‘The waiting place’: refugee resilience and documentation in Jordan

This research paper aims to present the deep disconnect between how refugees understand and strive to achieve their own resilience as opposed to how humanitarianism thinks and operates resilience. It seeks to concretely answer: ‘how do refugees strategize to become resilient in Jordan?’. To focus the scope of the question and answer it, this research paper builds on Hilhorst and Jansen’s understanding of humanitarianism as an ‘arena’ that is ‘shaped’ by actors ‘negotiating’ around the chain of aid. This will be done by exploring how refugees perceive their own resilience, and how they negotiate that resilience around the hu-manitarian arena in Jordan using documentation as a lens of investigation. This research pa-per will argue that refugees experience Jordan as an ‘arena of crises’, and their own resilience as the negotiation process to move from (and within) one crisis to another whereas docu-mentation is a technology of humanitarian resilience governing.