Imperial Privilege and the Political Economy of Jordan’s Garment Industry

Venue Room H405 - 28 rue des Saints-Pères

In January 2024, garment production ground to a halt in factories clustered in industrial zones on the outskirts of Zarqa, Irbid, and Amman. Deliveries of fabric and accessories from Asia were delayed as shipping routes through the Bab al-Mandab Strait were disrupted amid escalating regional conflict. As warehouses emptied, thousands of South Asian migrant workers living in dormitories within Jordan’s industrial zones were left without work, wages, or renewed contracts. This moment of disruption reveals the fragility of Jordan’s second-largest export sector and its deep entanglement in geopolitical dynamics far beyond its borders.

Revisiting this rupture, the presentation examines Jordan’s precarious insertion into global garment value chains through US preferential trade agreements. It traces how neoliberal development became intertwined with Arab–Israeli normalisation and the consolidation of authoritarian rule through the creation of extra-territorial industrial zones. By situating supply chain disruption within broader processes of trade diplomacy, territorial restructuring, and labour governance, the talk interrogates the political geographies of global production. Drawing on ethnographic research, it shows how sovereignty is selectively reconfigured to facilitate capital circulation while driving the dispossession and exclusion of local communities. In doing so, it deepens the rift between official narratives of development and lived realities, producing grievances that are governed through authoritarian containment.

Speaker: 
Katharina Gruneisl - Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham and an affiliated researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis. She is a geographer and ethnographer whose research focuses on labour, markets, and urban transformation.

Discussant: Hisham Bustani - Visiting Researcher at Sciences Po (CERI), working on the political economy of energy in the MENA region, as well as on postcolonial states.