Description
Located one kilometre from the purpose-built gates of Jordan’s largest refugee camp, Zaatari Village has adapted to become a hosting community, reactivating pre-war religious, familial and tribal networks that bridge the gap between local and migrant. The village, which has doubled in population since 2012, has been moulded, and spaces created, by the people interacting in its streets, shops, schools and community centres.
Despite these changes, the village represents a forgotten space on the periphery of aid. This paper addresses the role of refugee governance in processes of social cohesion and refuge making through a spatial lens. Incorporating paradigms of grassroots and humanitarian governance draws out the entanglements between how space is made and used in policy, and how space is constituted through the lived experiences of displacement. Space, therefore, is not neutral, but reflects relationships and patterns which penetrate the physical landscape.
This paper is based on data collected via online interviews and policy document analysis. It seeks to understand the social processes and communicative strategies between migrants, local populations and agents of governance to investigate how such iterations co-create, maintain or shape the space in the village, creating a site of refuge balanced between humanitarian imaginaries of community needs, and the realities of spatial management, as lived by inhabitants.
By centralising the village as a space of refuge adapted to the context of conflict-induced displacement, this rural village is conceptualised as an ordinary space, living in an extraordinary context, where people live the textures of the most banal everyday experiences which build a life. The sociospatial complexities that take shape, therefore, begin to fracture the confines of ‘blueprint’ refugee governance.
