SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This interdisciplinary study interrogates the nexus between women’s active citizenship, political participation, and governance in international development in Jordan. The critiques of the depoliticizing effects of both neoliberalism and international development work are well established in the literature. Theoretical insights about (women’s) citizenship and their political participation however are rarely linked to empirical studies of how these concepts are mobilized and to what effects, particularly outside of the places where they were conceived. This thesis bridges and intervenes in these bodies of literature. I examine what kinds of political participation become possible in the context of international development interventions that seek to promote Jordanian women’s active citizenship, in Jordan’s authoritarian political context. Central to this analysis are also the processes of subjectification that the development actors conceive, and in particular the ways in which neoliberal political rationalities shape them. To analyse these international development projects aimed at women’s political empowerment or their empowerment as citizens, I draw on qualitative data collected in Jordan and remotely across Europe, in particular ethnographic data and interviews with development officials. Based on these materials, I demonstrate how the term active citizenship, and women’s political empowerment, is being mobilized in these development interventions to signify a very particular kind of participation – in the public sphere, bound to the existing political system, visible to the state, and by an autonomous subject. Bringing these observations together with theoretical insights about the political, the state, and political activity outside of liberal frameworks, I demonstrate how women’s active citizenship in this context becomes depoliticized, a way to reinforce forms of governance that marginalizes avenues for meaningful, democratic forms of participation 2 and politics. I also argue that the bureaucratic forms of governance the Jordanian state subjects development actors to indicate how the state establishes itself through ambiguous and contradictory processes vis-à-vis women’s empowerment, and as a simultaneous and injurious absence and presence in its citizens’ lives. On a global level, these interventions also serve global north and particularly European actors which stabilise the Jordanian political system and thereby pursue a hierarchical international order. These countries and institutions prioritise stability over forms of democratic self governance in the global south to reinforce the European border regime that keeps racialised others, in this case mostly Syrian refugees, outside of its borders. This research therefore contributes to studies of the politics of international development, a feminist critique of (traveling) liberal theory, and forms of postcolonial state power. It also demonstrates the tensions between actors’ professed commitment to democratization and gender equality and the empirical effects of their work that marginalize possibilities for a contentious political to emerge