Preserving order: narrating resilience as threat in Jordan’s Azraq refugee camp

Abstract

ABSTRACT Built in 2014, Azraq is narrated as the ‘new and improved’ refugee camp in the humanitarian world while at the same time containing 40,000 Syrians in a high-security desert environment. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Azraq, Jordan, this article understands Azraq’s camp governance as bringing to light a Jordanian care-control politics operated through national aid workers, whose daily actions perpetuate a conflation of humanitarianism and security. This case study analyses Azraq’s politics of time to illuminate that humanitarian language of vulnerability in the camp reflects not only need but also control. National aid workers perceive the newest refugees to the camp (Village 5) to be the most vulnerable and least threatening to the camp’s order, a discursive relationship that has justified mechanisms of control carried out in the name of care. This article argues that local humanitarian assessments of vulnerability in Azraq create a system that preserves vulnerability, which is defined here as a refugee’s dependence on aid to survive, and prevents resilience, or a refugee’s ability to achieve self-sustenance. It confronts humanitarian narratives that drive Jordan’s securitized response by portraying time and refugee-led development as instigating disorder and chaos.