In her sweeping new book, Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent, Jillian Schwedler highlights the centrality of protest to the perpetual cycle of making and unmaking state power in Jordan. Taking geography, time, and space as the key nodes by which protest and power have historically unfolded in relation to each other, Schwedler demonstrates how dissent has never been an anomaly in a country that has and continues to be mostly seen and related to as an “oasis of stability” in a turbulent region of the world. As she painstakingly reveals through an analysis of the temporal and spatial dimensions of demonstrations, dissenting voices, and rebellion against the status quo, protest is historically constitutive of the country’s very social fabric, its built urban environment, the global and regional security network it is linked with, and its political imaginaries. By extension, this constitutive element, so bound up with geographies of local, regional, and global entanglements, affects the way the regime fashions its own identity and its strategies of coercion in response to the opposition it faces.
Traversing multiple periods in the modern history of Jordan, Schwedler unravels how “the Ottoman, British and Hashemite efforts to impose authority were not met with sporadic rebellions, repression and accommodation but with sustained resistance and proactive efforts to shape those imperial and colonial projects” (p. 23; my emphasis). This approach emphasizes the Jordanian people’s sustained efforts to participate in determining the fate of their country, despite also being concerned with how the regime survived disruptions, thereby challenging views of a society often framed as having been co-opted by regime politics in a top-down project of nation-building. Schwedler takes the people—the youth, the workers, the activists, and the intellectuals who speak out—rather than just the state as central to the political in Jordan. Her approach is in line with a growing body of works on the politics of the Middle East emerging after the outbreak of the Arab uprisings in late 2010.
One of Schwedler’s two novel contributions is her proposition that the tribal constituencies that supposedly form the regime’s core in Jordan are neither static nor unified. Rather they are driven largely by regional and domestic security, military, tribal, agricultural, and regional and international foreign trade and investment dynamics that intertwine with the built environment and its affective manifestations. As she rightfully observes about the years since the eruption of the Arab Spring, an increasing number of East Bank Jordanians “have dared to cross that ‘red line’” and brazenly criticize the king (p. 2). These dynamics, as she demonstrates through rich ethnographic material, an interpretive methodology, and archival research, are experienced by protesters and manipulated by the regime in multiple ways during tense political moments. Schwedler asks, “How did the regime’s supposed support base become the source of its loudest and harshest critics?” (p. 4). To answer this question Schwedler embarks on a study that ties political protest to the politics of urban space in a dialectical relationship that makes them constitutive of one another, which is her other equally novel contribution.
In chapter 1, Schwedler discusses the myriad ways of understanding protest in Jordan, which she posits as “dissent externalized even if done without hope of affecting change.” She continues, “Perpetrators need not be part of an organization or movement. Demonstrations, riots, marches, strikes, and sit-ins are all familiar forms of protest. Passivity can likewise be a form of protest, as can boycotting or not showing up” (p. 6). In subsequent chapters the author “zooms” in and out of multiple geographical locales and historical periods to make her argument. Together these chapters illustrate that, by focusing on the results of a demonstration or its repercussions, we may be missing a very important dimension of how politics happens or, rather, how, where, and why change eventually comes, when and if it does. This proposition counters the common understanding that the Arab uprisings were a failure because they ended not with regime change but with replacement of one authoritarian system by another.
In chapter 2, “Transforming Transjordan,” Schwedler uses what she refers to throughout the text as “spatial imaginaries” to bring into view various political subjects in the Transjordanian territory before and during the British-led Hashemite colonial project. In the process the chapter moves from the boundaries of modern-day Jordan to show how politics today is directly influenced, if not shaped, by protesting voices and their spatial manifestations in the past. In chapter 3, “Becoming Amman: From Periphery to Center,” the focus is on how the historically small town of Amman became the capital of Transjordan and subsequently Jordan. During that period, protests were shaped by and responsive to both the topography of the land and the colonial spatial imaginaries that translated into the planned and ordered capital that the colonial project of the British and the Hashemites envisioned. The city and the forms of protest subsequently grew in parallel with the British-Hashemite plan to shape a public space responsive to infrastructure, trade, and security that they could control: “by the 1930s then the rebellions of the early 20th century had given way to street demonstrations as a means of claim-making toward the regime” (p. 73). In the period of rising Arab nationalism and Nasserism between the 1950s and 1970s, a relatively planned and ordered capital that became easier to control came into being.
In chapter 4, Schwedler explores the technique of spatial and rhetorical repression by the regime in the aftermath of the 1970–71 violence of Black September. Before transitioning to Jordan’s arguably authoritarian form of neoliberalism and the “democratization” reforms that began with the Habbit Nisan riots of 1989, Schwedler meticulously describes the shaky grounds on which the regime responded to the Palestinian armed insurrection of 1970. The project of “Jordanization” that the regime embarked on “elided critical distinctions between terms conventionally taken for granted in some of the scholarly literature on Jordan, such as ‘East Bank’, ‘tribe,’ and ‘Bedouin’” to describe traditional regime supporters (p. 98). This elision became significant with the neoliberal reforms first introduced by King Hussein in the late 1980s in response to the government’s lifting of subsidies on basic goods. The grievances driving the revolt cut across class, tribal, clan, geographic, and ethnic lines, and “much of the worst violence took place between East Bank protesters and East Bank-staffed security forces” (p. 110).
Chapter 5, “An Ethnography of Place and the Politics of Routine Protest,” is an immersive ethnographic exploration of routine protests occurring in the built environment around the Kalouti Mosque located in affluent West Amman. It conceptually frames the mosque as a site of study of state-sanctioned protesting against the peace treaty signed with Israel precisely when no protests are going on. This framing probes us to think about how Jordanians, like scholars, often take for granted the mise-en-scène of protest signs and voices that routinely disrupt the capital’s urban landscape: people often indifferently work around the inconvenience of security vehicles and cordoned-off areas where small businesses are located. This reveals how the appearance of criticism of Israel’s illegal occupation works to reinforce state power even as it seems to disrupt it.
The tone of the book becomes more urgent in chapters 6–9. These evocatively written chapters reflect the intensity of the harsh repressive techniques aimed at silencing the mushrooming labor protests and tribal violence in the country today. Schwedler shows that several years before the Arab uprisings began, dissenting voices in Jordan were already agitating against the brutal effects of endemic corruption that were compounded by the regime’s neoliberal economic policies. Focusing on a new generation of protestors who could be seen and heard in new spaces in the early 2010s, including virtual spaces, the chapters detail the significant spatial and temporal innovations that activists resorted to in response to the increasing militarization and securitization of public and private space. The opening up of the country to regional and international real estate investments and security cooperation under King Abdullah II reduced the visibility of long-established sites of protest by creating material obstacles to protests in the built environment. Schwedler depicts a crescendo of dissenting, disenfranchised voices in virtual and physical sites that are being squeezed by a regime that wants to appear open to dialogue yet believes it needs to maintain a semblance of stability to enable the capital flows from US and Gulf security arrangements that it needs to survive.
One voice that is arguably invisible in the text is that of women. We know that women do engage in protest, but I found myself wondering what form this protest takes. Specifically, how do women engage in resistance to challenge the conventional narratives of state-making in Jordan, which are largely male dominated, and when and where do they most feature in protests? Women’s protests in Jordan on issues such as the nationality law, which prevents them from passing down citizenship to their children if they are married to a foreign man, and against femicide, honor crimes, and other forms of violence against women are used and manipulated by the regime as bargaining chips with conservative forces in the country in a glaringly visible pattern. Although women do not dot the urban landscape of the city in the way some of the protests that Schwedler focuses on do, sit-ins by feminist activists in front of courthouses and other government buildings are increasingly common. As Nicola Pratt (Embodying Geopolitics Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, 2020) argues, women were also present in the making of the state during the Mandate period, during the turmoil of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, and especially in the aftermath of 1989 with the lifting of martial law.
How did women’s issues and women themselves feature in Schwedler’s fieldwork? Granted, Schwedler’s focus is protest in the context of the built environment, and women outside the capital are not visible in the way they may be in the capital, even today. But how does that fact affect the outcome of the research? If protests are a means of entering into dialogue with the state in Jordan and women are not featured in many of the public protests, how are we to understand their relationship to the state in the context of contentious politics? I wonder how we may apply a feminist methodology to understand protest politics in urban sites where it is men who are mostly visible. Is the virtual space, which she engages, a more emancipatory one in that sense? How do we use the gender variable to understand the lived experience of activists so that we do justice to the complexities of social life in contexts where women (or other marginalized groups) have not appeared en masse in routine protests? Finally, what about Schwedler’s own positionality as a woman researcher in a male-dominated site of research? After all, Schwedler provides a wonderfully novel, dialectical, bottom-up, and interdisciplinary way of reading a history of Hashemite state-making that has largely been written by men. How then did her positionality affect her research results, if at all?
