Abstract
This chapter analyses the role of household-level refugee hosting relationships in refugees’ experiences of home in protracted displacement. Conceptualised as relationships of care, the everyday practice of hosting holds the potential for home within an uncertain and hostile context. Yet, this is an incomplete and transient home, restricted by the temporal, legal, and political limitations of protracted displacement. Based on qualitative research with Sudanese refugee men living in urban Amman, I look at the day-to-day experience of living in a refugee-refugee hosting relationship in with the socio-economic dynamics of Sudanese refugeehood. Household-level hosting is an overlooked practice within humanitarian and forced migration studies, yet it is by paying attention to the everyday ways in which particular refugee groups create and experience relations of care that we can re-focus our attention on how refugees inhabit, experience, and negotiate protracted urban displacement.
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Notes
- 1.
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with Syrian, Somali, Sudanese, and Iraqi refugees. Alongside nationality, the non-representative sample took into consideration gender, age, marital status, presence of children, and physical disability.
- 2.
For further discussion of race and gender in the Jordanian humanitarian context, see Turner (2018)
- 3.
This figure includes asylum seekers, refugees, and people of concern registered with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Jordan is a non-signatory to the Refugee Convention and its 1967 protocol. However, UNHCR is well-established in the country, with the refugee response governed by the 1998 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Government of Jordan and UNHCR.
- 4.
This has changed quite considerably in the years since I completed my interviews in 2018. A number of key donors now prioritise a One Refugee Approach and there is much greater awareness of the specific needs of Sudanese and other non-Syrian refugee groups in Jordan.
- 5.
This is the highest number of different housing arrangements reported by any of the Sudanese men in my study, all of whom, with the exception of one more recent arrival, had lived in Amman for approximately five years.
- 6.
Given my focus on speaking to men currently living in hosting relationships this is not surprising. It would be interesting to spend more time with those who had chosen not to engage in hosting relationships to understand their motivations and alternative strategies for living in the city.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank those who participated in my research, for their initial involvement and for their continued engagement with my work, as well as Dina Baslan and Israa Sadder, without whom I would not have met these men. I would also like to thank Cathrine Brun for her guidance during the doctoral research that informs this paper. Finally, I thank the reviewers for their helpful feedback, and the editors for guiding this work to publication. All errors and omissions remain my own. Funding was provided by an Oxford Brookes University 150th Anniversary Studentship, and an ISA Charity Trust travel grant.
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Jordan, Z. (2022). Refugee-Refugee Hosting as Home in Protracted Urban Displacement: Sudanese Refugee Men in Amman, Jordan. In: Shamma, Y., Ilcan, S., Squire, V., Underhill, H. (eds) Migration, Culture and Identity. Politics of Citizenship and Migration. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12085-5_3
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