Doctoral Dissertation Research: Maintaining Sovereignty in Refugee Receiving States

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will address how refugee-receiving states maintain their sovereignty despite the challenges of porous national borders and dependence on international institutions like the United Nations. The study investigates refugee hosting in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which is a small Middle Eastern country with 2.7 million refugees in a total population of 9 million people. The challenges of providing shelter, education, health care, and protection to refugees are made difficult because Jordanian citizens face high unemployment and strained social institutions including overcrowded hospitals and underperforming schools. Refugees and citizens alike are affected by growing national security concerns and the threat of terrorism along the Jordanian-Syrian border. While the study of Western sovereignty is foundational to political sociology and the sociology of international immigration, the literature neglects the sovereignty of developing states that host most of the world's refugees. However, Jordanian sovereignty is indispensable to refugee protection, regional stability, and the global flow of refugees. This project will enhance understanding of developing countries that bear the refugee burden for the rest of the world, exploring how such countries cultivate and maintain their capacity to host large refugee populations while preserving final authority over internal and external affairs of the state. A scholarly focus on the sovereignty-refugee nexus allows for an assessment of the effects that displacement has on refugees and citizens. The project will yield empirically informed insights into interventions that take into consideration the rights of refugees and citizens, the interest of the Jordanian state and Western donor states, and the challenges of aid providing institutions like the United Nations. As an important ally in the region and top recipient of US foreign aid, Jordan?s sovereignty - and the state's capacity to host refugees - is critical to American interests. How is sovereignty enacted on the ground through interactions among everyday people? Through ethnography and in-depth semi-structured interviews (conducted in Arabic and English), this research incorporates responses from 175 participants, including Syrian refugees, Jordanian citizens, and UN and government officials. This allows the researcher to theorize about how sovereignty is not only a top-down, state-imposed project, but one that is also shaped by the agentic behaviors of citizens and refugees. For example, the social construction of sovereignty from the ground-up includes the ways that border guards practice discretion when deciding who can enter and exit a refugee camp. The analysis of Jordanian sovereignty is situated within a system of sovereign states. The practice of Jordanian sovereignty is necessarily couched within disparities that are foundational to the international refugee regime that distinguishes the Global North from the Global South.