ABSTRACT
For thousands of years, the Azraq wetlands, east of Amman, the capital of Jordan, have been an important stopover for bird migrations between Europe and Africa. In the twentieth century, though, growing water consumption in the burgeoning metropolis nearby depleted the Azraq Basin. This chapter speaks to existing research in Forced Migration Studies on home-making in protracted displacement and legal limbo. Exploring parallels between bird and human flight, it uses the concept of ‘homing’ to study the entanglements of home-making and mobility among Syrian refugees in Zaatari Village, a small settlement on the doorstep of Zaatari Camp. The chapter looks at the different roles that Syrian refugees occupy in the village: as temporary guests within a securitized nation-state framework; as kinsmen who are bound to their Jordanian hosts by translocal ties; and as low-skilled foreign workers within uneven regional labour markets. It draws on a total of fourteen months of fieldwork in northern Jordan in 2016-17.
