People Eat People: The Influence of Socioeconomic Conditions On Experiences of Displacement in Jordan

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which refugee and host experiences of displacement in Jordan between 2010 and 2013 were articulated in a socioeconomic register that coincided with, but was also independent of, both state biopower and historical cross-border regionalisms. I argue that this register became salient due to a shared understanding of everyday life as characterized by what I term hunger, a state of depredation where people eat people to attain their own well-being. In pursuing this argument, the article has two goals: To show how Iraqis and Jordanians negotiated the complexities of living together in hunger by censuring individuals-locals and foreigners, rich and poor-who contributed to producing hunger rather than to alleviating it, and by consciously resisting the corrosive effects of hunger on social relations; and, more generally, to challenge universalizing understandings of refugee experiences according to which local tensions between refugees and hosts are derivative of a globalized antiforeigner discourse.