"Constitutions and Citizens.” In Handbook of Citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Zahra Babar, Roel Meijer, and James Sater. Routledge Press, 2020. With Nathan Brown.
“Syrian Refugees and Citizenship.” In The Middle East in Transition: The Centrality of Citizenship, edited by Roel Meijer and Nils Butenschøn. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018. With Musa Shteiwi.
"Brief on Citizenship." Vicious Cycles: Toward a Research Agenda on Return and Repeat Displacement Workshop. December 2019.
My research focuses on policymaking pressures and dynamics behind citizenship, migration, and gender policies, particularly in the Arab world. In doing so, I examine how states treat citizen and noncitizen groups in law and practice. Some of my research is cross-national and much of it focuses on cases within Jordan. My current research aims to uncover creative policymaking strategies and address shifting boundaries in practiced and legal citizenship using original qualitative and quantitative data.
These interests and goals come across in my two book projects. The first examines when and why host states adopt ambiguous policies that say one thing in law but do another in implementation. This project analyzes variations in the implementation of different Palestinian refugee groups’ legal rights in Jordan using archival, interview, and legal data. The second examines the persistence of discrimination toward women in state nationality laws that prevents female, unlike male, citizens from passing their nationality onto their spouses and children. This project studies variations in this discrimination using an original 16-year global dataset as well as case studies from across the Arab world. Both projects build on data I collected during 16 months of fieldwork in Jordan from 2016–23.
Intentional Ambiguity: Citizenship Policies under Pressure in Refugee Host States
My first book project builds on my dissertation research and asks why do states adopt policies that say one thing in law but do another in practice? I argue that competing pressures on executive political leaders can explain the implementation of a group’s rights better than existing arguments that attribute this outcome primarily to institutional weakness. I contend that when the most influential stakeholders for the executive leader’s political survival—e.g., the largest donor and strongest security leaders—have similar policy preferences, the leader can implement the law more easily: what I call coherence. However, when these actors’ preferences differ, the leader can placate both sides by allowing the policy’s law to please one side and its implementation to suit the other: what I call intentional ambiguity. In both scenarios, the law follows the stakeholder that is more external to the leader’s inner circle and to governing, while the implementation aligns with the stakeholder that is more internal.
This project assesses coherence and intentional ambiguity in the rights host states grant to refugee groups by focusing on the rights Jordan has granted over time to three Palestinian groups, i.e., those displaced to Jordan in: 1948, 1967 from the West Bank, and 1967 from Gaza. Comparing Jordan’s policies toward these groups over time enables me to hold alternative explanations constant, while closely tracking policies in law and practice. This analysis draws from over 800 British and American archival files I collected and over 200 interviews with ministers, security leaders, refugees, and others I conducted during 14 months of fieldwork in Jordan from 2016–19.
This project reveals that gaps in implementation can reflect a strategic political practice—rather than simply institutional weakness—where leaders break apart a policy into its law and implementation dimensions to placate opposing influential stakeholders. It also highlights the fuzzy lines at times between citizens and noncitizens by demonstrating that their rights can be similar in practice, despite diverging in law. In addition, it pushes the citizenship and migration literature beyond the global north by analyzing refugee policies in the global south, while presenting findings that can help inform refugee policies in the global north.
Related Research Papers
Regime Survival and Policymaking Strategies
I have several papers related to my first book project that focus on the policymaking strategies regimes use to remain in power. One of these papers is an article summarizing my first book’s findings. Others, in more formative stages, include articles that apply my intentional ambiguity framework to policy areas beyond migration, like negotiated peace efforts and conditional economic reforms. I plan to submit these single-authored pieces to top political science journals. In addition, I am working on a special journal issue on strategic non-enforcement in collaboration with scholars analyzing this phenomenon across policy areas and regions.
Further, I have a book chapter as part of an edited volume on The Politics of Fifth Columns. Fifth columns are residents in a state who allegedly undermine the state from within due to their ties to an external enemy. My chapter examines why political elites frame groups as fifth columns. My findings diverge from existing studies—which identify geopolitical factors as the source of fifth column frames—and reveal that fifth column frames can reflect domestic political interests, such as scapegoating a group to avoid reform. Likewise, political elites can ignore opportunities to frame a group as a fifth column to push forward other domestic interests, like economic development.
Citizenship and Migration in Law and Practice
I also have related papers that analyze citizenship in both law and practice across citizen and noncitizen groups. One of these papers is a book chapter co-authored with Nathan Brown for the Handbook of Citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa. This chapter argues that Arab regimes have asserted their sovereignty and control in constitutions and laws by including clear, extensive provisions concerning the rulers’ powers and vague, terse provisions on the people’s rights. Further, when existing legal provisions do not suit regime interests, regimes assert their power by ignoring and obfuscating people’s rights. They can do this by issuing regulations and decrees that contradict these laws and constitutional provisions.
In two other book chapters, I examine how long-term noncitizen residents, like PRGs, challenge the boundaries of state citizenship. One of these focuses on Jordan’s and Lebanon’s legal obligations to Syrian refugees since 2011 and highlights similarities in the types of rights these states grant to noncitizens and citizens, such as more social and economic versus civil and political rights. The other chapter unpacks citizenship as a concept using the literature on noncitizenship and Jordanian Arabic distinctions between “citizenship” and “nationality.” This analysis breaks citizenship down into four main parts: legal citizen status (i.e., nationality), rights in law, rights in practice, and belonging. This approach reveals the blurry lines in practice between citizens and noncitizens as well as intersections in legal inequality between citizen groups, like women, and noncitizen groups, like refugees.
Unequal Citizens: State Resistance to Women’s Nationality Law Reform
My second book project builds on my previous work and examines the persistence of discrimination toward women (DTW) in state nationality laws. This discrimination prevents women from passing their nationality—and the rights it entails—onto their spouses and children on the same terms as men. This project aims to resolve the puzzle of why Jordan, along with 45 other countries, has maintained this DTW, despite international pressures to remove it following the adoption in 1979 of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
I find that states with large, protracted noncitizen populations are more likely to have resisted removing DTW from their nationality laws because these states portray these groups as security threats seeking a pathway to citizenship. This finding contrasts with and extends existing arguments that attribute legal DTW solely to cultural-religious structures, women’s activism, and women’s political participation. In addition, this finding reveals an intersection of migrant’s and women’s rights and highlights migration trends as a critical factor to consider when studying women’s rights reforms.
This project engages a multi-method approach to present these findings. First, it uses an original global dataset I have been compiling on the presence of DTW in state nationality laws from 2003–18. Second, it includes most-similar case studies of Arab states that have responded to this DTW in different ways, despite sharing traits linked to the existing arguments above. These cases include: Algeria and Tunisia, which have removed most of this DTW, Morocco and Egypt, which have removed some of this DTW, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have introduced limited exceptions to this DTW, and Jordan and Lebanon, which have not reformed this DTW at all.
Gender, Ethnicity, and Security
I have a working paper on this topic that I am about to send for publication. This paper focuses on a detailed case study of Jordan’s failed nationality law reform in 2014 and statistical analyses of this DTW globally in 2015. I also have a working paper on how regimes frame other nationality law reforms—like access to citizenship by investment—as threatening and linked to long-term noncitizen groups. These papers show how state leaders can leverage pre-existing popular concerns with gender, ethnicity, and demography to make alleged threats more credible and block pathways to citizenship.
Previous Research
From 2014–15, I worked with Nate Jensen on a project examining the effects of large tax incentives for firms offered by U.S. counties on local inequality rates and government spending. Using data from the International City/County Management Association and the National League of Cities as well as U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, we used logit regression analysis to examine whether incentives lead to a higher likelihood of a county having a local sales tax as well as whether incentives correspond with higher levels of income inequality (using Gini indices). Our preliminary findings suggested that incentives are positively correlated with local sales taxes as well as local inequality rates.
My research prior to starting my doctoral program dealt with the role of Al-Jazeera Arabic news in Jordanian society, the effectiveness of development projects in Lebanese Palestinian refugee camps, and the reasons for U.S. intervention or non-intervention in the Arab Spring.
Professional Experience
Beyond these research projects, I have gained insights on Middle East politics, social protection policies, and inequality through professional opportunities. Specifically, I worked at the World Bank as a consultant working on social protection in the Middle East during my university breaks from 2012 through 2017. In addition, I worked with American Near East Refugee Aid for six months in 2012 on program evaluation, particularly examining the effectiveness of a women’s urban-agriculture project in Lebanon’s Ein el-Helweh refugee camp. Overall, I have studied, worked, or conducted research in Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, and Kuwait as well as visited Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Israel, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates.
Personal photo: A view toward Syria from Huwwara, Jordan