At the state’s gate: The uncomplicated coexistence of ideas about rights and hospitality among Syrian refugee youths in Jordan

Based on qualitative research with Syrian and Jordanian youth in Jordan in 2021-23, this essay unfolds the pragmatic ways in which young Syrians knocked on the gate of the Jordanian state. As Jordan (like most neighbouring states) has presented its welcome of Syrians as an act of hospitality to guests, Syrians have been given very few rights but have largely been allowed to self-settle. While hospitality as an approach to refugee governance has been criticised by researchers and international aid agencies, the young Syrians with whom I worked neither rejected nor fully embraced hospitality. Rather they responded to the situation by balancing their gratefulness for hospitality with various arguments for rights that heeded the specificity of circumstances in Jordan. In this way they charted out locally anchored ways to improve their situation. The article argues that efforts to aid Syrians could benefit significantly from taking such pragmatic youth perspectives into account and suggests that this would be true for other refugee situations as well. As most of the youths I worked with prefer to stay in Jordan at least until the situation in Syria improves considerably, their perspectives are also still relevant to their own predicament.