of (dis)connected refugees and migrant across the globe. I argue for an understanding of the complexity of multi-layered interactions between a wide variety of technologies and people’s everyday precarious realities. The figure of the ‘connected migrant’ (Diminescu, 2008) therefore requires an important addition: that of being and feeling simultaneously and yet also disconnected (Dhoest, 2019; Ferguson, 2002). There are multifaceted ways in which refugees interact with connections, and those connections interact with the visceral, material and social experiences of time and place. The functions of technologies go beyond the instrumental (Awad and Tossell, 2019). Digital affordances – the potentialities that emerge from the interaction between a user and a technology – interact with sociopolitical structures in ways that are often not straightforward. My ethnographical approach enabled me to point out less apparent subjective and social functions that technologies have. I have specifically explored how everyday experiences of prolonged uncertainty among Iraqi refugees, geographically residing in Jordan, are mediated and situated. Given their prolonged legal uncertainty and the lack of the legal right to work, uncertainties are real and material. They are exacerbated by the limited outlooks for betterment in the foreseeable future and are interpreted through the prism of the past, including gendered experiences of economic sanctions, prolonged crisis and violence in Iraq, one’s (former) middle-classness and prior humanitarian practices. Jordan’s temporary and restrictive protection context and the position that UNHCR Jordan holds as a ‘surrogate state’ (Kagan, 2011; Slaughter and Crisp, 2009) further interact with how the everyday is experienced as waiting and processes around seeking meaning and direction – out of waiting – are heightened. In Chapter 2 I showed how limited means available for obtaining information or establishing communication with humanitarian actors interact with and reinforce experiences of waiting. The fear of being forgotten or being stuck in Jordan engendered anxious information-seeking tactics among the Iraqi refugees in this study. Chapter 3 then engaged with efforts to collectively mobilise to obtain more information and to seek alternative means for travelling onwards, and how this interacted with seeing and hearing about the arrival of newly arriving people seeking refuge in

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Europe in the summer of 2015. More recognition for refugees’ connectivity also meant that UNHCR Jordan started tapping into the different means of communication that refugees had begun deploying by 2018. In Chapter 7 I questioned whether this has contributed to more human(e) humanitarian communication, given its interaction with the limits of urban humanitarian governance. Experiences of waiting, as evidenced throughout this book, are not static. How people experience time spent in conditions of prolonged displacement (Doná, 2015) is affected by and interacts with what people see, hear and feel when they are displaced. Experiences of place and home become interspersed with online worlds and transnational connections. There is some space to challenge gendered and generational norms, as smartphones can enable a sense of privacy within the refugee home or can engender shifts in who in the household is the income provider. But through mediated practices, gendered and generational norms are also often simultaneously maintained, for instance by controlling what pictures girls and women post online. Transnational connections can engender emotional relief through the mediated presence of transnational loved ones and can provide material relief by sending financial support. Yet they can equally and simultaneously aggravate the sense of feeling out of place in Jordan, as was explored in Chapter 4. Amid prolonged uncertainty, connections equally and simultaneously engender experiences of being disconnected from loved ones, from one’s past and from being able to advance in life along social and cultural norms and/or in popular culture. The term ‘waiting’ might imply passivity. The concept of ‘stuckedness’ (Hage, 2015) is therefore perhaps better suited to describe the active, sustained mediated and situated experiences of invisibility, uncertainty and arbitrariness experienced by the people in this study. These experiences are deeply grounded in material injustices, but they are also open-ended; people are never entirely stuck. Cathrine Brun puts it well: ‘there is always some kind of movement in people’s lives. There may be geographical movement; there may be social movement, or mobility, which could see people moving to a better or a worse condition; people find ways of moving on, and even though they do not move on, there are changes in their lives’ (2016: 393). And as time is slowed down and physical and social mobility are restricted, technologies stretch out the space to manoeuvre and interact with people’s experiences. In his pivotal work, Arjun Appadurai (1996) presumed that digital interconnectedness and the imagination would result in a world less bounded by borders. Instead, digital connectivity has accelerated the powers of neoliberal capitalism and (neo)colonialism, and has imposed precariousness and immobility on the lives of many. But the role of imagination and its

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connection to mediated practices is still worthy of consideration. The imaginations of the Iraqi refugees in this study are not radical per se (Hage, 2015). The chronic lack of certainties interacts with capitalism, popular culture, a state-oriented solutionism and a neoliberal form of humanitarianism that is increasingly attempting to integrate the ‘exceptional’ state of being associated with being and becoming a refugee (with its corresponding lack of rights) into capitalism more directly. This further reduces the space to imagine differently. Seeing and hearing about lives in other parts of the world also engenders specific imaginations. Envisioned routes have roots in people’s personal and societal histories and are deeply connected to neoliberal capitalism and its individualising means for addressing scarcity and adversity. The imagination that things could be(come) otherwise is deeply influenced by mediated content fostering and structuring these ideas and images. Structurally placed outside a normalised’ ‘national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995b), the Iraqi refugees in this study continue to strive within it and/or to strive to fit back into a state-governed capitalism. The prospect of being exploited can be deemed better than the prospect of being considered ‘of no use to anyone’ (Hage, 2004: 112; Lucht, 2012). Refugees are integrated into a global neoliberal capitalist system that tends to expel and has (also) left them out. The people in this study continuously sought to balance fears that better futures would not materialise with anxieties over having lost so much in life and hopes that life would be better in the future. Amid these deeply affective experiences, everyday life continues. Beyond securing rather precarious livelihoods and seeking ways to make a living, this includes sustaining meaningful relationships and finding means for transnational intimacy, home-making, learning and seeking education, falling in love and bringing up children, entertaining and receiving guests, enjoying pastimes and seeking meaningful activities to overcome boredom, reminiscing about the past and anticipating likely future scenarios while dreaming of betterment. The chronic lack of certainties is expansive and reinforces the urgency of hope. This can be considered as a force in forced migration (Witteborn, 2018). Critical border scholars have termed this the autonomy of migration because prior to and in response to attempts to control and regulate migration, there are moments of movement and resistance (Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Scheel, 2019)

America’s Got Talent, Amman’s Got Extras: Material Matters The meritocratic approach that the post-humanitarian, technocolonial turn fosters is increasingly spread across the globe. It moves beyond the informal economies and special economic zones in the Global South and spreads

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into Global Northern austerity policies (Duffield, 2019). Disenchantment with the unfulfilled promises of Western modernity and the schizoid enthusiasm for/anxiety over accelerated capitalism are felt across the globe. But how this plays out in people’s lives is structurally uneven. It interacts with intersecting differentiations based upon geographical location, nationality, status, race, class, gender, etc. This book began with a vignette of an evening of watching TV with Kholoud in her home, in which we saw former US soldiers participating in America’s Got Talent. One of the odd jobs in which many Iraqi refugees would frequently engage was playing an extra in a media production set in Jordan. Over the last decade, Jordan has become a relatively popular destination for media productions, given the turmoil in the rest of the region. As Variety magazine, an American publication on the entertainment industry, wrote: ‘It pulls in war dramas seeking genuine Middle East locations to lend authenticity to their stories’ (Vivarelli, 2017). This ‘authenticity’ of war dramas set in Middle Eastern locations ought to be disputed and critiqued. In November 2015, two months after I had returned to the United Kingdom where I was undertaking my Ph.D., I received a call on Viber from Solomon, Kholoud’s youngest son. We frequently called. Solomon told me that on that very day he had played an extra in the Netflix-commissioned production Sand Castle. Sand Castle depicts the experiences of a US soldier in the 2003 Iraq war. It draws upon the scriptwriters’ war experiences in what was termed the ‘Sunni triangle’. This geographical area was known for its active opposition to the US-led invasion and is where Fallujah is based. Several of the Iraqi extras present that day, who were expected to be silent, had very personal experiences of the events they were now reproducing. They were now made to perform victimised and emasculating imitations of themselves as Iraqi citizens affected by the war. And as Solomon told me, those actors playing the main Iraqi characters in the field were not Iraqi, nor did they speak with an Iraqi accent. A friend of his father, who had been present in the battles for Fajullah, had convinced Solomon to stay. He had told him: ‘Iraq is gone. There is no point fighting over it.’ Solomon earned 15 JOD (US$21) that day, which is – considering Jordan’s economy – not insignificant, but not that much either. Considering their everyday precariousness, he and other Iraqi refugees like him felt pressured to participate in the ongoing misrepresentations and misunderstandings of war and the reification of the ‘East’ and people living there. Experiences of marginalisation have never been free of how white, heteronormative and Western mainstream media depict people as ‘others’, nor is drawing upon people’s marginalisation for co-optation in Western-led productions particularly new. Western-led media productions on war have a long history of expanding the symbolic violence that enables (neo)colonial practices (Streitfelt, 2016).1 There have also been acts of resistance to this –

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for instance, when graffiti artists were asked to ‘add authenticity’ during its filming, they used Arabic script to call the series Homeland out on its racism (Phipps, 2015). But the pervasiveness and ubiquity of transnational connectivity might mean that racialised and orientalist media productions are becoming increasingly and continuously accessible, and this sits alongside experiences of how the international community has failed to act conducive and collectively in response to violence in Iraq and Syria. Streaming sites, satellite TV and DVDs, which are available for 1 JOD (US$1.41) in downtown Amman, make it extremely easy to see how the rest of the world is made to think about ‘them’. And some have been actively participating in these gross misrepresentations, given the lack of alternatives to which they have access. There are certainly many refugee and nonrefugee people with talent in Amman. And some Iraqi nationals, who are registered as refugees, have been able to make it work, given that the identity-marker of refugee intersects with class and other categories. Some have been able to invest in their own business or to obtain a work permit, as they had access to skills that are in high demand. As a computer programmer, one of Nabila’s sons was able to draw upon digital connectivity to circumvent the Jordan’s legal constraints. Hubs, incubators and hackathons can enable some other young persons to do the same. Other Iraqi refugees I know were able to get by doing home-based gig work. But during the global pandemic, their work came to a halt and they had no safety net. Without thorough attention being given to rights, economic inclusion continues to be an extremely precarious affair. The UNHCR was originally founded to ‘close’ the refugee experience through durable solutions and to guarantee refugees’ rights. By focusing merely on economic inclusion – refugees becoming self-reliant – over the political, it seems to forgo its ultimate responsibility: ensuring that refugees are protected from exploitation, extraction and other present and future risks. Does this demonstrate a shift away from their mandate? Or does it simply confirm the difficulty of upholding that mandate, considering its dependence on nation-states? Providing a more thorough response on what can be effectively and affectively done to ensure that immediate and urgent responses to human suffering do not further entrench inequalities is not especially straightforward. Studies like this one tend to end with recommendations for policy, but these tend to focus on wider implementation and therefore lose sight of the particularities concerning context, social relations and/or places. This places the author(s) outside of the situated reality she, he or they have engaged with, and instead often supports and reproduces a rather decontextualised worldview of humanitarian actors and policymakers (Bakewell, 2008).2 Instead, I use the final sections of this book to explore whether and how feminist and decolonising approaches towards post-humanism, ethnogra-

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phy and development can help in fostering affirmative practices towards the further inclusion of refugees as fellow (human) beings and towards the recognition of the mutual complexity in reference to the world’s (dis)connections. Situated critical studies can be regarded as hopeful acts, as they seek openings that could increase relationality rather than exploitation. Further comprehension of people’s everyday experiences and the power relations that are at stake are crucial humble steps towards much-needed practices of decolonising humanitarianism. In combination with a grounded solidarity, this could potentially contribute to more humane humanitarian practices. This is hard work (Pedersen, 2012), given the speed with which capital moves and the realities of people’s everyday struggles and suffering. The combination of accelerated capitalism and the urgency of crisis tends to push ‘us’ to move fast, yet practices that move towards more collective processes for social transformation require ‘de-acceleration and the common constructions of social horizons of hope’ (Braidotti, 2019: 54). The practice of staying hopeful plays a central role in this book. Holding on to the potential for change is an important act among refugees residing in prolonged conditions of displacement. But it is also and perhaps equally present among humanitarian practitioners and social science researchers alike, who are also holding on to the potential for change. However, there is an important difference here. Tech-optimist initiatives tend to celebrate the connecting potential of technologies and/or the possibilities of big data to provide what is presumed to be more accurate, objective and ‘neutral’ information. In doing so, these approaches do not engage with the actual social and political problems at stake and place the burden on people who are already located in structurally difficult circumstances to either excel and/ or to make do in suboptimal and precarious circumstances. Hope, unlike optimism, engages with material and sociopolitical realities. I make the argument for practices that move towards a politics of hope. A hopeful decolonial and feminist thinking foregrounds relationality and recognises that whereas ‘we’ are in this together, ‘we’ are certainly not the same (Braidotti, 2019). How ‘we’ are positioned differently matters. Some people can enter America’s Got Talent, whereas people who are persistently othered might only be able to act as extras.

Away from Unfettered Optimism and towards a Situated Politics of Hope Hope is the idea that there is potential for change ( Jansen, 2016). The optimism that humanitarian actors, policymakers, corporate organisations and some academics project onto technologies can be interpreted as modes of hope. The pervasiveness of suffering, the structural lack of solutions and

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the political constraints by which humanitarian actors are often required to operate might necessitate an optimist outlook towards the potentials of technologies to establish social change. And the need to hold on to the belief that their actions matter is part of what is expected of aid workers: being mandated to do something that one is unable to achieve in ways that are desired requires the performance of moral labour, which includes the need to inspire compassion and acceptance that aid falls short (Fechter, 2016). The move to technology is interlinked with a humanitarian audit culture and its requirements to measure impact and provide evidence to donors to safeguard funding. This has further resulted in a push for increased datafication and retrievable metrics that are further disconnected from people’s situated realities (Madianou, 2019a). Optimism tends not to engage with the actual social and political problems at stake. Remote sensing, computer models and big data are increasingly used to try to make sense of the world’s complexity. But while datafication, data visualisation and number crunching give the impression of objectivity, transparency and neutrality, it is actually a ‘god trick’ (Haraway, 1988). It simultaneously promises a vision from everywhere and nowhere. Obtaining data is never a neutral practice, also considering that obtained data is never ‘raw’: it is selected, reduced from complexity and interpreted by humans and machines designed by humans (Gitelman and Jackson, 2013; Lupton, 2016). Tests and measurements tend to instil hierarchies, police normativity and reinforce pre-existing exclusions (Harding, 2011). This contrasts with the affirmative stance towards hope proposed by Marxist process philosopher Ernst Bloch (1995). His ethos of hope is not a utopian belief in ‘a good elsewhere or elsewhen’ (Anderson, 2006: 692) or a naïve optimism. Instead, hope is a process that is deeply grounded in material realities and social inequalities. It acts upon the sense that something is missing in our unfinished, embodied and experimental world (Anderson, 2006: 699). Hopes that go unmet can also reinforce feelings of disappointment and despair – for instance, in relation to modernity’s many false promises (Hage, 2003) or in response to the limited gestures of what is perceived as the international community. In these circumstances, hope is also about holding on to the very idea that there is capacity to become otherwise. Hope is a method for being responsive to what is not and what is yet (possible) to become (Bloch, 1995). The thinking of Bourdieu (2000) provides important additional insights into the role of differential social positionings and power relations in practices of hope. Bourdieu compares holding on to hope to being invested in the game or the ‘illusio’. Hope requires investment and belief in its socially constructed rules and chances – that it offers something to those caught up in it is what makes it worthwhile waiting for. This investment is always associated with some uncertainty: of not being fully sure of the outcomes. But

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the social and cultural games of ‘illusio’ are not ‘fair games’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 215). A person’s embodied and embedded system of dispositions relating to geographical location, class, race, gender, legal status, etc. is the product of the social world’s history, but also reproduces the social inequalities and borders that govern our lives in the present and play a role in what futures are (deemed) possible. Those situated in more privileged positions have much more control over the outcome of the game than others. Simply put, it is easy to play by the rules if you know they will work in your favour. This does not mean this is destiny. And even if people are powerless to change their situation, they are not powerless to shape how they deal with their circumstances (Lucht, 2012: 84). According to Bourdieu, especially in times in which expectations and chances fall out of line, there is ‘a margin of freedom for political action aimed at reopening the space of possibles’ (2000: 234). This begs the question of whether and how scholarship can be conducive in terms of fostering this move towards a more radical imagination (Hage, 2004, 2020) without reproducing the neocapitalist tendencies to romanticise the truly destructive potentials of crisis or to celebrate the resilience of people who are able to make do against the odds. Around the world, the combination of technological developments, accelerated capitalism, structural violence and a global pandemic have contributed to a perpetual sense of crisis, uncertainty and anxiety among many (Braidotti, 2019; Duffield, 2019). This has resulted in increased precariousness and more individualised subjectivities, which reduce the opportunities for alternative imaginations for many of us. And envisioning if and how things could be different is perhaps even more challenging for people affected by displacement, given all the work required by them to simply make do. There is a need for more radical imaginations (Hage, 2004, 2020), but practices that move towards more radical imaginations require grounded solidarities that include systematic recognition that even if ‘we’ are all in this together, ‘we’ are most certainly not in the same position (Braidotti, 2019). These positionings matter. People are agents and agents have power, but these powers are unequally distributed. This means that resistance requires relations with those who are, in light of the unequal and unequalising global structures, in positions who can make their complicity constructive (de Jong, 2017). The impetus for structural change ought to include and go beyond refugees or structurally more marginalised people alone.

Constructive Complicity and Hope as a Methodology Some people who participated in this study played a more central role than others, but all of the experiences and times that Iraqi refugees shared are important for my sense-making. Here I briefly want to come back to Zeineb

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and Omar, the engineering couple whose navigations I discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. The first time I met Omar, he asked me: ‘Are you one of these Western women who would go to Palestine because she has an emptiness in her heart?’ His sceptical question made me laugh and his words resonated with me. This is not because I believe that my engagements with refugees in the Middle East would somehow provide a quick fix to my own disenchantment regarding our structurally uneven world, but it relates to my understanding that the manifold struggles in the world are interconnected. By holding on to individual gains, we sustain what oppresses us: ‘we’ all lose. Like humanitarianism, academic knowledge production has been deeply affected by the overwhelming speed of neoliberal capitalism and digital developments. Knowledge – which admits to the distinction between the ‘reality’ of lived experiences and the material and structural world, and allows for reflexivity and theories – has been steadily replaced by data, signals and alerts to calculate potentialities derived from people’s past behaviour (Duffield, 2019: 9). This majoritarian post-humanist position ‘combines a humanistic belief in the perfectibility of Man through scientific rationality’ (Braidotti, 2019: 118). The flat process-oriented ontologies and epistemologies they tend to draw upon negate and therefore intensify existing power relations. Feminist and neomaterial philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2019) provides a different approach to post-humanism, which seeks mutual recognition and similarities without flattening out differences and differential positionings. She argues for an epistemology that ‘that does justice to the power structures of contemporary subjects’ (2019: 56). In order to further comprehend what it means to be human in the twenty-first century in relation to fellow human beings, nature and technologies, we require situated knowledge and locations of power. This is crucial given the dangers of turning crisis into a nostalgic lament of white, Eurocentric and male entitlement (Braidotti, 2019: 69). The task at hand is to seek mutual recognition and similarities, without flattening out differences and differential positionings. The well-known ethnographer response on the inability to represent the experiences of others – the reflexive turn – has been rightfully criticised by Sara Ahmed (2000), who highlighted the potential pitfalls of either reifying ‘them’ into a construction of ourselves or for the ethnographer becomes absorbed with themself. And Spivak’s pivotal figure of the subaltern (1988) also notes that the hegemonic discourses in which knowledge is produced tend to be ‘deaf to the subaltern, even if she/he speaks up to resists’ (Kapoor, 2004: 639). Given this ‘via negativa’, what then would be constructive ways of listening to the ‘living subaltern’ (de Jong and Mascat, 2016: 722)? Recognising and highlighting structural oppressions and how knowledge tends to (re)produce these without also seeking means to overcome them would be a rather sad endpoint (Hage, 2020).

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This study seeks to do justice to the complicated and often messy connected experiences of Iraqi refugees in Jordan in ways that they themselves would hopefully also feel comfortable with and in the hope that it can somehow contribute to more social justice for those who were involved and those who are potentially following in their footsteps. I cannot and do not want to speak on behalf of the people in this study. But I can try and listen to their voices, situate their experiences to macropolitical processes and share the lessons I have drawn from my engagements in the hope that this will foster practices that move towards a more radical politics of hope. I was much inspired by Adam’s thoughts on this matter. At some point in 2015, Adam was temporarily ‘volunteering’ for one of the larger NGOs. This meant he often met and spent time with adjaneeb (foreigners, often with Western passports) who came to Jordan to aid refugees. I asked him how he felt about the rather fleeting coming and going of what were mostly young women, as it also made me aware how their and my own hypermobility would perhaps reinforce his own experiences of ‘stuckedness’. His response was as follows: They help the refugees … OK. But … it’s, it is hard to say that, but I appreciate what they do … They help. First of all, they let the people know what is really going on and that is really important … Uhm, there is a lot of good things in it … But if you come to me, as a refugee, I am not going to give a fuck … Because I am still sitting here. I appreciate it, whatever YOU – no, you are something else, I am talking about other foreigners – so, other foreigners who come and help refugees, come and go, I appreciate what they do, for real, because who will else going know about us. Maybe we will never ever going to travel. So, without them, we are not going to travel. Without them there are no stories. We will not just be stuck but we are going to be fucked. Literally. [Silence] Mirjam, the most important thing is that you guys CARE.

Adam’s considerations of me as ‘different’ touched me: how he perceives me matters. But as a Western, white cis woman who has access to a European passport and who is educated in Western knowledge structures, it is important to recognise that I do occupy a privileged position (Lundsfryd, 2017; Mohanty, 1988). I am not dissimilar to the women Sara de Jong (2017) depicts in her critical and constructive reading on Global Northern women wanting to ‘do good’ by supporting women from the Global South. Like them, I draw on my own normative engagements on social justice and inequalities. Adam’s words ‘without them [and me] there are no stories’ shows the awareness – present among most if not all people I have spoken to over the years – that the voices of Western citizen-subjects are more likely to be listened

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to than their own voices, as they are marked out as ‘others’. This means that careful listening (Bassel, 2017) and conveying situated knowledge in relation to broader exclusionary practices are crucial. Adam has been disappointed by what the international media and humanitarian attention have done for him over the years. But for him, being ‘forgotten’, no longer being talked about, seems even worse than being structurally disappointed: ‘We will not just be stuck but we are going to be fucked.’ I interpret his words as also pointing to the importance of maintaining relations beyond fieldwork, which is not always easy or straightforward, because it hurts to see the ongoing distress of friends, sickness and suffering, to be reminded of the ugliness of powers, to deal with your own frustrations and inability to ‘fix’ their struggle, and the general lack of care in the world towards their struggles. Grief and anxiety are unavoidable when serious attention is paid to the dislocated world in which we are living. This is not a justification to turn away, to become self-absorbed or to reproduce exploitative data collection practices. It is a further push for what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) calls ‘thinking care’. Thinking care ‘cannot be grounded in a longing for a smooth harmonious world, but in vital ethico-affective everyday practices that engage with the inescapable troubles of interdependent existencies’ (2012: 199). This is because Adam’s remark can easily be reversed: without ‘our’ involvement, he would most probably not have needed to tell ‘refugee stories’. Listening (Bassel, 2017) and care (Puig de la Bellacassa, 2012) are humble but important political acts towards more radical and more inclusive imaginations and transnational solidarity. Care involves sustaining contact and sharing research outcomes with the people who have actively participated in research. Especially when participants continue to live in extremely dire circumstances, this is a crucial but far from straightforward practice, given the exclusionary academic discourse and the lack of substantial change that research tends to bring about. This also became evident in the workshop I organised in 2018. Obviously, the attendees to this workshop expressed more interest in discussing their own ongoing struggles with communicating with UNHCR Jordan than hearing about the findings of my 2015 fieldwork. They were hopeful that I would share their experiences with UNHCR Jordan, which I did. Whether UNHCR Jordan listened to the suggestions made in Chapter 7 was beyond my control. The belief in a shared humanity is the organising principle of humanitarian action. Yet too often, refugees are deemed not to be human enough. They are continuously subjected to othering strategies (Nyers, 2006: xvi), conditional care and temporary and restricted forms of protection. This further reduces their ability to control, speak up or act in already difficult circumstances. Throughout this exploration on the (dis)connected everyday experiences of Iraqi refugees amid prolonged displacement in Jordan, I have argued against a fetishisation of refugees’ connectivities and in favour

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of a situated recognition that refugees are first and foremost our fellow human beings and are part and parcel of our interconnected yet deeply unequal and unequalising world. Our (dis)connected world is cruel, given that many people are struggling to holding on to life that is worthy. It is ‘crowded at the margins’ (Braidotti, 2019: 108). But it is also at these margins that there is hope. This is even more so because ‘we’ – a manifold of differentially positioned human beings seeking betterment – are many.

Notes 1. In an interview with the New York Times, the Vietnamese-American scholar and writer Viet Thanh Nguyen explained how the film Apocalypse Now has been an important source of pain and inspiration: ‘People just like me were being slaughtered … It was an anti-war movie about the war in Vietnam, but the movie was about Americans. The Vietnamese were silent and erased’ (Streitfelt, 2016). In his book The Sympathizer, Nguyen (2015) describes how his Vietnamese narrator is hired to provide ‘native experience’ to a Hollywood film on the Vietnam War. Set in the Philippines, he finds he is only contributing to the misleading romanticisation of the American representation of the war. Benjamin Moser’s (2020) biography of the life of Susan Sontag opens with a scene set in Los Angeles on the recording of Auction of Souls in 1919. Thousands of Armenians participated as extras in this Hollywood spectacle of the Armenian massacres, including survivors. Sontag’s mother and grandmother also participated, but had Jewish rather than Armenian roots, also suggesting the potential blurring of national identity markers in mediatised depictions of conflict and forced displacement. 2. Established scholars in the field of forced migration have written proposals that go beyond and try to envision alternative imageries. Alongside Betts and Collier’s (2017) optimism regarding private partnerships, there is the much more radical outline of Cohen and van Hear (2017) on a transnational polity, linking migrants and refugees with sympathetic citizens globally. Whereas I am sympathetic to its pragmatic utopianism and its calls for transnational solidarity, the latter raises very similar concerns to the former: being a top-down oriented proposal that potentially reduces refugee rights, that ignores context and important differentiating differences and that celebrates (and therefore also misrecognises the risks of) the potentials of digital connectivity.

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Index

2003 US-led invasion, 1–2, 30, 169 gendered experiences of, 61 and the imposition of ethnosectarian differences, 24, 30, 131 and Iraq’s violent unravelling, 30, 48, 110–15 subsequent changes of and the role of Iraq’s media landscape, 111–13 2013 Humanitarian Response to Typhoon Haiyan, 142 2G phone, endurance of the, 57

affect theory, 105–107 affordances, 11–12, 108, 142, 166 affective, 12, 26, 94–97, 103–22 agency, 6, 20, 25, 49, 76–77, 81–82, 106–7, 124 and inequalities, 107, 124, 167–168, 172–175. Assyrian (Christian) Iraqi minority, 86, 90–91, 95, 109 autonomy of migration approach, 76, 168

absent presence, 94, 101 accents, 93, 169 accountability (def.), 139 to Affected Populations (AAP), 26, 139–63 demands for, 72–75 directions of, 141 humanitarian (limits to), 46, 50, 56, 124, 127, 139–43 technologies, 56, 124, 127–28, 139–40 Ahmed, Sara, 9, 23, 75, 105–7, 109, 121 ‘always on’, 58, 71, 96, 100, 108. See also Madianou, Mirca Amman, 1, 22, 33–40, 83 East, 33, 34, 90–93, 119 (see also Hashmi Schmali) everyday life in, 33–34, 90–94 Iraqi material presence in, 33, 78, 92–93, 152 West, 34, 54, 64, 72, 83, 89–90, 92, 147, 151

belonging, 9, 13, 20, 64, 71, 81, 85–86, 91, 96, 104–5 Berlant, Lauren, 59, 104–7, 118, 120 Betts, Alexander, 17–18, 66, 126–27, 130, 133, 137, 177n2 biometrics (def.), 128. See also UNHCR: and biometric data registration border practices (including policing, violence and control), 2–3, 9, 14–15, 17–18, 23, 64, 75–77, 80–82, 126, 132, 165, 167–68, 173 borders (geographical), 7, 9–10, 13, 16, 18, 29, 36, 56–57, 74, 87, 91, 104, 123, 126, 165 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3, 6, 41, 49, 52, 58–59, 91, 106–7, 172–73 Braidotti, Rosi, 164–65, 171, 173–74, 177 Brun, Cathrine, 8, 29, 84–86, 114, 125, 167 bureaucracy and bureaucratic procedures, 43, 48, 52, 75, 81, 132, 156

210  |  Index

cash assistance, 35, 39, 131, 140, 148–51, 154, 158–59 celebrating refugees’ connectivity and/ or resilience, 15–18, 28, 37, 81, 171, 173, 177n2. See also technological: optimism Christian Iraqi refugees, 64, 66, 86, 90–93, 95, 100 citizenship, 45, 48n1, 71, 75, 86, 101 class(ed differences), 30, 33–35, 91–94, 134, 166–70 colonialism (persistence of), 9–10, 15, 17–18, 23, 45, 47, 127, 133, 167, 169, 171. See also Iraq: and British colonialism; technocolonialism communication, 12, 25, 63, 67–69, 72, 74, 99–100 directions of, 57, 140–41, 150, 155–56 and power, 57, 139, 143, 157 safety concerns for, 13–14, 50, 53–56 transnational, 3, 20, 31, 57, 62–3, 76, 87, 104, 108–10 with UNHCR Jordan, 54–59, 67–69, 72, 139–63 with communities (CwC), 139, 154–55 community-based approaches. See participatory approaches community-based organisations (CBOs), 64, 88, 99, 154 Community Support Centres (CSC), 140, 146, 152–54 compassion, 16, 27, 45, 47, 65, 74, 126, 172 conditionality, 9, 50, 69 connected migrant, the figure of the, 13–15, 166 presence, 13 connectivity. See also disconnected and affective attachments, 23, 96, 106, 109–110, 121, 167 and communication (see communication) ‘doing family’, 13, 100, 107–9 and (im)mobility, 61, 78–81, 117 infrastructure, 57, 108, 122n2

instrumental and/or utilitarian views on, 11, 16, 104, 166 learning, 99, 120, 134, 136, 138n4 managing precariousness, 10, 13, 81, 106, 121, 164–66, 175 and onward travelling, 77–81 othering potentials, 4, 14–20, 26, 105, 124–26, 134, 137, 140, 143–44, 156, 161, 165, 170–72, 177n2 pervasiveness and ubiquity of, 11, 108, 170 (see also ‘always on’) the pluralisation of social settings, 13, 96, 110, 146, 167 and safety, 84–87, 94 seeking information, 12, 62–63, 104, 110, 161 and sense of (private) space, 84–87, 97–98, 100–101 sustaining social networks, 21, 57, 62, 118–19, 137 and work, 89, 133, 137, 170 constructive complicity, 23, 173, 175–77 containment, 3, 8, 45, 52, 77 ‘context collapse’, 98 counting, 36–38, 68, 128–29 crisis, 6–8, 15, 25, 29–30, 47, 126–30, 137. See also ‘ Europe’s crisis’; the ‘Iraq refugee crisis’ cruel optimism, 106–7, 118. See also Berlant, Lauren datafication of aid, 86–87, 123–24, 127, 129–32, 137, 165, 171–72 dangers of, 130–32, 165 data ideology, 125–28, 167, 171–174 mining, 127 privacy (see privacy) protection, 19, 86–87, 128, 132 (see also digital citizens: rights) decolonising research approaches, 170–71 dependency, 35, 51, 106–7, 137, 143, 161 deportation, 73 deservingness (discourse of), 65–66, 74, 80 diaspora space, 10–11

Index |

digital citizens, 70 connectivity, 4 (see also connectivity) divides, 12–13, 15–16 exceptionalism, 11 identity, 14, 26, 129, 132, 138 presence(s), 13–14 rights, 129 digitisation, 17, 19, 137 disconnected, 4, 15, 19–20, 26, 109, 113, 121, 143, 164–66 discrimination, 15, 18, 102n1, 132, 158–59 Doná, Georgia, 3, 5, 13–14, 22, 49 donor funding and policies, 35, 37–38, 45, 47, 67, 99, 124, 126–9, 130, 139–49, 157–60, 172 Dublin III Regulation (Temporary suspension of), 69, 80 Duffield, Mark, 17–18, 23, 56, 81, 125–129, 141, 150, 153, 155, 169, 173–74 durable solutions, 4, 31–32, 49–52, 104, 170. See also resettlement (third country) lack of, 4, 55, 58, 62–66, 69n3, 124, 170–71 and perspectives of refugees, 52, 72, 75–77 earmarking, 37–38, 45, 67, 130, 158, 162 embodiment, 2, 4, 9, 15, 21, 29, 76, 84–85, 94, 108, 115, 172–73 emotions, 7, 57, 74–75, 97, 109 and how it differs from affect, 105 employment rights (lack of), 28, 32, 88–90, 132–134, 137, 138n3 ethnographic research, 10, 13, 21–24, 124, 144, 164, 166, 174 limits to reflexivity, 174 and othering potentials, 23, 83–84 and sharing outcomes with participants, 144–145 Europe. See also ‘methodological Europeanism’ beyond, 4, 15–17, 65–66, 69, 125

211

‘Europe’s crisis’, 70, 77, 87 everyday experiences, 2–3, 6–7, 9, 11–12, 15, 20–21, 29, 33–34, 48, 59, 62, 69, 71, 76, 83–84, 86, 90–91, 95–97, 103–6, 115, 121, 156, 161, 166, 168, 171 exception (state of), 9, 18, 27n2, 137, 165, 168 Facebook (company), 107, 126 groups, 63, 67, 72, 78, 80 use of its functions, 21, 54, 63, 87, 98– 99, 103, 107–11, 119, 146, 154–55 (see also UNHCR Jordan: Facebook page) Fallujah, 1, 169 fear, 32, 36–37, 55, 73–74, 83, 86–94, 109, 143, 145 feedback loop, 143, 156 feminist approaches to post-humanism, 23, 170–77. See also Braidotti, Rosi Fergusson, James, 15, 17, 19–20, 127, 166 fragmented journeys, 5, 77 futures, 65, 105, 114–15, 117–21 gender, 22, 25, 165 and displacement, 60–62 and distribution of labour, 61–62, 101 and (im)mobility, 116–17 and place, 85, 92–94, 96–101 and privacy, 97–100 generational differences, 25, 96–97, 100–1, 117 gig economy, 89, 134, 170 Global Compact on Refugees, 51 globalisation, 4, 18, 23, 27n2 from below, 90, 104 and cultural production, 118, 169–170 (see also USA: and the global media landscape) Global South containment in the, 7, 15–17, 60, 77, 104, 129, 135, 138, 141, 161, 164, 168, 175 critique on terminology, 17

212

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‘good life, the’? 106, 117–20. See also Berlant, Lauren gratefulness (discourse of), 121 guest discourse, 40, 101 Hage, Ghassan, 20, 53, 58–59, 64, 69, 76, 84, 105–6, 167 Harrell-Bond, Barbara, 51–52, 56–57, 106, 125, 141, 159 Hashmi (Schmali), 34, 90–92, 95, 97–98, 152, 154 ‘high-tech orientalism’, 16, 164 home-making, 22, 25, 85–101, 105 hope, 6–7, 26, 70–71, 75–77, 81–82, 103–21, 168, 171–72 as methodology, 175–77 as political act, 26, 164–77 societal, 58 hospitality. See guest discourse households, 22–23 and gender, 22 intrusion, 23 humanitarian communication, 50–59, 66–69, 139–6 experimentation, 19, 123–38 (see also Jacobsen, Katja Lindskov) governance, 18, 43, 47, 50, 60, 69, 75, 124–28, 144, 159–60, 167 imperative, 129 neophilia, 126, 137 reason, 16, 29, 47, 144 response, 29–30 short-term focus, 31, 49 humanitarianisms, 8, 17, 45, 125. See also post-humanitarianism Hyndman, Jennifer, 9–10, 45, 123, 125 ICTs (def.), 2. See also communication; connectivity illegalised, 74, 77, 164 imagination, 12, 20, 117–121, 167–68 radical, 173 impasse, 59, 115 in-between-ness, 104 informal employment, 28, 39 information precarity, 50, 58, 65

informed consent (lack of meaningful), 124, 128–129 innovation, 18, 26–27, 125, 132–38 labs, 133 (in)security, multi-layered experiences of, 85–86, 101–102 financial, 88–90 physical, 86–88 ontological, 85–86, 95, 99, 114 social, 90–94 Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, 148–151 interconnected(ness), 11, 167, 174, 177 intersectionality, 22, 34, 60, 93–94 international community (the), 35, 46, 52, 58, 66, 79, 170, 172 International Organization for Migration (IOM), 41, 44–46, 63 ı¯qa¯mh, 32, 33, 41, 48n1, 63 Iraq, 1–2, 30. See also 2003 US-led invasion and British colonialism, 47–48 the Embargo period (1990–2003), 47–48 future, 115 national attachments, 110–15 pre-2003 media landscape, 111 ‘Iraq refugee crisis’, 2, 25, 30–31, 39, 42, 46–48, 158 contested figures, 35–37 prima facie procedures, 38 prior Iraqi displacement, 31–32 irregular travel, 28, 62, 74, 77–81, 119, 127 ISIS (Da’esh), 1–3, 47, 63, 86, 90–91, 93, 110 and its media strategy, 122n2 Jacobsen, Katja Lindskov, 17–19, 37, 39, 56, 123–26, 128–34, 139, 141–43, 160 Jordan (country), 2, 8, 32 Compact, 132–34, 138n3, 158 economy, 36, 39–40, 133–135, 140 legislation and laws, 31–32, 39, 86, 129

Index |

limitations to futures in, 46, 84, 105, 115, 118, 120 non-signatory to the Refugee Convention, 2, 31 popular destination for media productions, 169 refugee protection in, 29–32, 35–40, 86–88, 139, 161, 166 Shi’a (Iraqi) Muslims in, 32, 93 language, 24, 73, 75, 120–1, 127, 152 legitimacy, 20, 31, 60, 72, 75–76, 80, 123, 126 limbo, 8, 27, 104 liminality, 3, 59 loss, 20, 25, 34, 60, 91, 110, 113–5, 123, 137 Lucht, Hans, 4, 6, 19–20, 79, 166, 168, 173 Madianou, Mirca, 10–11, 13, 16–19, 26, 56–58, 75–76, 86, 96, 100, 108–9, 125–31, 139–43, 150, 155, 165, 172. See also technocolonialism making do, 7, 29, 71, 77, 107, 161, 168 Malkki, Liisa, 9, 29, 49, 84, 117, 125, 168 marginalisation, 1, 60, 165, 169 Marxist theory, 105, 172 mediated warscapes, 91–92, 96–97, 110–114 mediation, 1 and belonging, 110–15 and home-making, 94–101 and hope, 103–122 and migration, 9–15 and routine, 62, 85, 95 theory, 11 of violence and suffering, 112–13, 169 of waiting for resettlement, 50–70 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), 31–32 memories, 79, 86, 91, 110, 113 merged RSD/resettlement procedure, 66–69 metadata, 127 ‘methodological Europeanism’, 16

213

mobility, 61–62, 84, 92–94, 115–17 needs for information and communication, 146, 149, 155–56, 159 networked authoritarianism, 14, 87 neutrality, 4, 17, 26, 44, 68, 148, 172 ‘new’ technologies, 10–11, 115, 146, 156 normalisation of crisis, 2–3 nostalgia, 113–15 One Refugee Approach (ORA), 38, 67 onward travel, 25, 28, 32, 63, 68, 78–81, 94, 104, 116, 134, 166 optimism, 106–7, 118 See also cruel optimism; technological: optimism and how it differs from hope, 171–72 orientation devices, 26, 117–21 pain, 108, 110–15, 158 Palestine refugees, 4, 8, 33–34, 78, 91–92 ‘Participation Revolution’, 141, 153 participatory approaches, 26, 140–42, 152–54, 161–62 passing, 93 Persons of Concern (PoC), 9, 31, 38, 54, 67, 132, 139, 142 physical integrity. See (in)security, multilayered experiences of: physical place, 84–101 polymedia, 11, 98, 146 positionings, 22–23, 86, 145, 172–74 post-colonialism, 10, 60, 126 post-humanitarianism, 17–19, 125–28 in Jordan’s protection space, 26, 123–38 and its relationship to posthumanism, 23 power, 17, 56–58, 161. See also under communication and translation, 24 practice, 2, 12, 50, 59, 68–69, 72, 87, 91, 94, 144, 171–76 precariousness, 4, 6, 59, 85, 106, 144, 167, 169, 173

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privacy, 19, 97–100, 104 private partnerships, 18, 126–28, 133–35, 137, 177n2 prima facie, 38, 40 and ‘refugee status determination proper’, 43 policy recommendations, 170 prolonged conditions of displacement, 2–7, 21, 24, 49, 58, 83–85, 165, 171 protection. See also under refugee data-driven, 19 space, 26, 30, 35, 38, 40, 46, 166 protests, 72–77, 145 protraction, 5, 27n2, 51 race, 9, 22, 34, 58, 73, 92, 94, 98, 165, 169, 173 racialised bias, 9, 14, 18, 121, 125–26, 134, 170 relationality, 23, 150, 171, 175–77 reflexivity, 23–24, 174 refugee camps, 6, 33, 35, 39, 50, 97, 135, 148 categorisation, 7, 9 Convention, 7–8, 43 (see also Jordan: non-signatory to the Refugee Convention) entrepeneurs, 89, 134–135 labels, 9, 38, 43 numbers of, 35–37 (see also counting) performativity, 35, 83 protection, 5, 8, 35 (see also Jordan: refugee protection in) status determination (RSD), 35, 38, 43–44, 81 stereotypes, 4, 9, 16, 50, 60, 105, 159, 166, 169–70 refugeeness, 9 remote management, 17, 150 representation, 105, 113–114, 124, 137, 169, 177n1 resettlement (third country), 4, 40, 42–23 appeals, 147, 156 and communication, 43–46, 49–70, 149, 151–52, 154, 157–59

as instrument of humanitarian governance, 43, 46, 69–75, 77, 86–87 and rights claims, 72–73, 75, 140, 151 selection criteria, 50, 56, 69n3, 107, 148 separate programmes, aside of UNHCR, 64–66. See also US: resettlement programme residency. See ı¯qa¯mh ‘resiliency humanitarianism’, 81, 89, 135, 137 rights, 2–3, 5, 40 claims, 71–77, 140, 151 restricted access to, 7–9, 25–26, 35, 40, 46, 58, 60, 76, 79, 86, 101, 117, 120, 126, 128, 135–37, 153, 170 violations of, 73 rights-based approaches, 40, 123, 145, 153, 159 Rohingya Response, 131 rumours, 32, 50, 58, 66 Sabean(-Mandean), 64, 91, 110 scarcity, 49–50, 57, 62, 65, 68, 130, 135–36, 159, 168 securitisation, 18, 125, 127, 135, 165 self-reliance (a neoliberal focus on), 89, 106–7, 125, 128, 134–36, 165 sense-making, 25, 62, 66, 69–70 situated knowledge, 21–22, 145, 172, 174 ‘social death’, 79 solutions. See durable solutions; technological: solutions Somali refugees and migrants, 59, 90, 106, 145, 158 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), 42, 53, 63, 72, 151, 163n18. See also US resettlement programme spectatorship, 2, 112, 169, 177 ‘stuckedness’, 64, 69, 76–77, 167. See also Hage, Ghassan Sudanese refugees and migrants, 67, 72–73, 82n2, 85, 145, 152, 159 ‘surrogate state’, 8, 25, 35, 52, 58, 87, 123, 166

Index  |  215

surveillance, 14, 18, 36, 57–58, 61, 87, 124 Syria, war in, 28 Syrian Refugee Response, 29, 38–39, 54, 67, 97, 124, 158 tactics, 25, 69, 71–82, 91–93 ‘talking spaces’, 62, 96 technocolonialism, 17, 76, 127. See also Madianou, Mirca technological fetishisation, 15, 176 optimism, 4, 18–19, 26, 28, 89, 126–29, 137–38, 142–43, 165, 172, 177n2 solutions, 16, 123–25, 130, 136, 157 temporariness, 3, 33, 91, 126, 147 thinking care, 176–77 third country resettlement. See resettlement time (experience of), 6, 29. See waiting transnational connections, 2, 3, 6, 10, 13, 31, 57, 62–63, 87, 104, 106, 167 transnationalism-from-below, 104 transit, 5, 31 uncertainty prolonged legal, 1, 24, 121, 49–50, 57, 77 UNHCR, 2, 4 2009 Urban Refugee Policy, 35 2015 Data Protection Policy, 128–129 2016 report Connecting Refugees, 16, 124 and accountability, 141–42, 160 and biometric data registration, 17, 38, 86, 123, 128–30 as embodiment of the international community, 46, 52 and legitimacy, 72–73 mandate, 8, 74, 141, 170 and refugee status determination (RSD), 43–44, 81 and solution scarcity, 51, 56, 73 UNHCR Jordan, 7–8, 31, 35–40, 72–73. See also ‘surrogate state’ communication by and with, 7, 139–63

‘counselling’, 147, 152 differentiation based upon nationality, 157–58 Facebook page, 63, 146, 154–55 geographical location, 7, 146–48 helpline service, 148–51 home visits, 148 and innovation, 130–38 limited capacities of, 88, 147, 157 as locus of power, 52, 77, 146–48 material space, 146–48 and procedures regarding resettlement, 41, 66–69, 87, 107, 117, 147–48, 151–54, 157 and refugee status determination (RSD), 64, 66–69 registration, 9, 32, 36–38, 40–41, 63, 146–47 service guide, 146, 158 Unites States (US). See also 2003 US-led invasion resettlement programme, 25, 42, 44–45, 53, 91, 117, 151 United States of America (USA) and the global media landscape, 1, 2, 7, 46, 101, 117–120, 169, 171, 177n1 as preferred location for onward travel, 117–20 UNRWA, 4 urbanisation of forced displacement patterns, 3, 33–40 voice, 5, 14, 22, 49, 60, 75, 138, 140, 143, 145, 156, 175–76 Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) application, 21, 98, 108 volunteering, 88, 92, 103, 152, 175 vulnerability, 9, 37, 55–56, 65–69, 75, 148, 159 indicators, 162, 163n Assessment Framework (VAF)124, 127, 159–60 waiting. See also mediation of waiting as affective phenomenon, 104

216

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agency in, 6, 59, 68–69, 167 and the experience of time, 6, 29, 104, 167 gendered experiences, 60–62 life in, 3, 5, 28–48 and optimism, 41, 46, 50 and power, 4–6, 52–54, 57, 60, 74, 77, 146–47

for resettlement, 2, 40–46, 49–62, 66–69, 79, 154 years of, 4, 27n2, 166–67 Yemeni refugees and migrants, 67, 112, 145, 152, 158–59 Zain (telecommunication provider), 87, 135, 148