A condition of excess characterizes Iraqi exiles' everyday life in Jordan: excesses of waiting and anticipation, bureaucratic work, and aspirations for future benevolent governance. To grapple with this excess, they have had to develop strategies that render their lives in exile more manageable. Despite being hosted as “guests” of the Hashemite monarchy—an ambitious status evoking notions of pan‐Arab solidarity and Arab traditions of hospitality—this status does not guarantee or grant them access to substantive citizenship rights. In light of this, Iraqi exiles who arrived in Jordan following the US‐led invasion of Iraq in 2003 have often found themselves dependent on potentially injurious ways to navigate their presence. One of these strategies are relations and practices of faḍl, a form of exchange governed by a foreclosure of reciprocity and necessity of public recognition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among what I refer to as the Iraqi exilic milieu in Jordan, this article examines how, in the absence and denial of expected forms of exchange, the circulation of stately faḍl and its cooptation by ordinary people articulate new notions and practices of valuable yet nevertheless wounding citizenship.
It was only after the invasion of 2003 and the gradual collapse of the Iraqi state that cellphones began to surface on Iraq's public market, for they have been previously banned by the regime of Saddam Hussein. This fairly recent breakage of the digital barrier rendered Iraq at the time as one of the most promising ICTs markets in the Middle East, with critical consequences on the larger Iraqi society, particularly since it also saw the introduction of the previously banned Internet. Using personal experience, as well as interviews with Iraqis from Baghdad, this paper argues that Iraqis creatively employed, and continue to employ, ICTs and Cellphones not merely as a tool of reconnection between the Iraqi diaspora and the homeland (and vice versa), continuously reconstructing their national identities, but also as tool of survival and risk assessment for Iraqis on the inside. This is of particular importance since the devastating consequences of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq are still evident on the Iraqi social, urban, and political space until this day.
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