Keywords

5.1 Introduction

In September 2019 we interviewed Mohammed, a 29-year-old Syrian refugee in the northern Jordanian city of Ramtha. He shared with us his journey into Jordan and the ways in which his family network has been divided by their situation of protracted displacement. His story provides important insights into understanding the impact of family networks on mobility aspirations. He said:

I came to Jordan with my uncle and my cousin. When we arrived, in 2011, it was about seven months after the beginning of the revolution. My uncle introduced me to his maternal uncle, who is Jordanian. My uncle sent me immediately to work in the construction sector with him. I spent two years working in this field and sending money to my family back home. In 2013, my family joined me here because the situation in Syria was difficult. When my family arrived, they lived with me at home and settled down here. Later, my father moved to Germany. He has been there for four years now. My mother and my siblings will join him as he applied for a family reunion there. All of them are now doing the interviews for that. Morally and psychologically, I would prefer to move to Britain. My brothers-in-law have told me that life and work in Britain are different and more convenient. Everyone has his own life. I prefer to be independent.

In the 10 years of violent conflict in Syria, 5.6 million Syrians – more than a quarter of the country’s pre-war population – have fled from the war, from political persecution, conscription in the military or dwindling livelihood security in the war-torn country. Most have fled to the neighbouring countries of Turkey (currently around 3.6 million Syrian refugees), Lebanon (more than 1 million), Jordan (approximately 655,000) and Iraq (more than 246,000) (UNHCR, 2018). As the war in Syria continues and the underlying political conflicts remain unsolved, the options and hopes for return are dwindling for many of the displaced. Worse still, most continue to live in exile under highly insecure and precarious conditions – or to put it in the UNHCR’s terms, in ‘a long-lasting and intractable state of limbo’. In such protracted displacement situations, the lives of refugees ‘may not be at risk, but their basic rights and essential economic, social and psychological needs remain unfulfilled after years in exile’ (UNHCR, 2004, 1).

Since the UNCHR established this definition, the number of people who fall into the category of being in a protracted refugee situation has steadily increased to around 16 million by the end of 2019 (UNHCR, 2020). For more and more people, the three normally discussed ‘durable solutions’ of resettlement, local integration and repatriation are thus out of reach (see Kraler et al., 2020 for a critical discussion of the emergence and the value of the notion of durable solutions). While establishing camps and providing for refugees in countries of reception is an important element of humanitarian relief, maintaining a bureaucracy of aid in and through organised camps over a longer period of time might actually contribute to protracting displacement rather than solving refugees’ plight, especially if no adequate space for social inclusion and economic self-sufficiency are built up simultaneously (Hyndman & Giles, 2016; Betts et al., 2017). Solutions which are more sustainable would thus have to be embedded in clear political and economic strategies and linked to conflict management, peacebuilding and development actions (Loescher & Milner, 2008). Moreover, given the fact that displaced families often lead multi-local lives and rely on mobility and cross-border transfers, transnationalism has now been proposed as a fourth durable solution to forced displacement (Van Hear, 2006; Cohen & Van Hear, 2017). Recent literature on transnational migration has emphasised social actors’ ability to be mobile as key in this development (Black & King, 2004; Piper, 2009). This warrants attention not only on return migration but also on other forms of secondary migration, including onward migration outside of the first country of refuge (Jeffery & Murison, 2011).

It is this latter string of the debate to which we want to add our contribution, which is based on collaborative research within the framework of the project ‘Transnational Figurations of Displacement’ (TRAFIG).Footnote 1 In our project we consider displaced persons’ mobility and their own network connections as socioeconomic and socio-psychological resources that they draw from and utilise in order to live with and eventually overcome protracted displacement. In order to better understand the multiple mobilities that are part of displaced people’s trajectories and to comprehend the central role of family, kin relations and other local, translocal and transnational networks in their everyday lives, we make use of the concept of ‘translocal figurations of displacement’, which is inspired by figurational sociology – a meso-level approach emphasising the processual character of life and which centres around the networks of interdependent human beings – and which we combine with state-of-the-art studies on forced displacement as well as key literature on migrants’ transnationalism and translocality (Etzold et al., 2019).

For this chapter we draw on the comprehensive findings of our TRAFIG team’s empirical research in Jordan, where we utilised a mixed methodology to better understand Syrian refugees’ trajectories into and out of protracted displacement. Based on these rich empirical insights we show that translocal family relations and kin networks do indeed play a decisive role in displaced people’s lives. They shaped Syrians’ journeys to and within Jordan until they reached their current location, they open up locally available opportunities to sustain one’s life in the short and mid-term and for longer-term integration and they structure future (intended or imagined) mobilities, both return movements towards ‘home’ or onward migration to other third countries. The translocal figurations within which people are embedded inevitably also have quite ambivalent effects on displaced people’s lives. Reuniting with one’s family in Jordan or moving on to Western Europe or other ‘future elsewheres’ is often highly idealised, whereas the presence in the ‘everyday here’ can be full of frustration, dependencies and conflicts. Our contribution discusses these ambivalent entanglements and, in particular, the role that (im)mobilities play in this regard.

A central finding which we present here is that Syrian refugees relied heavily upon extended family and kin networks for movement into and throughout Jordan. Once in Jordan, Syrians continue to cultivate onward migration aspirations to move, to be or to reunite with extended family and kin networks ‘elsewhere’. However, these aspirations are highly ambivalent, entangled in concerns and interests about the role of the families and kin networks, dependencies and perceived requirements, conflicts and ruptures. Protracted displaced situations for these Syrians have created conditions of unrealised and idealised futures, aspirations for something better and imaginations of a family life that is likely to never come to pass.

This chapter investigates Syrian refugees’ mobilities and ‘onward’ orientation as a means to understand their embeddedness in social figurations in Jordan and beyond. We examine the ways in which translocal and transnational networks shape refugees’ experiences and mobility to and within Jordan and their aspirations beyond Jordan. We thus examine not only actual mobilities to and within Jordan but also the desires and intentions of Syrian refugees to ‘move on’ in their lives. In particular, we provide evidence that – what we call – figurations of family and kin provide key structures and contours to the mobility experienced by Syrians to and within Jordan and to their aspirations to leave Jordan especially through (1) knowledge-sharing and (2) trust-based interactions.

5.2 Entangled (Im)mobilities: Refugees’ Positioning in Translocal Figurations of Displacement

5.2.1 Social Figurations

This chapter builds on German sociologist Norbert Elias’s (1978) figurational sociology and stresses the networks and interdependencies of displaced people at and across distinct places and, in particular, the transnational dimensions of social figurations that stretch across the borders of nation states (see Etzold et al., 2019). The figurational approach is a meso-level concept that can be used to describe the organisation and contingent emergence of social life and the inherent interdependence of actors and groups. It is also a useful concept with which to overcome the division within sociology between a micro-perspective that focuses on individual actors, their perceptions and actions on the one hand and a macro-perspective that centres on structures and functions.Footnote 2 According to Elias, figurations are dynamic social constellations between interdependent individuals that are produced in and through interactions and transactions. Social life thus evolves in and is significantly shaped by power relations and multiple, often overlapping, social networks or the differently structured ‘chains of interdependence’ that bind people to one another (Elias, 1978; Baur & Ernst, 2011).

While the notion of figurations can be applied at multiple social levels (Etzold et al., 2019), the family is a particularly important social figuration, which is marked by somewhat dense and intimate social relations. Castrén and Ketokivi (2015) apply a figurational approach to studying family relationships, demonstrating that these are simultaneously personally lived and embedded in wider ‘webs of relationships’ that are both constraining and enabling. Families and kin networks, in a figurational reading, thus constitute dense figurations which are highly dynamic in their make-up and expressions and which also reflect ‘lived ambivalences between personal affinities and relational expectations’ (Castrén & Ketokivi, 2015, 1). In the context of migration and forced displacement, figurations of family and kin can be seen as a – maybe the most – central social form of unity, belonging and support which also provide essential resources for mobility as well as lives in immobility (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002; Baldassar & Merla, 2014; Long, 2014). Yet family and relations can also become unstable, unreliable and disrupted – in many cases, displacement literally breaks these family figurations apart (Silver et al., 2018; Belloni, 2019; Lokot, 2020).

5.2.2 From Protracted Displacement and Multi-sited Transnationalism to Translocal Figurations of Displacement

The figurational approach is an inherently process- and temporality-oriented concept. Methodologically, it helps us to assess how structures and practices evolve and dissolve dynamically. It is thus suitable for analysing figurations of family and kin and their transformations over time. At a broader scale level, we can also apply a figurational lens in forced migration and refugee studies (Sökefeld, 2015; Rosenthal & Bogner, 2017). Figurations of displacement inevitably come into being when people are forcibly displaced in the context of violent conflict, when they flee from or are decoupled from the state in which they once lived or when they are forced to take on positions in new social settings in countries of first reception or asylum (Etzold et al., 2019). Such figurations of displacement can become protracted if the displaced people’s abilities and de facto available options to rebuild their lives after displacement are severely limited over long periods of time. Protracted displacement is shaped by violent practices, policies, laws, institutional settings and discourses in multiple nation states and places that, together, continue to prevent people from returning to their country of origin, from realising their potential and integrating in the place of (first) reception and from moving on to third countries to seek a future (Etzold et al., 2019).

Despite ‘being stuck in immobility’ in one place, displaced people’s lives are, however, not limited to one place only. Their social relations, including family and kin networks, often spread across multiple places and several nation states, as research on transnational mobility and diaspora relations of, for instance, Afghan or Somali refugees has demonstrated (Al-Ali et al., 2001; Horst, 2006; Harpviken, 2014; see also de Hoon and van Liempt, Chap. 3 in this volume). Acknowledging this central predicament, we examine Syrians’ protracted displacement from a figurational perspective as described above. By addressing the concerns of displaced persons for mobility, this approach enables an examination of both structure and agency in terms of the rigidity of systems and the capacities of individuals to change them. Figurations are useful to employ here because they are forms of durable connectivity that persist in the face of borders, policies and social and cultural practices that might otherwise serve to sever such ties.

‘Translocal figurations of displacement’ are constituted by de-territorialised interdependency relations, communication and transactions between nodal places in networks – for instance, the multiple interlinked sites where displaced family members live. In this chapter, we approach the questions and concerns of mobility through the lens of the extensive family and kin networks and ties – figurations of family and kin – into which displaced persons tap and in which they live. Mobility is then not only physical or geographic and place-based but is expressed in social, cultural, economic and political connections, identities and experiences that are multi-directional, non-linear and not limited to simply one locale. As the vast literature on transnationalism and translocality demonstrates, refugees and other migrants can and do exist in multiple places at the same point in time; they are simultaneously situated across different locales (Brickell & Datta, 2011). Their social practices and life-worlds are thus grounded in multi-nodal relations of translocal networks (Faist et al., 2013; Greiner & Sakdapolrak, 2013; Dahinden, 2017). As translocal figurations of displacement are constantly being reproduced through the practices of displaced people themselves and by those of other actors such as host states and communities or humanitarian NGOs, they are also re-configured by the changing power relations and by the way in which connections are being spun and dissolved. Here we thus want to highlight the dynamics in figurations of displacement – how they are transformed, become protracted or are resolved – and the role which translocal networks play in this regard.

5.3 The Protracted Displacement of Syrian Refugees in Jordan

Jordan has provided refuge to more than 1 million Syrians, over half of whom are registered as refugees (Sullivan & Tobin, 2014). Current figures place the refugee population at approximately 650,000, with around 120,000 refugees (19 per cent) living in camp settings, the two largest of which are Zaatari and Azraq (Ledwith, 2014; UNHCR, 2020). While much attention has been given to the camps, the majority of the Syrian refugees in Jordan now live in urban areas and cities and many initially left the camps under the kafala or ‘sponsorship’ system. To be allowed to leave a camp, a Jordanian national had to act as a legal guardian or sponsor (kafil), which permitted a Syrian refugee to leave. The kafala system applied to displaced refugees from Syria but was gradually dismantled and finally scrapped in 2015 (Alahmed, 2015). It is believed that some 34,000 Syrians have returned to Syria, both voluntarily and involuntarily (Edwards & Al-Hourani, 2019).

For the larger TRAFIG project from which the data for this chapter are drawn, we selected three urban field sites – the largest urban locations for Syrian refugees in North Jordan (Irbid and Mafraq) – while the third site (Zaatari) is Jordan’s largest (or at least most famous) refugee camp for Syrians. Irbid is the research site which we focus on here. Prior to the influx of Syrian refugees, Irbid was the second-largest urban area in the country (after the capital Amman) and was well-known for both urban crowding and a large number of institutions for higher education (UNHCR, 2016). In 2016, about 30 per cent – or nearly 110,000 – of the country’s urban refugees lived in the larger Irbid area (UNHCR, 2016; Tiltnes et al., 2019).

For most of these refugees, return to Syria or onward migration to Western Europe or North America are simply not realistic options (Federman, 2019). By the end of 2019 (UNHCR, 2019), 5952 individuals had been submitted for resettlement in 13 countries, and over 5000 refugees left Jordan in 2020 to rebuild their lives in a third country. In line with global trends, however, the number of resettlement places available for refugees in Jordan continues to decrease and remains far from meeting the estimated 75,000 refugees who need resettlement from Jordan. Returning to Syria is also difficult (Edwards & Al-Hourani, 2019). According to the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, 34,000 registered Syrian refugees have returned from Jordan since October 2018, when a key border crossing was reopened after years of closure. This is a fraction of the 650,000 registered Syrian refugees remaining in Jordan but a dramatic jump from previous years, when annual returns hovered at around 7000. This situation is compounded by the severe challenges to building an economically viable and secure livelihood in Jordan, where 90 per cent of Syrian refugees rely upon aid and institutional transfers (Tiltnes et al., 2019). As a result of the constraining forces and blocked pathways to resolving their conditions of protracted displacement (Etzold et al., 2019), Syrian refugees often find themselves contemplating, imagining and dreaming of better lives elsewhere but with few pathways to realise these ideas.

5.4 Syrians’ Entangled (Im)mobilities To, Within and Beyond Jordan

Utilising 23 biographical interviews with 17 women and 6 men aged in their 20s, 30s and 40s, we examine the ways in which figurational networks of family and kin shaped and reshape refugees’ experiences with and desires for mobility into and within Jordan and their aspirations beyond Jordan. In particular, we found that family and kin networks provide key socio-cultural structures and figurational contours to the mobility experienced by Syrians through (1) knowledge-sharing and (2) trust-based interactions. We acknowledge that organising our analysis into this pattern of into-within-beyond Jordan may reinforce the linear and singular narratives of migration mobility. However, we believe that the content of each section complicates that narrative, demonstrating that it is not nearly as straightforward as such a formation might imply. Thus, we begin by highlighting two of our in-depth biographical interviews to demonstrate the complex influence of family and kin-network figurations on mobility trajectories and aspirations.

The methodological contributions of using both biographical research and figurational sociology is explained in-depth in Rosenthal and Bogner (2017, 15–18). While biographical research concentrates on the individual recounting of events, experiences, and affect, figurational sociologicy has a stronger focus on the “collective and long-term processes” (17). When combined, analyses are able to reveal the “interrelations of dominant discourses and power inequalities within and between social grouping and figurations” (17). Through this innovative methodological approach, the meaning of first-hand experiences are understood and explained – not in isolation – but within the context of a transnational life-history of displacement that goes into-within-beyond nation-states. This method distinctly enables the processual analysis of figurational sociology, and it reconstructs the “emergence, persistence and modification of social phenomena… taking into account the permanent intertwining of life courses and biographical (self-)interpretations” (18). Rather than asking “why” – for example, “Why did you go to Jordan? Why did you leave the refugee camp? And why do you want to move to Europe?” – this method asks about the individual and collective history, circumstances, and course of events that brought forth this particular biographical constellation for both the individual and the collective. Thus, we argue that figurational sociology can be well-received through in-depth biographical interviews such as those that we have conducted.

5.4.1 In-Depth Biographical Interviews

As discussed above, one powerful way to better capture the powerful dynamics that family and kin networks have on mobility for Syrians in Jordan is through in-depth biographical interviews. Life histories provide an opportunity to draw new connections between life events that are often non-linear and multi-directional, with extensive collective influences. ‘Life histories are records of individuals’ personal experiences and the connections between them and past social events, while auto/biography treats these accounts not as established facts but as social constructions requiring further investigation and re-interpretation’ (Payne & Payne, 2004, 1). This is because people actively interpret the world in which they live, and in doing so engage in processes of the construction of the collective or ‘social’, including the individual and shared actions and by their individual and shared interpretations of it (Rosenthal & Bogner, 2017, 9).

It is this ability to understand the social constructions of life narratives in biographical interviews that is so valuable in capturing figurations of family and kin and their transformations. We start our empirical analysis with two interview case studies.

5.4.1.1 Biographical Interview 1: Um-Baha

Um-Baha is a married woman from Daraa, in southern Syria. She is in her late 40s, a mother of nine children and has elementary-level education. She was in Daraa with her family when the Syrian crisis began. Jordan was the closest country and they began thinking of going there – presumably for a short time – and that they would return after 2 or 3 months. Jordan was also the first choice because Um-Baha’s husband knows the country well, as he has visited it regularly with family and friends since 1999. Um-Baha’s husband and four oldest sons began preparing for the journey to Jordan before her and the rest of the children. Um-Baha’s mobility aspirations were oriented around fear for her children: she was afraid to stay in Syria with them, afraid to make the journey and endanger them and afraid to be somewhere new where she would be unable to help them as they needed. Thus, she did not want to leave Syria but one of her daughters had the traumatic experience of being sexually assaulted and several of her sons had been arrested by the Assad regime. After their release, her sons pushed to leave for Jordan.

The father and the oldest sons left Syria together in January 2013 and entered Jordan through the regular border, with the plan that they would get everything set up – such as an apartment, jobs and other arrangements – so that the rest of the family could join them later. Um-Baha followed a few weeks later with her five other children. She said:

We were a big group of people who travelled to Jordan together from Daraa. I didn’t know those we were travelling with, but I knew my husband was waiting for me in Jordan. Some people who had been doing this coordination [of Syrians out of Syria] charged us for it. They put us at the border. They were paid smugglers. I only saw them when they took us from our place in Daraa and dropped us at the border with Jordan. They organised the journey to the Naseeb border in Jordan. Then we were taken by the Jordanian army to Zaatari. In Zaatari – it was not a good place to stay. We arived in January 2013 and it was snowing. It was so difficult. They gave us blankets but it wasn’t enough. We were freezing.

Um-Baha and her five children were able to leave Zaatari after only 3 days because of her husband ‘vouching’ for her through the kafala (sponsorship) system. They first lived together in a neighbourhood outside Irbid called Kafa Raqab, and the Norwegian Refugee Council initially paid their rent. However, they did not like living outside the city and preferred to live closer to Irbid, even though they felt that the rent, water and electricity were too expensive in the city. Based on the recommendations of family members in Ramtha, including her mother, father and brothers, the family moved there a few months after arriving in Jordan in the spring of 2013. Now they are planning to stay in Ramtha. Um-Baha said, ‘No one has prevented me from moving but, as for me, I prefer to stay in Ramtha’. This is – at least to some degree – attributable to the presence of her family. Eight of her nine children now live in Ramtha, her parents and siblings are there and, together with her husband, this family figuration is residing in Ramtha and within a five-minute walk of each other. The one daughter not in Ramtha married and has moved back to Syria with her husband and their five children. They regret having returned to Syria and would like to go back to Jordan – presumably because they fear for their safety – but cannot do so due to border restrictions.

Um-Baha dreams of a better life. Economic conditions in Jordan are hard and the family must work together to make ends meet. Her sister and brother-in-law and their children were resettled in the USA in 2015 (they had arrived in Jordan before Um-Baha) and they keep in touch. This prompts her to think about the possibilities for improving her own life as well. When asked if she intends to stay in Jordan, she said, ‘No. This is not a good life for my boys here. I am thinking of a country other than Syria, a better place for my boys’. However, any real possibilities for onward migration are thwarted because her oldest married son refuses to travel to Europe and her grandchildren would not be eligible to go with her due to family reunification restrictions: Um-Baha is worried that any onward migration would split the family apart.

She said that they would consider returning to Syria to be near her daughter if the security situation improved. However, even if it did improve, she has a hard time imagining how they could do go back since they would be ‘starting from zero and my boys would have to go and serve in the army’. Her family in Syria has advised her not to return with her sons. She said, ‘It’s like the lottery – the settlement of conscription debts is not necessarily a given. Maybe they won’t have to go to jail for not serving but they could still be conscripted again’.

If she had a choice and the opportunity, Um-Baha would prefer to move to Canada, the UK or the USA. She said, ‘I’ve heard that men have secure jobs and health care and medication for everyone is important. My sister is in the US – her fourth year now – and says everything is good and perfect. But she is so distant from other family’. At one point, Um-Baha collected information from family and friends who are in the USA, cultivating her mobility aspirations to move there. They advised her to go; likewise for the UK. She started pushing a bit and asked her family members in those countries to submit the paperwork for family reunification in order to bring her. However:

Then I noticed that they apologised and deferred and said ‘Its too long and complicated’. Our relationship has grown distant. I keep asking the UNHCR about it. But they said our request is in the queue. For now, family is the most important factor for staying in Ramtha. I keep thinking about a better life for my kids, especially my 19-year-old son. He has health problems. I would like to secure my kids a better life and better work, wherever that might be.

5.4.1.2 Biographical Interview #2: Um-Alaa

The second biographical case is that of 44-year-old Um-Alaa, who is also from Daraa and lives in Ramtha. She has elementary-level education and was married – and subsequently separated – in Syria. She and her former husband have five children. During the protests and at the beginning of the crisis, her oldest son was arrested for protesting and was taken into custody in a Syrian prison. After 5 days he returned home, having been tortured and badly beaten. The next day Um-Alaa took her children to Jordan, in the hope of receiving medical treatment for her son there. They entered Jordan legally and her eldest was taken immediately to hospital. Um-Alaa says,

The journey was easy for us because it was so early in the crisis. This was only seven months into the crisis (in October 2011) so everyone was helpful and we could enter Jordan legally and were welcomed. I paid extra money for our passports to be made the same day my son came home. When we were exiting the Syrian side of the border, the police saw my son and said ‘You were the one calling for hurriya (freedom)’. I was silent and we didn’t say anything. They let us go. We had to leave. I was so worried that what happened to my oldest son would happen to the three younger ones. We had to leave to protect them. I was so afraid.

They stayed in Um-Alaa’s brother’s house in Jordan for a week or two. However, she experienced harassment from her sister-in-law. ‘She said she didn’t like me or my older sons. She’s the same age as my older sons, so it wasn’t appropriate to stay there’.

The next apartment they found was in a basement and they stayed there for 6 months until she found another house. Her brother did not help her in any way. In the absence of a strong family and kin network, she and her children subsisted with the help of humanitarian aid and were supported by various NGOs in the provision of household goods and blankets. Um-Alaa’s eldest son returned to Syria and stayed there for 2 years [presumably to fight in the crisis]. Um-Alaa tried her best to get him back to Jordan, reminding him that it was not safe for him in Syria but ‘He wasn’t convinced. He had to see it for himself. Eventually he returned to Jordan by irregular means and had to pass through Zaatari’. Her sons were able to start working and secure rent. However, she explains that it is expensive and difficult to make ends meet:

No one has forced us to stay here in Ramtha but we stay because it’s cheaper than other places outside Ramtha. And the culture and lifestyle are more similar to Daraa. I prefer this to Irbid, because the local Jordanians are more understanding and flexible. For example, the landlord can accept not getting rent for two months. In Irbid, they would go to court to get the rent. It’s too hard in Jordan and it’s really expensive. I have some distant family members who have returned to Syria and who regretted it. But my family encourage me to stay in Jordan because it’s better for us and safer and, if we return, the boys will be taken by the army. We talk on the phone sometimes but the police in Syria are always listening. Once I was foolish enough to ask them about returning to Syria and my sister said, ‘Shut up! Don’t talk about this!’ If the regime knew we are coming back, they would take my sons immediately.

Every 6 or 7 months, Um-Alaa receives about 200 Jordanian dinars (250 euros) for her sons from her mother-in-law, who is in Irbid. Um-Alaa’s husband has not visited her or the children in Jordan for more than 4 years. He lives in Kuwait – where he has been for an unknown length of time – and does not regularly send remittances. Her sister was granted asylum in Canada sometime before 2015. She sent remittances to Um-Alaa once; however, her husband told her not to send Um-Alaa any more money. Um-Alaa says, ‘Each one is thinking about himself. The war has split my family and I more than ever. The war has made us crude. No one supports me. I have no one to complain to, I only can say “Al-Hamdulilah” (praise God)’.

Um-Alaa applied for resettlement in another country but this was denied. She said,

It is mainly because of my husband. He doesn’t help us at all and still he – even in his absence – he’s causing me problems. When I applied for resettlement they said, ‘Why are you asking for resettlement when you have a hard-working and wealthy husband?’ My sister was lucky because she left Syria six months after me and was living in a very poor house when the UNHCR came to assess her situation. When they asked her about why she stayed there, she replied that this was all she could afford. But when they came to my house, they saw a better situation, so I was denied resettlement. … I don’t want to stay in Jordan, and I don’t want to return to Syria. I don’t have a house there anymore. The house has been destroyed and taken over by other groups. My sons would be taken. If I had daughters, it would be different. So I will stay here. Worrying about the rent is much better than worrying about your sons getting arrested and conscripted.

As the stories of Um-Baha and Um-Alaa demonstrate, mobility is not a straightforward and linear trajectory. Rather, mobilities are anchored in past experiences, subject to current realities and informed by future hopes and imaginaries. All of these are entangled in figurations of family and kin that invoke knowledge-sharing and trust-based interactions. In what follows, we break down the complexities of mobilities into to/through/beyond in order to illuminate the key players in place, the ambiguities of family figurations and the necessary knowledge-sharing and trust-based interactions which Syrians require as they consider their future elsewhere.

5.4.2 Arriving

We experienced death while we were alive (Um-Majid).

All our interviewees described haunting scenes of death and destruction in Syria. The need to leave the country and quickly – often the same day as a key family member died or returned from imprisonment – was reported by nearly all of our respondents. One of the first findings we gathered in our research is that the opposition groups in Syria played a critical role in helping people to leave Syria for Jordan; in this instance it was actually non-family and kin networks who provided knowledge-sharing and trust-based interactions. Three interviewees (Omar, Rayan, Abdullah) indicated that the opposition groups in Syria played a major role in securing their safe passage to the Jordanian border. Omar reported that the opposition groups used to keep a list of people who wanted to go to Jordan. When they gave their names at the opposition check points, they were treated especially well. The refugees were given the contact information of other people who had passed the same checkpoint, information about where to go, knowledge about the security situation and even coffee, tea and food. Rayan said that he was also well-received by the Jordanian soldiers after crossing the border and that they gave him everything he needed for the transfer to camp Zaatari. Finally, Abdullah did not name the opposition groups as such but explained that there was a ‘group of like-minded people’ who assisted him, his wife and their only son in their passage to Jordan. He indicated that the group gave them transportation, food and drink and left them in front of the Jordanian military for transport into the country for free. He indicated that ‘This group of people has permission to travel to the border areas’, which is how they were able to facilitate the family’s passage.

This group referred to above is one set of key players beyond family networks which provided support for mobility and passage into Jordan. This demonstrates that non-family networks may work to ‘fill in a gap’ of knowledge or trust when needed but, of course, they cannot be relied upon in the same way as family networks. Opposition groups were often paid for their ‘services’ rather than providing them for free for family. In other words, the Syrians were very lucky that they had received support from opposition groups and that they had the resources to pay for it if needed.

Yet, not everyone was so lucky: one woman we interviewed (Um-Hussein) indicated, for example, that her house in Syria was sited in a militarily strategic location next to the police station. In an effort to confiscate her house for military operations, the police forcibly removed her from it and beat her to the point that she needed to go to Jordan for medical treatment. Her daughter and son were also badly injured in this event and in need of medical care in Jordan while her husband was then killed by the police. Driven out by warring factions, she migrated to Jordan with her children and sister, whose husband was also killed in Syria, and are now living in the same house in Jordan. Others (Hanan; Um-Khalid; Jasmine) reported that opposition groups in Syria would bring in a large bus that could transfer 40–50 people and demand that the Syrians leave, driving them to Jordan. The families would quickly organise themselves into large groups and travel on the buses together.

In addition to these encounters with opposition groups in Syria, family and kin networks played a key role in these passages out of the country and into Jordan, mainly because all our respondents travelled in such groups and often remained in those groups in Jordan, which had longer-term impacts upon residency patterns there. Family groups who were also neighbours prior to displacement were particularly strong and stable figurations this way: they went to Jordan together and were then mobile together within Jordan, especially in our field sites. Thus, we found not only that figurations of family, kin and as neighbourhoods are strongly interlinked but also that these connectivities proved to be essential for their respective mobilities within Jordan.

5.4.3 Moving Within

I wanted to move out as soon as possible (Noura).

Most of the interviewees who had entered Jordan by irregular means were sent to Zaatari. All those whom we interviewed who came through Zaatari described hating the camp due to the dire conditions they experienced there – no bathrooms, no drinking water and an inhospitable environment without adequate protection from the weather and the elements. Um-Baha said:

When we saw Al-Zaatari camp – Wow!! – I wondered how the people there could tolerate it; there were no tents and it was raining as we arrived there in the winter (January 2013). At the time, it was snowing; we could not sleep because it was too cold and lots of snow; there were no sheets except one blanket for each person which they gave us when we arrived.

Um-Wael and Noura even said, on seeing and experiencing Zaatari, that they would have been better off if they had died in Syria.

Our research shows that figurations of family and kin and mobility out of Zaatari were highly intertwined. Roughly, there were two groups of Syrians in Zaatari: those who had extended family in Jordan and those who did not. For the latter, their only means of leaving Zaatari was to ‘skip out’ and leave, knowing that they were jeopardising their legal status in Jordan and their ability to receive UNHCR assistance.

For the former, they were able to invoke trust-based interactions in their family and kin networks to leave Zaatari under the kafala or ‘sponsorship’ system, as Um-Baha experienced it above. A Jordanian national had to act as legal guardian or sponsor (kafil) in order for a Syrian refugee to be permitted to leave the camp. This demonstrated a very high level of trust: if the Syrian who was ‘bailed out’ of Zaatari was in trouble (legally, socially, financially, etc.), the sponsor (kafil) was ‘on the hook’ in the eyes of the Jordanian government. The kafala system applied to displaced refugees from Syria but was gradually dismantled and finally scrapped in 2015 (Alahmed, 2015). All our interviewees arrived before the dismantling of the kafala and many reported that their extended family networks in Jordan were a key element in their mobility out of Zaatari through these trust-based interactions. Um-Wael, from Daraa, Syria, even explained that the kafala had so strengthened her family networks that she sought to bring more family members from Syria to Jordan, then through and out of the camp via the kafala system. However, by that time (2015) the border had closed. Jordan was no longer taking Syrian refugees and they were unable to assist Syrian family members this way.

Waleed, also from Daraa said that he went in 2013 after consulting with his family first. He moved to Jordan with everyone except his married daughter because she was with her husband and their children. They moved as a group with family and neighbours from Daraa. He was motivated to leave Syria because he was afraid that his wife and daughters would be raped, as he heard other people had experienced this. He chose Jordan because he believed that he would not be mature enough to start a new life in a completely new country. He said that he knew Jordan and was more comfortable with the decision to go there and to do so with his extended family: ‘It didn’t feel so foreign’. He said he had family in Zaatari camp, the Mafraq area and around Jordan in general. Others echoed a similar sentiment.

Many, if not most, of the Syrian families we interviewed had extended family and kin networks in the Jordanian city of Ramtha, which facilitated their movement there in knowledge-sharing and trust-based interactions. They specifically facilitated their movement through promises of further strengthening the connections inside their figurations of family and kin through marriage and commercial relationships. In fact, so many Syrians from the Daraa region have now moved to Ramtha that one – Um-Osama – said, ‘Ramtha even looks like Daraa’. Um-Rashid, a Syrian woman we interviewed, had multiple family and kin networks, which facilitated her move to Ramtha with her nuclear family. However, her husband’s family was in Irbid and she thought they could get help from his family and kin network. They moved to Irbid for 2 months to join the husband’s family network but ended up disliking it and returned to Ramtha. Ramtha, some interviewees reported, has the highest rate of integration for Syrians in Jordan, making it an especially valued location for those Syrians keen on maintaining their family and kin-network relations and trust-based interactions.Footnote 3

In our research we also found that many displaced persons were simultaneously embedded in multiple and overlapping figurations of family and kin, with the option of facilitating mobility in differing directions. Multiple migrations and iterations of movement within Jordan were then also the results of access to these multi-nodal networks. Some interviewees indicated that, in the earlier days and years of Syrian migration to Irbid, people simply had to take whatever housing they could find based on knowledge-sharing provided by family members. They believed that the situation was temporary and that they would be returning to Syria soon. Thus, they accepted housing wherever they could afford it. Over time, it became clear that the Syrian crisis would be more long-lasting and the Syrians began to find more permanent places, again obtained through knowledge-sharing in their family and kin networks. Many began a process of urban-to-rural migration to the surrounding villages as a means to limit their housing costs. For example, some moved to the semi-urban area of Ajloon. However, it was not overly friendly to Syrians, as it is a closed tribal area for Jordanians. Without other Syrians around, early migrants to the area turned to kin and family networks again for help to return to urban areas. Family and kin networks have played such a strong role for mobility that quite specific residency patterns of Syrian refugees have become established within Jordan: for example, we have found that Syrians from Aleppo and Damascus typically go to Amman and people from Daraa go to Ramtha and Irbid.

Another example was Um-Hosam, who had previously worked in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where she had a good financial status and lifestyle. She had visited Syria a few weeks before the crisis because she was preparing for her third son’s wedding to a locally resident Syrian woman. She stayed with her other two sons while her husband returned to the UAE. The crisis began and she was stuck in Syria, unable to return to join her husband. She fled by irregular means to Jordan (that is, without the proper border-crossing documentation and the processing of her refugee status with the Government of Jordan or the UNHCR) with her three sons, her brothers and her parents and they were immediately placed in Zaatari. They were able to use the kafala process with local family members and to leave Zaatari. After a time, her two oldest sons went on to Turkey then fled overseas and on to the UK. Her parents used their extended family networks to move to Doha, Qatar. She is now in Jordan with her youngest son who is still in school. She feels that she has lost everything: not only did she lose a well-paid job in the UAE but also, because of multiple family and kin networks and their use by her family members, she is now alone with one son in Jordan while her family are flung across the globe. In this case, family and kin networks left some members behind without support.

Having close family and kin networks does not automatically mean that Syrians desire to live with or next to their family members. Many Syrians indicated that ‘family is far away’, even if they are in the same region or country of Jordan. This echoes the work of Lokot (2020), in which the ambiguities of family relations emerge as simultaneously limiting social interactions with ‘outsiders’ while also having a greater potential to unravel.

5.4.4 Moving On

Frankly speaking, no, we don’t intend to stay in Jordan. But we haven’t found a country to move to. So, in Jordan we live in a spacious prison (Leila).

One important topic of conversation amongst our interviewees was whether or not returning to Syria would be feasible. Some Syrians in Jordan have, of course, already returned. Estimates vary but most cite the economic challenges of living in Jordan as a main driver for some 34,000+ Syrians to return from there (Edwards & Al-Hourani, 2019). The decision not to return to Syria (which constitutes all our interviewees, as we do not have access to those who returned to Syria), is not always an easy one and is often fraught with trauma and bad memories of the crisis in Syria, even as life in Jordan presents its own host of challenges. A few women whom we interviewed said that they would not go back there in the near future because of such memories of Syria. One woman, Israa, recounted how her mother was shot and the family buried her body outside the house and next to a window. She said:

All of us (me and my uncles) decided that we did not have any hope of staying [in Syria]. At the time [as they were leaving], my grandmother wanted to go to her house and she was diabetic. While she was climbing the stairs, they just shot her. She was crippled and died on the spot; we crawled on the ground to drag her from her empty house and buried her in the yard under our window… I will return home someday and remember her outside that window.

In this case, we see mobility imaginaries and family relations intimately intertwined.

Some families are now split as a result of some members returning to Syria while others remain in Jordan. As in the case of Um-Baha, Um-Osama reported that her older son had returned to Syria to be near family and he is therefore no longer able to come back to Jordan. She has applied for permission to visit him and her family in Syria with guaranteed return to Jordan. She has no desire to go onwards to Germany, despite being offered asylum there under the terms of family reunification, because she would be even further away from her son and family in Syria. Furthermore, her sons in Jordan with her are unable to go to Syria or Germany under the current legal rules and thus she feels that staying in Jordan with them is best. In this case our interviewee is weighing different powerful and compelling ties in her family and kin-network relationships. As a result of these globally dispersed social relations of Syrians, most of our interviewees expressed some desire to travel outside Jordan but not necessary for permanent relocation. Some, such as Um-Osama, Un-Faisal, Um-Mustafa and Hanan, wished to travel temporarily to rekindle and protect their figurations of family and kin only but not necessarily to live with them in a new place.

We inquired about our interviewees’ onward migration aspirations from Jordan, asking about their motivations, possibilities, desires and preferences. Many reported that, if they were to leave Jordan, they would either return to Syria or go on to Europe. Comments such as this one by Jasmine were relatively common: ‘We are thinking of moving, but we cannot afford it. We have no country in mind, but we would choose Britain’. There are restrictions against Syrians entering other Arab countries, even Gulf states where they have relatives, which made them less-frequently referenced. Family reunification is perceived to be easier in Europe than in the Gulf states. Some information about mobility possibilities came from the internet, as Israa found: ‘My cousin has been in Britain for nine years now. They are doing very well. He has three daughters. We searched their profiles on the net and found out that they are living well’.

The Syrians we interviewed described an image of Europe in which they would have a better life, lifestyle, gardens/outdoor life, better work and better opportunities for the children’s education. One woman, Um-Saif, said, ‘I want my kids to go back to school. I cannot afford to send them to private school. Their achievement is now below satisfactory. I wish I could move to another country to get a better education for my children’. Another, Jasmine, said, ‘My cousin is in Denmark. She told me that life there is good, too. She does not pay house rent. The government supports them with everything’. Such comments – like that of Um-Saif – were often prefaced with reference to the knowledge-sharing networks that the Syrians used to imagine such futures, such as ‘They [relatives already in Britain] tell us… The role of family and kin networks in knowledge-sharing was key in the cultivation of mobility aspirations and imagining new futures. Furthermore, their role in trust-based interactions was also important. Any steps which family members took towards actual onward mobility (through asylum applications to the UNHCR or family reunification, for example) were grounded in pre-existing family and kin networks that provided actionable knowledge and information. The movement to Europe is often encouraged by family members who already live there and provide knowledge on the journey and the conditions ‘elsewhere’ and who are also a trusted and a potential source of necessary finances for a very challenging onward journey.

We also found that market and demographic perceptions also constitute an important driver for Syrian aspirations for onward migration to Europe: Syrians did not want to migrate to countries where there was already a large presence of Syrian refugees for fear of ‘overtaxing’ the system and labour markets. Those who expressed a desire for Germany often selected it due to family reunion. However, the perception was that there are already a large number of Syrians in Germany and our interviewees more frequently preferred to go to other countries where there are fewer Syrians in order to have been economic opportunities – other Syrians are economic competition. As Waleed said: ‘Britain is my favourite but, if I had the chance to move to another country such as Canada or Germany, I would’. Most were averse to France, due to the colonial history and political relations between France and Syria. Sweden and Norway were mentioned only a few times due to family networks there. The USA was overwhelmingly not preferred and several interviewees refused to migrate there. One refused because she was afraid of the high crime rates in the USA.

The UK was the most preferred choice of the Syrians whom we interviewed, followed by Canada. Syrians in Jordan with family members in the UK were said to encourage their pursuit of family immigration to the UK, with claims of free healthcare, education and housing. UK support for refugees is seen as generous (compared with other countries) and is considered the ideal country amongst our interviewees. Syrians came to these conclusions based on their wider knowledge-sharing and on the information provided by family members and, more specifically, by other, mostly kin, contacts already living there. Widely positive expressions of being happy and satisfied with the healthcare and education in the UK and experiences of being treated well by society and the government are frequently shared within transnational social figurations. There is an overlap between trust-based interactions and knowledge-sharing in this case: there is a very popular facebook group for Syrians in the UK and any Syrians in Jordan who are given the opportunity to go to the UK describe the developing smaller knowledge-transfer groups and receiving a tour and orientation in the UK together.

However, the likelihood of gaining asylum or being granted onward migration to Europe was considered quite slim and random. We encountered one unusual case of a Syrian, Nidal, who opted out of his networks in order to increase his poverty and vulnerability as a means to – presumably – increase his chances for UNHCR-sponsored asylum. He refused to apply for jobs or work so that he could focus on applying for asylum instead. He has a wife and child and his wife is pregnant again. He has not been offered UNHCR-sponsored asylum. We are calling this ‘strategic marginalisation’ or ‘strategic impoverishment’.

5.5 Conclusions

This chapter has discussed the complex and myriad ways in which figurations of family and kin shape Syrian refugees’ experiences and mobility to and within Jordan and their aspirations beyond the country. Through qualitative interviews, we examine the ways in which family and kin networks provide key structures and contours to the mobility experienced and desired by Syrians to/in/beyond Jordan, especially through knowledge-sharing and trust-based interactions.

Knowledge-sharing in family and kin networks proved key for providing the information that Syrians used to assess whether and how they could – or should – be mobile. It was vital for the development of informed decisions in areas such as health, safety, education, work and future prospects. In general, the more extensive (in terms of network density and spatial dispersion) these knowledge-sharing networks are – especially in family and kin forms – the more confident Syrians in Jordan were about their actual and prospective mobility.

However, it is not the case that family and kin networks were always positive influences. As Lokot (2020) and Stevens (2016) have shown, family and kin networks amongst Syrians in Jordan are extremely taxed, brittle and thin. Due to the protractedness of the Syrian crisis, family members are now scattered around the world. On the one hand, this meant more possibilities, both imagined and real, for mobility through family reunification or resettlement – or even within Jordan between cities and towns. On the other, the extensive and distant ties of family networks could – and did – split families, in ways that were both painful and frustrating, resulting in missed funerals, births and everyday companionship. Trust-based interactions within translocal figurations of family and kin were ambiguous; they tended to provide for both safety and security out of Syria and within Jordan, even as entangled future aspirations. Based on those experiences, many Syrians imagined the possibilities of mobility outside of Jordan, only to find these hopes not being fulfilled as family and kin relations are less robust or reliable than expected or even breaking up and thus not providing any support and orientation at all.

Overall, our research shows that close and strong ties to members of the (extended) family who live in the same country of reception or in other nations do provide essential support and a sense of identity and unity in protracted displacement situations. The translocal figurations of family and kin can, however, also be seen as ‘ambivalent entanglements’ that cannot provide the necessary information or resources or can even block opportunities to move out of protractedness. Such situations render possibilities for onward mobility more imaginary than real for many of these Syrians.

Future research would benefit from a gendered analysis of these networks – who supports and nurtures these networks, who provides information and access, who benefits from them and in which ways. Surely gender plays a role in untangling these ambivalences, finding patterns of attachment and rupture and uncovering ways in which Syrians may find solutions to the ongoing challenges of protracted displacement?