Introduction
Hassan and Samir laughed until they cried, each falling to his side and wailing at the absurdity of it all. Hassan’s mother, Amal, interjected several times to emphasise to me how serious Hassan’s predicament was, but her sober tone was undercut by the continuous laughter in the background that eventually forced a smile from her too. Hassan recalled one fiasco after another: ‘The worst things in life are hilarious,’ he said. Hassan described the unique circumstances that led him – a Jordanian citizen – to sneak into and live among Syrian refugees in Za’atari camp. Citizenship secured Hassan’s right to work in Jordan, but his economic circumstances left Hassan unable to meet his basic needs and cover his mother’s medical expenses. Living among Syrian refugees, Hassan reasoned, would give him access to humanitarian assistance and free him from paying for rent in the city. Soon after moving to Za’atari camp, however, Hassan grew tired of the restrictions that Syrian refugees faced in their daily lives. While Hassan had greater access to resources in the camp, he could not exercise his citizenship rights, including the right to employment in a particular sector. Resolved to find a solution to this dilemma, Hassan applied to work as a security guard in Za’atari during the day, knowing that only Jordanian citizens would be eligible for this position. After dark, Hassan planned to reside in the camp as though he were a Syrian refugee. Despite his efforts, Hassan’s plans fell apart due to unforeseeable events. ‘Maybe she can get Brad Pitt to play you in the Hollywood remake of your story?’ Samir joked, looking to me to wield my American connections.
Hassan is the only Jordanian citizen I have met who lived in a Syrian refugee camp – his story is explained in greater detail below – but his predicament brings into stark relief how neatly bounded categories within refugee studies, such as refugees or hosts, can fail to capture people’s lived experiences. Such categories may further obscure population-level assessments when they are extended beyond individual experiences to describe communities. Inspired by Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s ‘refugee-hosts’ research agenda, in which she interrogates the manufactured boundary between refugees and the people who receive them, this article describes and examines unquestioned assumptions that inform the concept of ‘host’ and how it is used within refugee studies (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016a, 2016b, 2020). Who are recognised as hosts? What are the socio-political implications associated with identifying who the hosts are? Critically examining who counts as a host – and who counts the hosts – has important implications for the study of refugee reception; scholarship on incorporation, belonging and social mobility; research about national and global governance; and evaluations of humanitarian intervention and aid allocation. This critique is rooted in identifying distinctions between categories of practice applied by humanitarian organisations and policymakers as compared to categories of analysis that allow scholars and other knowledge producers to examine empirical realities that diverge from ascribed group characteristics (Arar and FitzGerald, 2023).
In this article, I introduce the concept of humanitarian fiction and apply it to an analysis of the ‘host’ category in refugee-receiving contexts. Humanitarian fiction is a phenomenon in which humanitarian interventions are made possible because certain false renditions of empirical reality are accepted as factual. This concept invites scholars to identify and analyse gaps between realities of refugee reception and incomplete/false descriptions of those realities that have been shaped by humanitarian actors, institutions and their partners. I argue that humanitarian fiction conceals multifaceted hosting practices and dynamic receiving populations that operate alongside aid-informed frameworks.1 The word fiction is not a nod to a literary genre, nor is it intended to impose a value judgement. Humanitarian fiction is derived from ‘legal fiction’, an established socio-legal concept used to describe fictitious renderings within law that are accepted despite their limited explanatory power and are employed within systems of governance to achieve specified goals. As Smith (2007: 1437) writes, ‘Scholars in every area of the law can identify examples of legal rules that are at least ostensibly based on false premises.’2 Within refugee studies, Hamlin (2021) critiques the refugee/migrant binary as a legal fiction. She describes how the refugee label, as defined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, strays from empirical reality and confers privileges onto refugees at the expense of migrants. Humanitarian fiction draws upon legal fiction by not only evaluating the productive use of fictitious renderings, but also recognising that such narrative constructions become useful within institutions that have established norms, practices and policies.
The findings presented in this article draw from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations with refugees, Jordanians and humanitarian and government officials in Jordan during 16 months of observations over a four-year period from July 2014 to July 2018. While the empirical analysis is rooted in the Jordanian case, the observations are applicable throughout Southern states that have received the majority of UN-recognised refugees and partner with humanitarian organisations to address their needs.
The Vocabulary of Displacement
Scholars and practitioners have developed a vocabulary of displacement to describe the circumstances of forced migration and reception. The lexicon includes, among others, the words: refugee, migrant, host or host community, humanitarianism, resilience, and refugee burden. Scholarly debates have emerged throughout the decades surrounding how to define these important terms. Among individuals fleeing in search of sanctuary, there are life-altering stakes associated with identifying who legally qualifies as a ‘refugee’ as compared to those who may be labelled as ‘migrants’ (Richmond, 1988; Crawley and Skleparis, 2018; Hamlin, 2021). Critiques of ‘humanitarianism’ acknowledge neglected acts of care and draw attention to the misguided assumption that aid is always altruistic (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Pacitto, 2015; Carpi, 2020). A sober evaluation of ‘resilience’ reveals that the word does not merely describe people’s capacity to thrive in the face of incredible hardship but can also be used as coded language to justify appeals from host governments for increased international support (Ilcan and Rygiel, 2015). Examples such as these illustrate that the vocabulary of displacement can prioritise palatable language over clarity, exercise deliberate vagueness and engage in doublespeak. As Rodgers argues in his insightful analysis of the formation of the ‘host’ label, ‘the notion of the “host community” is useful precisely because it is vague, thereby rendering a messy situation comprehensible and open to intervention’ (Rodgers, 2021: 1874). These rhetorical practices bridge conversations across legal, political, humanitarian and empirical domains, allowing scholars and practitioners to speak with one another. Yet, there is a need to explore what is lost in translation when the goal is to reflect lived experiences over the coordination of aid and governance. A critical analysis also brings to the forefront how power operates in labelling, recognising and legitimising some hosting practices over others.
The word ‘host’ is not legally defined and there are no legal stakes to maintain the ascribed label. There are, however, humanitarian stakes, which in turn can have consequential political implications. Hosts’ interests are intertwined with refugee newcomers. They have become an integral part of planning and implementing refugee-related interventions, as can be seen in the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework and the Global Refugee Compact. The UNHCR has defined a host community as ‘the country of asylum and the local, regional and national governmental, social and economic structures within which refugees live’ (UNHCR, 2011). While this definition seems broad enough, there is a policy-informed tendency to homogenise hosts, such as neglecting differences in class and nationality, an observation made by Robert Chambers (1986) that remains relevant to the contemporary moment (Rodgers, 2021). Hosts are understood as the opposite of refugees, which Fiddian-Qasmiyeh has aptly demonstrated is empirically false, especially in cases of protracted displacement (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016a, 2016b, 2020; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Greatrick, 2021). Fiddian-Qasmiyeh writes, ‘Refugees are increasingly experiencing overlapping displacement in the sense that they often physically share spaces with other displaced people. The implication of these intersecting processes is that people who have been displaced share, contest and (re)construct spaces over long periods of time with other people – citizens and refugees alike’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020: 403).
The refugee/host binary is an example of what I conceptualise here as a humanitarian fiction. The concept of humanitarian fiction allows us to interrogate contradictions that permeate refugee-related knowledge production not adjudicated by law. Nevertheless, humanitarian fictions can have broad policy consequences. Understanding the refugee/host dichotomy as a humanitarian fiction invites scholars to question how ascribed labels uphold the contemporary refugee system, broaching such questions as: Who benefits from the ‘host’ label? Who may be adversely affected by rejecting humanitarian fiction? While answers to such questions require empirical examination, such inquiries suggest junctures at which scholars can study how power operates to maintain the global refugee system.
The Jordanian case demonstrates how binaries fall apart when we observe people’s lived experiences, especially in cases where the host community includes residents with refugee histories or refugees living in protracted situations. Jordan’s diverse and dynamic populations blur the ascribed divide between refugees and hosts. Seeing beyond the binary invites scholars to search for and acknowledge other cleavages or solidarities in society. Moving across multiple scales of analysis from global humanitarian constructions outlined in UN reports to the self-identities of people living in Jordan, this article invites scholars to critically examine humanitarian fiction as a form of knowledge production that can diverge from objective reflections of observable reality.
Methods
Using a mixed method approach that included ethnography and semi-structured interviews, I examined refugee hosting in Jordan from the perspectives of Syrian refugees, Jordanian citizens, and UN, NGO, and government officials. I spent 16 months in Jordan from July 2014 to July 2018. I conducted 175 interviews: 70 with Syrian refugees, 65 with Jordanian citizens and 40 with government or humanitarian officials. I conducted interviews in Arabic and English, drawing upon my language fluency as a heritage Arabic speaker. I recorded most of the interviews I conducted on a digital recorder with the permission of the interviewee. In addition to semi-structured interviews, I had countless conversations that informed my understanding of refugee reception and hosting in Jordan and spent time with Iraqi, Palestinian and Sudanese refugees. All names that appear in the paper are pseudonyms.
I observed how hosting Syrian refugees has changed in Jordan over time, notably in response to European reactions to the influx of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 (Arar, 2017). This timeframe allowed me to track how ‘host community tensions’, ‘resilience’, and the allocation of aid to beneficiaries – which came to include more Jordanians in refugee-centred interventions – shaped Syrian reception in Jordan. I met with refugees in Amman, Mafraq, and Irbid. I visited four Syrian refugee camps including Za’atari camp, Azraq camp, King Abdullah Park, and Mrajeed Al Fhood also known as the Emirati camp and conducted interviews in informal tented settlements on the outskirts of Mafraq and Irbid. These unofficial camp-like settings were home to nomadic groups of Syrian refugees who usually followed seasonal farmwork. Each of these settings provided a different lens through which to consider what hosting and being hosted looks like. To access securitised spaces, I partnered with a large international NGO that coordinated with the UNHCR. I spent countless hours with Jordanian aid workers during these days, driving from headquarters in Amman to the camps and back. I attended town hall meetings, which included Jordanian business representatives who presented work opportunities to Syrian audiences, and visited with government representatives from various ministries.
Spending time with different groups of people revealed the extent to which ascribed labels of refugees, hosts and humanitarians often intersected in the ways that individuals described who they were. Refugeehood was often present in conversations with residents who were not officially labelled as refugees by the UN or the state (Arar and FitzGerald, 2023: 6). Jordanians with familial refugee histories were often citizens. Syrian refugees often worked as humanitarians, hired by humanitarian organisations to provide aid to their neighbours and members of their community. The findings presented in this paper were selected to convey these complicated and multifaceted ways in which the refugee-host binary breaks down when we consider people’s lived experiences, including marital ties and family formation, histories of displacement that are not reflected in legal status or humanitarian designations, and personal identities that are informed by contexts of displacement in the home country and the region more broadly. The findings emphasise variation among people with different nationalities, which demonstrates overlapping and intersecting identities that cannot be reduced to one ascribed label or role. The data are comprised of varying levels of familiarity with participants. While I spent months with Samir, the Jordanian citizen with a family history of displacement from Palestine, my experiences with Nahid and Nuzha, the Iraqi women who preferred to be referred to as residents of Jordan – as opposed to being called refugees – were limited. Studied together, the findings reveal the dynamic ways in which neat categorical designations can fail to capture how individuals make sense of their experiences and the world around them.
The Big Picture: Counting Refugees, Assigning Hosts
Refugees are the primary focus for the UNHCR, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and other humanitarian organisations; but there is another population whose size, composition and needs are considered in tandem: hosts. Hosts have received considerably less scholarly attention, yet their interests inform national and global responses to refugee displacement. The term ‘host’ is applied to distinct scales, from individuals and communities to states and territories. As members of the receiving community, hosts matter intrinsically, as many of whom have been affected in some way by conflict in neighbouring states. Refugee reception impacts their social, economic and political milieu. Hosts’ relationships to newcomers are not stagnant, but informed by iterative interactions and evolving local, national and global policies. While there is a tendency to treat refugees as a separate population in reports and other forms of knowledge production, people who coordinate aid and the response to refugee newcomers must always consider hosts. Foremost, this is because refugees do not enter an empty space; they are received by a sovereign state (often called a ‘host state’), except in cases where a territory is not recognised as a state. Coordinating the response to displacement requires the contributions of governing officials and members of the local community that become humanitarian workers as well as neighbours, teachers, drivers, doctors, business owners and so forth. Herein lies a gap between what happens on the ground and what is reflected in refugee-related knowledge production. Given the intertwined experiences and interests of hosts and newcomers, we must interrogate: Who counts the hosts? Which hosts count?3
Hosts are recognised in the UNHCR’s annual Global Trends report (Krause, 2022). They are included in two main ways: by the number of UN-recognised refugees that a state receives (e.g. Türkiye hosts nearly 3.8 million refugees) and as a percentage of refugees to other residents (e.g. 1 in 23 people in Türkiye is a refugee) (UNHCR, 2022). While these evaluations may seem straightforward, there are several scope limitations that inform ‘big picture’ assessments. These exclusions emerge from applying restrictions to the definition of refugees – and as a result, limiting which forms of hosting are acknowledged – and what spaces qualify as hosting grounds. First, hosts are acknowledged for receiving UN-recognised refugees, not any group fleeing violence or persecution. For example, in January 2022, Peru was home to more than 1.3 million Venezuelans, but only a small percentage (approximately 3,200) were granted refugee status between 2016 and 2021 (UNHCR, 2022b). While the UN keeps track of Venezuelan displacement despite status recognition, there are other people who have been displaced across state borders who are not counted and often fall completely outside the scope of analysis. Such has been the case with Syrians in Saudi Arabia that are labelled as ‘Syrian nationals’ and receive support from the state, not the UN (Osmandzikovic, 2020). In 2018, the number of Syrian nationals in Saudi Arabia closely matched the number of UN-registered Syrian refugees in Jordan with over 600,000 people (Osmandzikovic, 2020). An overview of hosts that looks only to the UNHCR to make an assessment about global displacement and reception could easily miss this population. That year, the Global Trends report counted 259 refugees in Saudi Arabia. In fact, Saudi Arabia, along with other Gulf states, were criticised in media reports for abdicating any responsibility toward Syrian refugees, especially in the wake of mass reception in Europe in 2015 when commentators looked to restrictionist practices to justify keeping asylum seekers out (e.g. Malsin, 2015).
Second, nearly 20 per cent of UN-recognised refugees are regularly neglected in rankings that inform the lists of top hosts. In 2021, more than 5.8 million Palestinians were registered with UNRWA, not the UNHCR (UNHCR, 2022a). While UNRWA-registered Palestinians are included in global counts of displacement that also incorporate IDPs, asylum seekers and Venezuelans displaced abroad, Palestinian reception is often excluded from the rankings of host states and were relegated to a footnote in the 2022 Global Trends report. One is forced to confront these contradicting approaches to Palestinian data incorporation that reveal large numbers of globally displaced persons but skew other conclusions – such as the rankings of top hosts. Neglecting Palestinian displacement not only ignores refugees but also their impact and influence in the five host territories where UNRWA operates: Gaza, West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Given that receiving host policies may be path dependent, especially when protracted displacement creates refugee cohorts that span generations, this tendency obscures important theoretical and empirical considerations including reception policies informed by past experiences of Palestinian reception (Turner, 2015).
Not all spaces are conceptualised as potential hosts. The third limitation baked into ‘big picture’ assessments of hosts is the neglect of territories. The UNHCR primarily acknowledges refugee hosting in states, meaning that unrecognised territories are excluded from assessments of who the hosts are. Gaza, for example, hosts more than 1.4 million UN-recognised refugees in a population of over 2 million people. Gaza does not make the list of top hosts even though refugees comprise about 70 per cent of the territory’s population (Arar and FitzGerald, 2023). One can observe the powerful political implications of identifying refugees and hosts as rhetoric surrounding the ongoing genocide in Gaza in 2023 and 2024 is surveilled and censured. A leaked memo from the New York Times instructed journalists to not only avoid the words ‘genocide’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘occupied territories’ but also ‘refugee camps’, thereby contributing to the erasure of Palestinian displacement and reception (Scahill and Grim, 2024). Refugee reception on Indigenous lands in other parts of the world may be relegated to the background when scholarly understandings of hosts reinforce methodological nationalism. Most of the approximately 300,000 refugees in Iraq, for example, live in the Kurdistan region located in the north. Beyond geography, recognising unceded lands invites scholars to consider other theoretically consequential variations in terms of who seeks refuge and who governs protection. Of the approximately 280,000 refugees and asylum seekers registered in Iraq in 2023, more than 230,000 were Syrian Kurds (Iraq Operational Data Portal, n.d.). On the one hand, the movement of people fleeing Syria can be understood as Syrians finding refuge in Iraq. Yet an alternative framing would be to consider how Kurdish co-ethnics found refuge among other Kurds. The same pattern held true for Turkish and Iranian refugees who entered before 2012, the majority of whom were also Kurdish co-ethnics. Acknowledging national and ethnic ties may further contribute to examining variations in the treatment of refugee populations (Abdelaaty, 2021). The UNHCR partners with the government of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KR-I) to provide aid. While this partnership requires a level of recognition, the KR-I is not discussed in the 2022 Global Trends report or available for assessment through the Refugee Data finder, a UN database. To consider refugee hosting on such territories, scholars would need to conceptualise hosts beyond the common assessments that appear in humanitarian fictions.
Finally, states must meet a population threshold before their hosting is recognised. The Global Trends report covering forced displacement in 2020 recognises Curaçao, where 1 in 10 people, in a population of approximately 190,000 people, are displaced Venezuelans. Meanwhile, the tiny island nation of Nauru is excluded from the ranking of top host states despite having a similar proportion of refugees to the overall population. In 2020, Nauru hosted 1,179 refugees in a population of approximately 10,824 people. The state is excluded because it does not meet the minimum population requirement to be included in the assessment. In examining the politics of knowledge production, one must ask, what does the exclusion of Nauru from the overall assessment of global displacement obscure? Excluding Nauru has the secondary effect of glossing over Australia’s externalisation policies, namely the forcible containment of asylum seekers in Nauru (FitzGerald, 2019). The Nauru-Curaçao comparison may not be topically relevant for scholars working in other areas of the world, but the point that ‘hosts’ is a category that is constructed to fit within humanitarian frameworks has far-reaching implications. In this case, scholars are prompted to consider the multifaceted ways in which hosting is not altruistic, but a political calculation that can only be understood with geopolitical analyses. Cutting through humanitarian fictions points to junctures in which scholars may examine how power is at play.
The Jordanian Case: What is a ‘Host Country’?
In 2021, Jordan hosted approximately 2.7 million UN-recognised refugees in a population of 10 million people. Examining the politics of ‘counting the refugees’, drawing from Jeff Crisp’s insightful observations (1999, 2022), is an important component that in turn influences how we ‘count the hosts’ as well. The UN’s refugee total is an operational number, not a reflection of people with refugee histories or identities. Simply parsing refugees from hosts brackets the history of displacement in the region.
The refugee-hosts lens invites readers to consider the varied ways migration, displacement, and reception have shaped society in Jordan and throughout the Middle East. Jordan’s capital city, Amman, was a ‘refugee settlement’ founded by Circassian refugees who fled from the Russian Empire’s North Caucus region (Hamed-Troyansky, 2017: 605). Circassian refugee elite were ‘refugees-turned-immigrants’ through the registration, sale and purchase of property. Chechens fled to Ottoman land that would become Jordan in 1901 to escape Tsarist Russia, founding settlements of Sweileh and Zarqa that developed into modern cities (Hamed-Troyansky, 2017: 607). Jordan is also home to an Armenian community who fled the 1915 genocide as well as refugees who fled conflicts in neighbouring states over the last century including the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (also known as the Nakba), the Lebanese civil war from 1975 to 1990 and the contemporary war in Syria. Palestinian refugees have hosted Syrians and Iraqis in camps established in and after 1948. Syrians who hosted Iraqis after the US-led invasion never imagined that they would become refugees but found themselves looking for sanctuary a decade later. Some Palestinians from Yarmouk camp in Syria may have been displaced for the third time when crossing into Jordan after 2011. Accepting the refugee/host binary at face value warps any comprehensive examination of refugee reception in Jordan.
Through an operational humanitarian lens, Jordan is interpellated as a ‘host country’ and Jordanians are members of the ‘host community’. Such language suggests passivity on the part of the state and its citizens or residents. Hosting, in reality, is not passive at all. In fact, ‘hosting’ only captures one aspect of how people in Jordan have been affected by war, which had cascading economic, social and political effects. Moreover, the responsibilities associated with ‘hosting’ include far more than providing sanctuary to refugees. Examining Jordan’s role within the global refugee system demonstrates the ways that other states depend on Jordan to contain refugees and facilitate the resettlement of a minority of refugees to states in the Global North. At the national level, accepting international support through the UNHCR and by other means requires the coordination of aid with international organisations, which necessitates coordination and governance.
The ways that Jordan, Jordanians and Jordan’s residents have accommodated changes to their society after the start of the war in Syria in 2011 cannot be measured in straightforward assessments of the costs and benefits of refugee hosting (Arar, 2023, 2024b). Such calculations can only be broached if one is able to parse refugees from hosts, and then is willing to homogenise both groups. But host states are not homogenous populations and people have different, sometimes competing, interests. By interrogating who are identified as the benefactors of cost/benefit calculations, scholars can distinguish the effects of hosting on different sectors of society. One sector in society may benefit from refugee hosting while another sector may feel the pressure of increased costs.
Individuals Confront the Refugee/Host Binary
Humanitarian fiction conveys a clear difference between refugees and hosts. The shortcomings of the refugee/host binary are evident when we consider people’s lived experiences. The vignettes below describe the predicaments and examine the self-identities of four individuals. Hassan, whose story is excerpted in the introduction, is a Jordanian citizen who finds himself hosted in a Syrian camp. Samir is a Palestinian-Jordanian man with Jordanian citizenship working with Syrian refugees as a humanitarian professional who explains that his familial history of refugeehood connects him to the experience of displaced Syrians. Nahid and Nuzha are Iraqi women, both of whom have eschewed the refugee label, preferring instead to be recognised in other ways or not labelled at all. They are residents of Jordan.
A Citizen Seeks to be Hosted among Refugees
Hassan’s father was in a polygamous relationship, married to two women at the same time. Hassan’s father is Jordanian and his mother is Syrian. Hassan’s father’s first wife is a Saudi citizen. When Hassan was born in Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s, the family registered him as if he were the child of the first wife, hoping that Hassan would receive social benefits. Citizenship throughout the Middle East is bestowed through jus sanguinis, as a right of blood, and is paternal, meaning it can only be passed on by the father or husband. Hassan would be a Jordanian citizen no matter what his mother’s nationality. On paper, Hassan had no legal association to his Syrian mother. Decades later, the decision not to register Hassan to his birth mother would have monumental consequences.
Hassan inherited his father’s last name, a proud East Bank Jordanian name that let everyone know he was from a well-known tribe. Tribal relations denote heritage and family-capital, which often translates into social capital. Hassan reaped the benefits of his recognisable name when the family moved from Saudi Arabia to Jordan. Arabic last names tell a story of who a person is, where they come from, and can influence how people interact with one another. Over the years, Hassan became estranged from his father, but his name and citizenship status were identity markers that shaped how Hassan engaged with the world around him.
Hassan’s mother, Amal, moved back to Syria to live with her family after her marriage dissolved. Hassan stayed in Jordan. When the war in Syria started in 2011, Hassan was in his early 20s. He worked in a restaurant, making close to 250 JD (Jordanian dinar) per month (about 350 USD). Hassan was not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but as a young man with few obligations, he was making ends meet and enjoying his time off work with his friends who he shared an apartment with. That changed when Amal became a refugee in Jordan.
Many Syrians have connections to people in Jordan, including family ties through marriage, friendships that span generations, and business connections especially for people who live in towns on either side of the border. Few Syrians, however, were lucky enough to have a Jordanian son that was ready and willing to take care of his Syrian mother in her time of need. After Amal crossed the border into Jordan, she was required to stay in Za’atari camp until Hassan could ‘bail’ her out. In the first few years, Jordanian citizens could sponsor Syrian refugees who were in Za’atari by paying a small fee and agreeing to be responsible for the people who were allowed to exit. Being the dutiful son that he was, Hassan moved out of the apartment that he was renting with some friends and found a nicer place where his mother could be comfortable. Hassan also knew he would need more money and began to look for a better paying job, but he was not equipped to provide for his mother’s needs.
Amal had a medical condition that required monthly prescriptions and frequent doctor visits. Hassan barely made enough money to cover rent and food – money that he could not stretch far enough to pay for out-of-pocket prescriptions for Amal. Hassan did have the option to drive Amal to a faraway clinic to access less expensive medication, but this would mean he had to take time off work. He was stuck choosing between two unsustainable options. Hassan and Amal needed another solution.
Amal reluctantly suggested that she return to Za’atari camp. It was not an ideal situation, but as a registered Syrian refugee, Amal could have her basic needs met – including access to medication – without burdening her son. The UNHCR would provide her with a caravan where she could stay without paying for rent. She could walk to the camp clinic to see her doctor. She would be giving up the comforts of living in an apartment, including the privacy she enjoyed and dependable internet access. Life in Za’atari would be hard, but she was willing to bet that life outside of Za’atari was harder. Hassan couldn’t help but feel envious of Syrian refugees. He believed Syrians’ humanitarian privileges far surpassed the resources he had access to as a Jordanian citizen. Citizenship did not pay his bills, put food on the table or secure his housing. When Amal suggested that they both move into Za’atari camp, Hassan considered it. Maybe he too could benefit from all the international support that was being funnelled into the country.
Amal entered Za’atari through official channels as a registered refugee; Hassan snuck into the camp and joined her a few weeks later. As a Jordanian citizen, Hassan was not legally permitted to live in a Syrian camp. Amal presented her registration information to get access to food and other goods, but Hassan needed to hide his presence in the camp. His national ID card, which he could use in Amman to open a bank account, register for university classes and access government support, was of no use inside the camp. Without the necessary humanitarian identification, Hassan could not take advantage of goods that the UN provided to refugees. He was ‘undocumented’ in ‘a country of UNHCR’ (Kagan, 2011).
Life in Za’atari was easier in some tangible ways, yet as days dragged on, boredom evolved into dread. What would become of Hassan’s life in the camp? Hassan reasoned that he would need to get a job someday. He needed to acquire wealth if he were to marry and start a family. He was not ready to return to the hardships that awaited him in Amman, so instead, Hassan devised a cockamamie scheme that would allow him to make the most of a bad situation. Hassan noticed there was an opportunity to work as a security guard at the camp. The UNHCR manages most of the daily activities in the camp, but Jordanians reserve control over all security-related issues. Hassan put forth an application, was ecstatic when he got an interview, and couldn’t believe his good fortune when he was offered the job.
As luck would have it, the new hires would not be placed in Za’atari, but in a different camp about an hour’s drive away called Azraq. Hassan was now a Jordanian citizen, working as a security guard to manage Syrian refugees in Azraq by day, and secretly living as a refugee in Za’atari working to evade security officers by night. Hassan described the challenge of keeping up this charade as a comedy of errors. He needed to wake up early enough to sneak out of Za’atari camp without attracting the attention of the guards he had once envisioned would become his colleagues. Then, he needed to find his way to Azraq camp, which included a long walk and a bus ride. After a full day’s work, Hassan would then sneak back into Za’atari camp, and then go through the process all over again the next day.
Hassan’s story sheds light on the ways that refugee and host populations in Jordan are intertwined, a phenomenon that existed before the war in Syria and continued to develop after mass reception. Hassan’s situation is unique, although there are many examples of citizens living with refugees in camps, including Baddawi in Lebanon or Yarmouk in Syria (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020; Bitari, 2020).
A Citizen with a Refugee Identity
‘I see the people in the camp more than I see my own family,’ Samir said to me after a long day’s work. His words were a monotoned confession, a departure from his usual jubilant demeanour. Samir called me one day after handing out blue baseball caps to refugee kids in Azraq camp. He described a huddle of children, so many that all he could see was the tops of their heads and arms outstretched toward him. ‘All those grubby hands reaching out at me,’ he squealed. ‘It was disgusting, I could feel the diseases crawling on my skin.’ But Samir loved those kids and loved the work he did as a humanitarian aid worker for one of the most well-known international organisations that partnered with the UNHCR. He complained about waking up early, about the summer heat, about the time spent at work – but never about the people he spent his days working for. Samir listened carefully to people’s concerns and searched for solutions. He was popular, resourceful, and willing to bend the rules when the situation called for a creative solution. Samir’s ability to get things done had little to do with the power endowed by his position; it was, in fact, the opposite. Samir worked with a group of two or three other humanitarian aid workers on a regular basis. The NGO gave them an SUV and tasked them with a goal, the rest was up to the group.
Samir spoke candidly about how witnessing Syrian displacement reminded him of his own family’s story. While we met with an elderly woman in Za’atari, he once turned to me and said, ‘I bet my grandmother was like her,’ then turned back to her and smiled. It was clear that this Syrian grandma liked being compared to Samir’s beloved Teta. Samir continued, posing a rhetorical question, ‘Can you imagine what it would have been like for them?’, referencing the 1948 Nakba when approximately 750,000 Palestinians were displaced. ‘They didn’t have all this. There was no UNHCR, no Za’atari camp.’ The Syrian grandma agreed, she too had likely contemplated what it was like for the Palestinians before. ‘I sit here with you, and it’s like I get the chance to sit with my grandmother,’ Samir said, and the Syrian woman blessed his words, ‘Allah yirda alak.’ Samir described what he imagined would have been a starkly different situation without the same level of humanitarian intervention. His role as a humanitarian aid worker was anchored in his identity as a Palestinian-Jordanian man.
By some accounts, Palestinian-Jordanians comprise the majority of Jordan’s population, which introduces politically sensitive considerations. This demographic composition was the result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the acquisition of the West Bank by Jordan in 1950, and the 1967 Six-Day War. After 1948, ‘the total population of the East Bank rose to 485,000 while the West Bank rose to 785,000, making the total population of the new expanded Jordan 1,270,000 people’ (Massad, 2001: 233). Jordan lost the West Bank after 1967 and gained 400,000 Palestinians. These people were labelled internally displaced migrants (Naziheen) because they were moving from what was at the time Jordan’s West Bank to Jordan’s East Bank. Today, there are more Palestinian refugees in Jordan than any other country (or territory) in the world. Approximately 2.3 million Palestinians in Jordan were registered with UNRWA in 2022, most of whom also have Jordanian citizenship, including Palestinian-Jordanians who reside in one of the ten formal UNRWA camps in the country (UNRWA, n.d.).
Each cohort of Palestinian refugees has experienced different treatment and varying protections under the law. Palestinians who migrated to Jordan before 1923 became Jordanian. Those who fell within Jordan’s jurisdiction in 1948 became citizens, and many remained citizens. The 1967 Palestinians that stayed in the West Bank experienced different legal precarity than those who migrated to the East Bank. Most Palestinians who fled Gaza in 1967 were never naturalized. As of 2024, approximately 158,000 ‘ex-Gazan’ refugees have lived in Jordan for over 50 years without a pathway to citizenship (UNRWA, 2024). Jordan also hosted approximately 20,000 Palestinian refugees who fled Syria and became refugees again after 2011 (UNRWA, 2024). Newly displaced refugee groups entered a complicated legal landscape that differentiated various groups of refugees by nationality and year of displacement. Palestinian histories of displacement and reception across the region shaped how refugees from Syria were treated. The treatment of Palestinian refugees in Jordan was tied to their rights and protections in neighbouring states, as well as their nearly impossible chance for resettlement or return.
Samir was not among those who were registered with UNRWA. He had no legal ties to the refugee label, but it was a part of how he understood himself and his family’s story. I listened to him talk about his family with Syrian refugees, which was his way of fostering relationships and expressing care. As a Palestinian-Jordanian, Samir was also a citizen. His citizenship status provided him with the opportunity to secure a well-paying job in the humanitarian sector. To neatly categorize Samir as either a ‘refugee’, ‘citizen’ or ‘humanitarian’, without taking into consideration the complicated intersections of these identities, would overlook how Samir understood himself, his work and the experiences that have informed who he is in the world.
Residents Who Eschewed the Refugee Label
‘We’re not real refugees,’ an Iraqi woman named Nahid in the Jordanian neighbourhood of al-Hashim al-Shamali said to me. ‘We’ll be able to return home soon. The Palestinians are the real refugees.’ Nahid’s relationship with the refugee label was informed by her understanding of Palestinian displacement and their struggle for the right to return. I met Nahid in 2009. She was displaced by the US-led invasion in 2003 and fled to Jordan when the violence escalated in Iraq in 2006. We reconnected in 2011. Nahid and her family were still living with the same precarity, waiting for a chance at resettlement – an UNHCR ‘durable solution’ that is afforded to less than 1 per cent of UN-recognised refugees annually.
The UNHCR estimated that more than 4.7 million Iraqis of a population of 30 million, fled their homes because of the Iraq War in 2003. While nearly half of these people were displaced within Iraq, the others fled across state borders. An estimated 700,000 to 800,000 Iraqis lived in Jordan in 2009, although these counts have been criticised as inflated (Fagen, 2009). Jordan has received multiple groups of Iraqis throughout the decades. Like with the various displacements of Palestinians, the focus on Iraqi refugee displacement since the start of the war in 2003 concealed ‘previous dynamics of forced-migration from Iraq, the embeddedness of current refugee migration in other migration movements of Iraqis, and the variegated experiences and self-perceptions of refugees from Iraq’ (Chatelard, 2009: 5). When considering contemporary displacement, therefore, it is important to note that the receiving communities included established Iraqis displaced in the years prior.
Once in Jordan, Iraqi refugees who left after 2003 faced several country-specific obstacles that put them at risk for refoulement including unauthorised status, lack of legal employment, and the isolation of urban settlement that left many Iraqis without access to an established network of available resources usually dispensed through refugee camps (Arar, 2016). Jordanian policy labelled, and treated, refugees fleeing Iraq as ‘temporary visitors’ – not as Convention refugees (Human Rights Watch, 2006). This invisibility heightened Iraqi vulnerability to the consequences of unauthorised status. For Iraqis without the necessary capital access to the labour market, social institutions and resources were obstructed. A small percentage of Iraqi refugees were granted some residency rights because they could afford to invest a substantial sum of money in Jordanian banks. These refugees were treated as ‘investors’ instead of ‘visitors’, and held ‘investor’ legal status.
Some Iraqis rejected the refugee label as a marker of their identity. I met an older Iraqi woman in a taxicab headed toward Amman’s Mecca Mall in 2016. Nuzha was striking, elegantly dressed, and smelled of perfume. We made small talk but she was not chatty. As I described my research to her, I implied that Iraqis in Jordan came as refugees. ‘I’m as much a refugee as you are,’ she curtly retorted. By this point in the conversation, I had already volunteered my identity as a Palestinian-Jordanian-American. It was clear that the refugee label was not one that she reserved to describe her experiences. The refugee label carried a social meaning outside of its categorical usage by humanitarian organisations and government officials. Some people who have experienced forced displacement may identify as refugees, others may not. Nuzha was simply a resident of Jordan, not a refugee. As a resident of Jordan, Nuzha was part of the receiving community for Syrian refugees who entered the country after 2011, but was Nuzha a host? While I did not ask Nuzha about her identity in relation to the host label, it is worth noting that humanitarian constructions of hosts often overlook people like Nuzha.
These vignettes show that not only do newly arriving refugees enter a legal landscape that has been informed by the reception of previous groups, but that the refugee label is shaped by social constructions that connect populations across groups and through time. ‘Refugees may previously have been hosts; and citizens in host countries may have past experiences of both displacement and of hosting’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Greatrick, 2021). Considering self-identities drastically reconstitutes humanitarian-ascribed categories that assign the labels of ‘refugee’ or ‘host’.
Conclusion
Analogous to the socio-legal examination of ‘legal fiction’, I introduce the concept of humanitarian fiction to name and examine the gap between aid-informed knowledge production and empirical contradictions in studies of refugee displacement and reception. I interrogate the ‘host’ label by considering who counts as a host and who counts the hosts, examining the relevance of these questions at multiple scales of analysis from international rankings of states to individuals and communities. The social construction of ‘hosts’ begins with ‘big picture’ assessments, such as those put forth in the UNHCR’s annual Global Trends reports. By restricting which refugees count, the UN also shapes which hosts are recognised. States that host refugees who are not included under the UNHCR’s mandate – such as Palestinians – are less likely to be ranked as official host states. Identifying these scope conditions pushes scholars to consider how representations of ‘host states’ and their rankings shape broader understandings of global displacement and reception. Territories that have not established external sovereignty among other states in the international community, including Gaza and Kurdistan, are also neglected in discussions of top hosts.
The host label draws a clear demarcation that separates refugees from the receiving community. In the case of Jordan, this delineation neglects the country’s history of forced migration, emphasising presentist humanitarian objectives over lived experiences, self-identities, and familial histories of refugeehood. Scholars can interrupt the implications embedded in humanitarian fiction by recognising how states have been shaped by migration, displacement and reception. Examining the construction of the ‘host state’ label also invites scholars to consider the geopolitics associated with such recognition. For Jordan, being a ‘host state’ also means that the country facilitates the orderly management of refugee resettlement, which has global implications in the contemporary refugee system.
The refugee/host binary conveys an incomplete picture of how people in Jordan identify and their relationships to others in society. Binaries serve an important function for practitioners who must differentiate among people within a population to provide services or advocate for specified populations. Scholars, however, do not need to succumb to binary language or humanitarian fiction. They may observe empirical realities, consider self-identities, and question who benefits from the application of humanitarian frames. Through the findings presented in this article, I describe how individuals confront the refugee/host binary in their daily lives. Hassan was a Jordanian citizen with a Syrian mother, Amal, who fled to Jordan. When his mother decided to move to Za’atari camp, Hassan joined her and became a citizen hosted among refugees. Samir was a Palestinian-Jordanian humanitarian aid worker who drew upon his familial history of refugeehood to identify with Syrian refugees. While he was not registered with UNRWA, Samir identified with both the refugee label and as a Jordanian citizen. For others, the refugee label carried implications that people preferred to avoid. Nahid and Nuzha were Iraqi women who arrived in Jordan after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Drawing upon their understanding of who refugees are, they both expressed not wanting to be called refugees. Neither of them had acquired Jordanian citizenship, so they were also not citizens. Their presence would be unaccounted for in the refugee/host binary.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, who guided this project from its inception and provided feedback throughout the writing process. Thank you to Estella Carpi, Karina Chavarria, Jeff Crisp, Sorcha Daly, Deisy Del Real, David FitzGerald, Rana Khoury, Laura Madokoro, Mirian Martinez-Aranda, Lama Mourad, and to the anonymous reviewer.
Notes
For a discussion of how humanitarian fiction applies to refugee integration (as policy and practice), see Arar (2024a).
Examples of legal fictions include assessments of ‘the corporation is a person’ (Schane, 1987) to critiques of ‘entry fiction’ in which immigrants who are present on state territory are legally treated as though they exist outside the state (Lee, 2021).
These questions are inspired by Jeff Crisp’s (1999, 2022) interrogation of who counts refugees.
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