Disengagement from politics: Nationalism, political identity, and the everyday in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan

Abstract

In al-Wihdat, a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, there is today a puzzling absence of political participation among camp dwellers. This absence is all the more striking for a number of reasons. First of all, because Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East are widely held to be bastions of political resistance and Palestinian nationalism. Secondly, because this lack of political participation coincides with the outbreak of unprecedented turmoil in the Arab world. Is refugees’ disengagement from politics a clear sign of their passive assimilation or, conversely, a form of political protest tout court? What forms does Palestinian nationalism take in a country that has granted full citizenship rights to the majority of refugees? More generally, how do claims of national belonging articulate with other, apparently conflicting, national identities? Taking as its starting point the reverberations of the “Arab Spring” in Jordan, this paper wants to shed light on the complexities associated with refugees’ socioeconomic and political integration in Jordan. More broadly, it aims to add to a scholarly debate that has recently urged anthropologists and social scientists to rethink the categories of “the political” and “political agency.” What will be argued here is that refugees’ eagerness to distance themselves from what they saw as the dangerous world of politics can also be explained with Carl Schmitt’s specific understanding of the political. According to the philosopher, the distinction between friend and enemy lies at the very core of “the political.” In Jordan, this distinction is played out in the seemingly contradiction of being both Palestinian refugees and Jordanian citizens. However, if politics requires taking a firm stand either as Palestinian refugees or Jordanian citizens that camp dwellers are unwilling to take, a descent into what refugee perceives as a nonpolitical ordinariness enables them to negotiate the complexities of their lives.