Description
In his small office in the municipality, Mohammad takes a sip of coffee and sighs deeply, playing with a small tear in the leather of his armchair: ‘Syrian minds are in overdrive about if they should stay or go. And we, Jordanians, have no say. They will go, leaving their home and business, and no new projects or funds will come. We will be forgotten again’.
While literature in critical migration studies has provided rich insight on refugee arrival, host state commitments and the role of refugee-host communities in terms of integration or social cohesion, far less has been written about the socio-political, economic and cultural experiences of host communities who live side-by-side with refugees and the increasing uncertainty surrounding refugee return. Based on long term ethnography in a North Jordan village, this paper explores the emergence of ‘ghost towns’ along the Jordan-Syria border and what is being left behind or forgotten after protracted displacement. Bringing together literature on urban refugees (Sanyal 2017), post-crisis (Jordheim and Wigen 2018) and a ‘more-than-human’ account of the material objects (Squire 2014), the paper investigates the growing insecurity around the housing and labour market, neighbourhood dynamics and a lack of humanitarian investment; pitched by some Jordanians as a ‘re-crisis’. If the refugee uncovers the ‘untenable link between birth and territory…an order incapable of imagining any other form of belonging and legitimate ‘right to a place’’ (Minca et al. 2020: 751), the politics of re-crisis questions traditional notions of international order whereby refugee return becomes a source of unease.
