ABSTRACT
The Hashemite Kingdom, characterised by its political stability, has overcome a number of challenges in order to avoid the far-reaching political processes experienced by its neighbours within the Arab Uprisings. Among those challenges was the first public and joint criticism made by tribal leaders against the monarchy. These criticisms revealed the recent deep erosion of an authoritarian pact based on patron-client dynamics. In this sense, the chapter analyses the central role of brokerage played by tribal organisation as the regime’s main clients and essential pillar of the foundational authoritarian pact. However, they also act as sub-patrons towards their own clients, i.e. the Jordanian citizens. Using process-tracing analysis, this chapter shows how neoliberal economic reforms undertaken in the last decades led to privatisation, which in turn weakened the clientelistic distributive capacity of both the authoritarian regime and the tribes. However, these first emerging fractures have been overtaken by the existing regional chaos, a development that has reinforced the king’s image as a pole of stability in the fight against ‘terror’. In short, this chapter sheds light on the patron-client dynamics that structure Jordanian politics by analysing the intermediary role played by tribes before and during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’.
