Threatening Refugees: Refugee Rentierism and Arms Deals in Jordan, 1967–77

• In Event: Political Crises and International Migration

Abstract

The large waves of Syrian refugees fleeing violence since 2012 have directed scholarly attention to the rents that neighboring states can extract from donors in exchange for receiving and “hosting” refugees (Tsourapas 2019). However, refugee rentierism is not solely a recent phenomenon, nor has it only been linked to keeping refugees out of Europe. Jordan, for example, has long leveraged its large Palestinian refugee population to extract aid from British, American, Arab Gulf, and Libyan governments in exchange for containing and controlling these refugees in Jordan. Despite this history of refugee rentierism, less scholarly attention has been devoted to its historical variations. How have refugee host states secured and maintained refugee-related rents?

This paper addresses these questions by analyzing Jordan’s refugee rentierism from 1967–1977 by using archival files on Jordan’s internal politics from the U.S. and British National Archives. These files, which amount to thousands of documents and hundreds of folders, provide historical context and details regarding Jordan’s past refugee diplomacy in the absence of accessible Jordanian national archives covering political topics. The paper starts with a discussion of data collection and case selection, before moving onto the argument and its implications. Overall, I find that Jordan secured and maintained refugee-related rents by linking refugees to major security threats, thereby connecting refugee and military assistance. In addition, donors supplying such military assistance can help propagate refugee-related arms deals because of their commercial benefits. This “security-refugee nexus” highlights links between foreign aid, arms purchases, and refugee-hosting that can enable refugee rentierism to endure and expand.

Author

• Lillian Frost, Virginia Tech