Orphaned Youth in Jordan: Constraints of Patriarchal Citizenship

Despite a formal discourse of equal citizenship in Jordan, orphaned youth, especially those with no lawful lineage are still marginalised and excluded. This thesis examines how orphaned youth in Jordan enact their citizenship in the legal, social and civil society fields. An ethnographic study with a group of politically active orphans in Amman was conducted mainly focused on unstructured interviews. Bourdieu’s Social Reflexivity Theory and a framework of citizenship theories in the Arab World are used to analyse various aspects of the orphan’s experiences in the three above-mentioned fields. I argue that within all fields, various aspects of orphan’s citizenship are constrained by patriarchal and patrilineal structures and habitus.