A Recipe for Resilience: The Shifts in the Domestic and Foreign Authoritarian Religious Policies of the Jordanian Regime (1979-2024)

Abstract

This thesis studies the domestic and foreign religious policies of the Jordanian regime from 1979 to 2024. It provides a long-term multi-level analysis. It analyses the different ways in which the Jordanian regime (the “governor”) manages religious actors (the intermediaries) to protect its political interests and enhance its ability to face threats. This qualitative study complements the literature based on fieldwork research, including a hundred semi-directed interviews. It identifies four main phases of Jordanian religious policies and explains the reasons why the regime contracts different actors and manages them differently during each period. Using the governor’s dilemma theory and the competence-control trade-off at its core, this thesis shows how the Jordanian regime at times simultaneously partners with different religious intermediaries at various policy levels to exploit their distinct competences and reach separate target groups. Yet, this study demonstrates that the regime does so with the same long-term policy goals: avoiding the politicisation of Islamic actors and protecting its political resilience. The analysis demonstrates the importance of considering external factors, such as foreign influences, when studying indirect governance relationships between governors and their intermediaries. Therefore, this thesis presents an updated version of the governor’s dilemma theory to better integrate such elements in future analyses of indirect governance relationships. This research also informs our understanding of authoritarian regimes and highlights their adaptability, often overlooked due to the prevalent biased pre-conceptions that authoritarian regimes are inflexible.