Description
Scholarship on refugee recognition has overwhelmingly focused on contexts in the Global North, in which state actors typically assess individualized claims to refugeehood. In states that host the vast majority of the world’s refugees, however, the politics of refugee recognition processes have rarely been the focus of academic attention. This paper explores the politics of refugee recognition in Jordan, a non-signatory state hosting the second highest number of refugees per capita in the world. It argues that governmental and humanitarian policies and practices, heavily shaped by national and racial hierarchies, intersect to create refugee recognition systems that fail to adequately recognise the protection threats people face. In particular, several nationalities of protection seekers – most notably Somalis, Sudanese and Yemenis – are now in practice unable to claim asylum. These nationalities have received much less humanitarian and scholarly attention than Syrian or Iraqi refugees, yet often face particularly challenging circumstances in Jordan. Furthermore, the paper tracks how evolving labour market interventions – focused exclusively on Syrian refugees – are in effect creating different categories of asylum seekers who variously can, or cannot, simultaneously work legally in Jordan. This paper is based on fieldwork and interviews – both online and in Jordan – undertaken as part of the EU-funded ASILE Project.
