Considering ‘Refugeeness’ in Jordanian Policy: Priorities, Ambiguities and Hierarchies

Emily Joel is a graduate in Sociology and Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, with a research focus on forced displacement. She is also a keen advocate for improving opportunities available to refugee and asylum seeking communities. Emily recently worked with CENDEP after securing a student placement wherein she contributed to the ‘Competing Priorities’ project, centred on coherence and competition within migration, education and employment policies in Jordan. Emily writes:

Analysing a country's migration policies is instrumental to understanding the nation's wider approach to forced displacement. In the Jordanian context, what is equally as significant is what - and who - is missing from policy discourse. 

Today, Jordan hosts the second highest number of refugees per capita in the world (UNHCR, 2021a). This includes approximately 2 million UNWRA-registered Palestinians and a government estimate of over 1.4 million Syrians (approximately 670,000 being UNHCR-registered) (UNHCR, 2021b). Jordan is also host to over 89,000 refugees and asylum-seekers from more than 52 other countries, including over 67,000 Iraqis (UNHCR, 2021c), 14,000 Yemenis, 6,000 Sudanese and 700 Somalis (UNHCR, 2021d).

Having a long history of accommodating forced migrants, Jordan is widely recognised as a welcoming host-state to refugees. However, this stereotype is significantly problematised by Jordan’s case-by-case approach to refugee-hosting. In this approach, policy absences, ambiguities – and indeed, comprehensiveness – act as strategic socioeconomic tools, where levels of policy attention are determined by the perceived costs and benefits of prioritising specific needs and communities. In the contemporary context, this has birthed a discourse of migration and employment policies which cohere in prioritising Syrian refugees, whilst excluding other refugee groups.

Workshop: Navigating from education to employment in crisis and uncertainty

Zoe Jordan writes:

Young people’s position in the labour market is increasingly precarious and uncertainty is an ever-present dimension for young people living in protracted displacement and other crisis settings. Over the last decade, much progress has been made in developing frameworks to provide education in crisis. However, there is currently limited research examining the relationship between education and employment prospects in such contexts.

As part of the ESRC/GCRF and IDRC funded research programme “From education to employment. Trajectories for young people in Lebanon and Jordan in the context of protracted displacement”, CENDEP, in collaboration with the Centre for Lebanese Studies (CLS), is hosting an international workshop responding to the need for greater insight into young people’s trajectories from education to employment in crisis settings from 28 – 29 April 2020. Preliminary findings from the research programme will be presented, and we invite researchers and policy makers working in other contexts of uncertainty to join us to share insights, analytical approaches, and empirical realities.

We will be questioning education and employment strategies among young people and their families in the context of crisis; intersectionality and its workings in young people’s trajectories, focusing particularly on legal status, gender, disability, class and other social positions; the relevance of education for employment in the context of protracted displacement; and how young people are categorized and conceptualised, and its implications for policy and practice.

Paper presentations (15 – 20 minutes) and interventions for a roundtable discussion (5 minutes) are invited. Please send short abstracts (up to 200 words) indicating which format you would like to present, to Zoe Jordan (zjordan@brookes.ac.uk) by 17 March 2020.

To find out more: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/events/navigating-from-education-to-employment-in-crisis-and-uncertainty/

Displaced in cities: who are the hosts?

Zoe Jordan writes:

The recent ICRC report, Displaced in Cities, shines a much-needed light on experiences of hosting IDPs in urban centres. This is an increasing area of focus for humanitarian action, but understanding of this phenomenon is sorely lacking. While humanitarian agencies are increasingly considering hosting at the national, regional and city scale, there remains a significant gap in understanding and working with host families—those individuals who share their accommodation and resources with displaced people.

Hosting practices are more diverse than currently portrayed, forging relationships between unrelated individuals and offering protection, belonging and identity, as well as meeting basic needs. To provide better humanitarian support we need to question underlying assumptions about host families and to identify ways to better engage with this vital support system.

Taking the Displaced in Cities report as my starting point, I offer my own reflections on hosting practices for displaced populations. In doing so, I draw on my PhD research around refugee hosting practices in the protracted urban context of Amman, Jordan and experience working with hosts and IDPs in DRC.

Host families in urban environments

ICRC’s report is a valuable contribution, drawing attention to the little understood issue of IDPs in urban areas. In putting people’s own experiences and understandings at the forefront of the report and questioning existing humanitarian approaches and assumptions, it makes a call for humanitarian actors to reconceptualise their work with displaced populations in urban environments.

The recognition of the importance of host families within the report is a welcome inclusion. Though humanitarian agencies are demonstrably aware of the importance of these support networks, I’ve found there is little detailed information available on host families. Where reports and studies mention host families, this is often merely one line, or at best a paragraph. With so little in-depth information available, it’s difficult to put figures on the number of people living in such arrangements. The available evidence suggests hosting practices are widespread and large-scale. In Jordan, CARE found that 23% of Syrian refugee households were sharing accommodation with non-family members in 2017.  I believe rates to be higher among other refugee populations in Amman, who have less access to assistance and do not have access to camps. In DRC, OCHA estimates that 96% of the 16,000 people internally displaced in December 2017 were living with host families.

In the opening pages of the Displaced in Cities report, the authors rightly note that there has, as yet, been little focus on the experiences of IDPs in urban environments. They also point out that IDPs in different cities will face their own political, economic, social and legal constraints, in ways that differentiate their experiences from those of refugees and non-displaced city residents. To me, this gap in the analysis also applies to hosting arrangements for both refugee and IDP populations living in cities.

One of the key recommendations outlined in the report is the need for responses to be built upon reliable data and analysis, rather than generalisations and assumptions. In my experience, despite frequent references to host communities and host families there is little insight into who hosts are, what the experience of hosting and being hosted is like, and how humanitarian agencies influence these relationships.

Are people better off being hosted?

I find that it is often assumed that displaced populations living in cities are better off than those in camps. In addition to increased economic opportunity and freedom of movement, the possibility of living with a host family is often cited as an explanation of why cities can be a better option. While hosting can present many benefits and is largely seen as a positive coping mechanism, it is also often the only option for those who do not have access to camps. With high rental costs, many urban refugees and IDPs have little choice but to live with others.

Hosting can provide shelter, access to food, water and sanitation facilities, connections to work, safety and protection, and psychosocial support and advice. My research suggests it can also contribute to a sense of belonging, by maintaining or restoring someone’s identity and sense of connection to their culture, history and place of origin, and to beginning a process of integration in their place of displacement. Hosting can also present a danger—overcrowding, poor living conditions, ill-health, stress and a lack of privacy, exploitation and abuse. With so much at stake, I think it’s essential that humanitarian actors better understand how hosting works and the impact their policies can have.

Who are the hosts?

The hosting relationship is often seen in terms of securing access to resources to meet basic needs and described as a burden on hosts or exploitative of guests. It is also assumed to take place between family/kin, and between citizen-hosts and displaced-guests. To me, this misunderstands the basis of many hosting relationships and the decision-making processes and expectations involved. Thus, it misunderstands which factors may influence the experience of being hosted and the ‘terms of agreement’. It avoids engaging in the complex societal and personal relations and norms around hosting. Furthermore, it fails to recognise the huge role hosting relationships play in the lives of displaced persons and hosts, beyond the provision of shelter and basic assistance.

While in many cases displaced people are hosted by family, or draw on pre-existing relations to find a host, this is by no means universal. In Jordan, I found that hosting arrangements between non-family members is common, especially in non-Syrian and non-Iraqi refugee populations, and particularly among young men. In many cases, single people join together to share accommodation, or un-related families form a new household. Importantly, these relationships aren’t just about sharing rental costs but are a vital safety net in a context of uncertain informal employment and low levels of humanitarian assistance.

Unlike the increasingly-popular refugee hosting programmes in Europe, in many places in the global South host families are not organised by an NGO or another organisation. Rather, they are formed by the people involved, sometimes with the support of their church or mosque, a community leader, or a community group.

In all of the hosting arrangements that I encountered in Amman, refugees were not being hosted by Jordanians, but rather by other refugees, normally of the same nationality. While Syrian and Iraqi refugees were often hosted by family relations, normally those who had arrived in Jordan a few years or months earlier, Sudanese and Somali refugees rarely had these options, and usually arrived in Jordan without knowing anyone. Instead, they created hosting relations based on ideas of sharing and solidarity (for a brief discussion of the motivations to host, please visit the CENDEP blog).

What is the role of humanitarian actors?

Humanitarian actors have a great influence over hosting arrangements. Most obviously, in situations where humanitarian agencies have the capacity to distribute cash grants and offer rental support, this assistance plays a major role in influencing people’s housing decisions and their experience of hosting. For example, Waseem, a young man with a serious injury that prevented him from working was at risk of having to leave his hosting arrangement because he could not contribute to the rent costs. Recognising this, Waseem did all the cooking and cleaning at home as his contribution towards the household. Though most of the nine men he shared with were happy with this arrangement, several of them weren’t, creating tensions and arguments at home. Waseem told us that once he started receiving monthly cash assistance, the situation at home stabilised and he no longer felt under threat.

Some NGOs have run pilot projects working with landlords to offer secure space to refugees in return for home improvements. Interventions aimed at improving tenure security are welcome, with the recognition that many hosting arrangements are informal and that for many their flexibility is desirable, though risky.

Other impacts of humanitarian assistance are subtler. For example, many of the men I worked with in my research met each other during activities run by NGO community centres—English classes, football matches and dance showcases. In places where public space is limited or inaccessible (either due to cost barriers or fears of harassment), community centres become vital spaces to develop relationships. Similarly, workplaces become crucial sites for solidifying existing relationships. Though NGOs may have limited influence in these sites, a recognition that work is providing more than an income is important

Recommendations

As recommended in the Displaced in Cities report, we need further and better analysis of the situations of host families in order to capture the impact of displacement on them and to understand how they support displaced persons. Doing so would provide us with greater insight into how humanitarian action already influences such practices and what we as humanitarian actors can do better. This would allow us to support positive aspects of hosting while minimising the risks and protection concerns of everyone involved in the hosting relationship.

By placing people at the centre of response and focusing on dignity and resilience, we can enhance and promote existing support mechanisms—such as hosting—and prioritise the choices and preferences of people affected by displacement. In this regard, the 2016 localisation agenda emerging from the World Humanitarian Summit is a positive development. Beyond just looking at increasing and improving equal partnership with local organisations, we need to maintain this energy to look at what people are doing for themselves. In particular, we need to look at the ways that refugees are helping other refugees, acknowledging that the main source of assistance is frequently not citizens of the host country nor governments or humanitarian actors, but rather other migrants, displaced populations and refugees.

Humanitarian actors are still learning how to work in urban environments. In doing so, we need to make sure that we’re taking a step back and looking at the whole urban environment, rather than working in sectoral silos or focusing on humanitarian action to the detriment of medium and long-term development. As part of that, we need to pay more attention to which spaces and services are accessible to refugees. We should see how refugees are creating, using, and perhaps changing them in ways we have not considered. This includes looking beyond the places we’re used to working in—NGO offices, community centres, and schools—and focusing also on workplaces, public places, and homes (with appropriate privacy and safeguarding protections).

Host families play a critical role throughout displacement. They are not only the first responders, but also a vital connection to the urban environment, sharing resources, knowledge and experiences. As summed up by S, a young Sudanese man living in Amman, ‘if someone comes, maybe I can allow him to live at my house. I’ll welcome him. Why would I not help him, of course I’m going to help him…It doesn’t depend on my situation, it just depends on my humanity. I am a human being, like him. He is Sudanese, and I know this country. It is difficult here.’

This is cross-posted from the blog of the International Committee of the Red Cross 

For further reading

• ICRC Report – Displaced in Cities: Experiencing and responding to urban internal displacement outside camps, 2018
• Blog post – Internal displacement: Some reflections on cracking the urban challenge, Catherine Lune-Grayson, 23 September 2018

Work in Progress this week: refugee hosting in Amman

Zoe Jordan writes:

Since 2015, Europeans have become more familiar with programmes that ask city residents to offer a spare room to asylum-seekers and refugees. Yet refugee hosting exists beyond the borders of Europe. In countries around the world, sharing accommodation with IDPs and refugees is a widespread and longstanding practice, offering vital support to thousands of people displaced by conflict and disaster. As humanitarian action moves increasingly into urban areas, we need to better understand how such community support mechanisms work and the impact of external actions on them, including the unintended consequences of humanitarian policies.  

In such contexts refugee hosting is rarely mediated by an NGO or other external facilitator. Rather, the people involved create these relationships, often independently or perhaps with some support from an organisation or institution already present in their lives – a religious organisation, a community leader, or a local group. In many cases, displaced people may live with extended family members, but this is by no means universal.  

My talk is based on research with young, single, Sudanese men living in urban Amman, Jordan. These men arrived without pre-existing connections, to an environment that is largely hostile towards them, where they receive little to no humanitarian support. Under such conditions, learning to negotiate the urban environment and forge their own support networks is essential. In this talk, I will explore how and where they make connections with their hosts, why they decide to live together, and how they experience living in a hosting arrangement. 

Time: Thursday 15th November at 16.30

Place: Abercrombie building 3rd floor, white space/student hub (Oxford Brookes University)

Please find details of the entire Work in Progress seminar series here.

Why host refugees?

Zoe Jordan writes:

Many refugees around the world do not live in refugee camps, but in towns and cities, alongside citizens and residents of the host nation, and other migrants and refugees. In urban neighbourhoods across the globe, refugees are hosted by others. They are invited to share a house and resources with another family – who may be from the host country, or may also be refugees.

Refugees who are hosted gain access to shelter, most obviously, but may also be able to share other resources – sharing food, using electricity and water supplies, support in the costs of education for their children, and any healthcare costs. Hosting relationships can also provide access to less tangible resources – connections to jobs and social groups, important emotional and psychosocial support, and can help refugees to define their identity within a new community. This might all sound quite nice, but there are concerns about exploitation within the hosting relationship – for example enforced labour and child labour, physical and verbal violence, particularly towards women, overcrowding, poor hygiene, and unequal treatment of different households involved, with effects on the 'inferior' family's well-being. The arrangements underpinning these relationships change over time, based on the length of time spent living together, participants' expectations of themselves and others, and in response to external influences – for example, legal status, wider community acceptance or discrimination, humanitarian assistance, and the perceived welfare of refugees and host nationals. For those refugees who are hosted, it’s not just an economic or material calculation, but is also quite closely bound with how people see themselves and others, how they relate to those around them, and their expectations and plans for their lives while displaced.

Less commonly considered is the perspective of the hosts. Why do individuals and their families decide to share space and resources with refugees?

As Ibrahim (not his real name) told me:

“I live with one friend and my brothers. I met my friend here in Jordan. Before he came, I was living with my brothers, and we had five or six others with us. But they were all deported – I am a survivor with my brothers too…So we are just 3, and then I found my friend, he is alone. So I was sure with him, I said “You have to come with us. First, because you live alone, and second your home is unallowable or unacceptable to us because you are a member of our community.” “Yes”, he told us “ok no problem” and he came...When I met him, the first thing for me is that all the Sudanese here are from Darfur, and the second thing is about our environment, or community - with Sudanese, the first time I see you, I will know if you are from Sudan or not, and if you are from Sudan of course it is my pleasure to try to know you…Another reason to live together, a good strong reason, is because I can defend them and they can defend me.

Currently, there are three dominant images of host relationships. Firstly, that the majority of hosting takes place between extended family members, secondly that refugees are an economic burden on the host family, and finally that refugees are exploited by hosts. While all of these are undoubtedly true for certain people at certain times, they do not account for the whole picture. Instead, as Ibrahim’s account shows, we also need to consider social motivations, including solidarity, compassion, and obligation. This isn't to do away with the recognition of personal gain from participating – either as a host or refugee – in the relationship, but to recognise that the social motivations for hosting are perhaps as important as the economic ones, and we need to better understand how these different interests intersect.

Current understanding of hosting fails to explain why both hosts and hosted refugees choose to engage in hosting relationships, relying un-nuanced understandings of kinships relations and economic costs and benefits, rather than social explanations. Drawing on these additional concepts isn't to accept them unquestioningly – we need to make sure that we avoid romanticising them, recognise the power dynamics contained within them, and consider who they apply to and who they exclude, and how and when the different concepts feature more strongly in people's accounts of their actions.  We also need to consider how our understanding of these concepts may be challenged or expanded by thinking about their relevance in long-term displacement, urban environments, in relation to refugees, and in non-Western settings. We need to incorporate all of these explanations into our understanding of why people engage in hosting relationships, if we want to understand how community support mechanisms work and the impact of external actions, including the unintended consequences of humanitarian assistance.

Sudanese hosting practices in urban Jordan

Zoe Jordan writes from Amman, updating us on her PhD fieldwork:

After a long break over Christmas, I'm now back in Amman. I’ve got two months left in Jordan, and feel like my time here is rapidly running out!

As a first step in my fieldwork, I have been trying to identify the different forms of hosting – arrangements in which one or more different families live in the same space – that exist among refugee populations in urban Amman. As I’m seeking to identify the broad range of different arrangements that exist, I’ve focused on speaking to refugee households with different characteristics –  including nationality, age, gender, marital status, length of time in Jordan, living with a physical disability, and the number and age of children in the household – rather than seeking a representative sample.

With Dina - a Jordanian researcher - I spoke to 13 Sudanese and nine Somali refugee households in late October and early November 2017. So far, this has shown that within these two national groups hosting practices are extremely diverse. They are also a primary coping strategy, given limited humanitarian assistance and low awareness in the host community. The interviews also suggest that among the Sudanese refugee population, this form of refugee-refugee support has undergone substantial changes, and is increasingly difficult to maintain.

Sudanese and Somali refugees in Jordan are a small minority. Compared to 657,628 registered Syrian refugees, 79% of whom are living outside of camps, the 66,262 Iraqis, 4058 Sudanese refugees and 810 Somali refugees have been overshadowed. In December 2015, approximately 800 Sudanese people were deported, following a demonstration outside UNHCR. In the three years since, there has been an increased awareness of the presence of Sudanese and Somali refugees among humanitarian actors, and a number of reports published detailing their particular concerns and needs. Despite this, many NGO programs serve primarily Syrian and Jordanian populations. The wider Jordanian population has little awareness of the presence of these minority refugee groups in Amman, or understanding of their needs.

The frequency of racially-motivated verbal and physical harassment of Sudanese and Somali refugees is particularly concerning. Many refugees experience social isolation due to their status. For Sudanese and Somali refugees in Amman, this is further reinforced by their fear of harassment and, for some Somalis, limited Arabic language skills. Combined with the low awareness of the presence of Sudanese and Somali refugees, this fear has resulted in limited contact with the host community, and low levels of host community support. Some Sudanese - and fewer Somalis - spoke about the kindness they had been shown by Jordanians - being given household items, or a landlord reducing rent costs. This was outnumbered by the number of households who said they have few or no interactions with Jordanians, that they are charged an inflated rent despite poor living conditions, that they have been forced to leave their accommodation due to complaints from neighbours, or that they had been underpaid and exploited by employers, as they cannot legally work. Given the limited assistance available from both humanitarian agencies, and the isolation from other community members, Sudanese and Somali refugees in Amman rely heavily on the limited support available from other households of the same nationality.  

For many of the Sudanese refugee households I spoke to, the 2015 deportation marks a significant turning point in their circumstances. In addition to the devastating separation of family and friends, many Sudanese refugees report experiencing a general climate of fear in the weeks and months following the deportation, limiting their movement and ability to find (informal) work. An additional effect of the deportation seems to have been a weakening of the ability of Sudanese refugee community in Amman to offer support to other refugee households. Though many people I interviewed still spoke with pride of their desire and intention to help others, many described their primary form of support – both given and received – as moral, advice, and sharing any assistance opportunities they found, rather than material or financial support. Previously, there were ‘association’ houses, where single men collectively covered the rent and basic expenses. New arrivals would often be taken to such a house on arrival, and be able to join this community support mechanism while they established themselves. Now, these houses are much smaller - there is less demand as the number of new Sudanese arrivals has slowed, but previous residents also reported rent increases and eviction requests from neighbours after the deportation. Smaller groups of single men continue to live together, but the groups are often less stable, and are unable to

support members who cannot pay their way for longer than a couple of weeks. In general households have fewer resources available to lend or share with other households, and the human connections that brokered these supportive relationships have disappeared. The situation of Sudanese refugees may slowly be recovering - though this is debatable - as an increasing number of NGOs show greater engagement with the non-Syrian population in Jordan. Yet refugee households – particularly those led by single women – told me they avoid going to others for help. As one Sudanese woman told me: “I could have gone to another family - people would have helped me - but I have four children. It’s not easy to support us.”

In the coming month, I will be conducting similar interviews with Syrian refugees living in Amman. Syrian refugees differ from Sudanese and Somalis in several key ways, including greater awareness of their presence and needs, more opportunities for further study, and legal avenues to work. I am looking forward to seeing if and how Syrian hosting practices differ, and what they can add to my emerging understanding of this important community self-support mechanism.

Exploring refugee hosting in Jordan

After a long summer hiatus, the CENDEP blog is resuming with the new semester just a couple of weeks away. First, PhD student Zoe Jordan is embarking on her fieldwork in Jordan:

I’ve recently arrived in Jordan to begin fieldwork for my PhD research, looking at hosting practices for refugees in urban Amman, and how humanitarian assistance influences these relationships during situations of long-term displacement.

Jordan has received one of the highest numbers of refugees from the on-going Syrian conflict. According to UNHCR, Jordan is the second largest host of refugees per capita in the world. In addition to the Syrian refugee population, Jordan also hosts refugees from Palestine, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen, as well as smaller populations from many other countries. While refugees continue to arrive in Jordan many people are in long-term displacement situations, having been in Jordan for years. These features make Jordan an interesting context in which to understand the changing nature of relationships between refugees and their hosts as displacement becomes increasingly protracted. Given the strength of familial and tribal ties between Jordan and its Arab neighbours, it is also interesting to explore potential differences in hosting arrangements between refugees and hosts from different national groups.

While media attention and much of the humanitarian response remains focused on the large refugee camps of Zaatari and Azraq, up to ninety per cent of refugees live outside of camps. The situation for many families in Amman is critical – up to ninety-three percent of Syrian refugees outside of camps live in extreme poverty, and there is only limited assistance available for non-Syrian refugees. The presence of refugees in urban areas and the importance of their host families has been recognised by the Jordanian authorities and humanitarian actors. Important lessons on how to provide humanitarian assistance in urban settings are emerging from Jordan, and there is an increasing awareness of the vital role of hosts in supporting refugee families. Despite this recognition, there is little understanding of the personal relationships and household-level dynamics between refugees and their hosts.

Jordan is not a party to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, nor its 1967 Protocol. Many Jordanians are proud of their reputation for hospitality, and the influence of Arabic and Islamic traditions of hospitality are evident in day-to-day and policy discourse regarding refugees in Jordan. At the everyday level, this hospitality can be seen in the relations between refugees and their hosts. Host families may provide material, financial, or social and emotional support for refugees, and often continue this support well past the moment of crisis, facilitating refugees to integrate with the host community, and to become independent while in displacement. For many, “host family” conjures an image of a refugee family and a host family sharing a space, acting a household, who identify themselves to be in a hosting relationship. This understanding does not capture the full range of supportive relationships between hosts and refugees in Jordan, and does not respond to the shifting dynamics of refugee-host relations as displacement becomes protracted. A broader perspective on hosting practices allows us to consider the range of social relations which may be engaged in by refugees and hosts, and the potential for strategies to overlap.

Hosting relationships are not easily characterizable nor perceived in the same way by all participants. Existing research has focused on community level relations, but seems to be little in-depth research into the different types of relationship between hosts and refugees, nor the experience of being a hosted or of hosting a displaced family. Situating my research in Jordan allows me to understand how hosting practices are maintained and developed in contexts of protracted displacement, and provides an opportunity to explore local traditions and practices of humanitarian assistance and hospitality and their impact on refugee hosting practices.

In my first few weeks in Amman, I will be meeting with staff from international organisations and local NGOs, asking them to share their knowledge on the current state of humanitarian engagement with urban refugees and host families in situations of protracted displacement in Amman, and to provide their feedback on my research design. In the following months, I will continue working with humanitarian organisations and community centres to speak to refugees and hosts about their current living arrangements, their experiences of living in Amman, and their interaction with humanitarian actors. From this, I hope to be able to identify common patterns and experiences in different people’s hosting arrangements, as well as beginning to explore the differences between people’s experiences, and some of the reasons behind this.