2 - Strategic Alliances and Amalgamated Social Orders

Summary

In Jordan, social order has historically emerged as a result of the regime’s laws, policies and institutions, but also as a result of practices established and modified from above and below. This chapter lays the ground for the book’s subsequent examination of how the Public Security Directorate intervenes into citizens’ lives and how citizens have recourse to the police, by tracing the emergence of several hegemonic projects in the Kingdom. These projects are largely grounded in the nature of patron–client alliances forged since the establishment of the modern state between the Hashemites and the East Bank Transjordanian population on the one hand, and Western liberal democracies on the other. Whilst uneven and increasingly amalgamated, these alliances have supported the dissemination of a tribal order, which for several decades enjoyed a large degree of hegemonic consent. and more recently a ‘neoliberal-civic’ order, which is facing an appreciable counter-hegemonic pushback from below and paradoxically fostering an increased reliance on kinship networks.