Jordan leads the Arab world in its efforts to tackle domestic abuse against women and children. Since 1997 the Family Protection Department in the PSD has forefronted the state’s campaign, albeit with extensive involvement of women’s rights groups, many of which are associated with members of the Royal Family. And yet, extensive public opposition remains to state intervention into the private affairs of the family. In the absence of ‘spontaneous consent’ for the Family Protection Department, the police rely on strategies of power including royal and external patronage, alliances with women’s rights movements, legal strictures and, ultimately, coercion, to undertake their work. The chapter draws on interviews with police officers, lawyers, women’s rights groups as well as societal figures opposed to the initiative.

Post-2011, in the aftermath of the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan, the promotion of community policing has received notable support from Jordan’s Western allies, and a successful initiative piloted in refugee camps to improve liaison between the police and residents was subsequently expanded to the wider host community. But community policing is an amorphous concept that has varied interpretations in different societies depending on the nature of the prevailing social order. This chapter explores some of the shifting understandings of community policing within the Public Security Directorate, which blend perceptions of Jordan’s tribal identity, with its reputation for low crime rates and a small population, and the notion of civic duty within an increasingly neoliberal society. The latter idea of civic duty, which in what is ultimately an illiberal authoritarian context, restricts the degree to which genuine police–public partnerships are possible in Jordan.

How and why do the Jordanian police still have recourse to customary tribal traditions to impose social order on the population despite the fact that the regime has, overall, reduced its reliance on, and patronage for, East Bank ‘tribal’ figures? Using the example of ‘blood crimes’ (offences in which an individual is injured or killed), this chapter explores how the state, through the police, insinuates itself into various traditional dispute management practices and adapts them to contemporary needs. The chapter evaluates the relative importance of the police, administrative governors and other societal figures, including tribal notables and local headmen (mukhātir), in dealing with cases including assault, fatal traffic accidents and murder. It also considers the various reasons why, on the whole, different components of the population comply with these practices, thereby buying into contemporary forms of ʿashāʾiriyya, whilst highlighting instances of resistance.

Police practices substantiate legal abstractions, but frequently the police are influenced by normative frameworks beyond the framework of the civil laws that regulate their work.This chapter examines the interrelationship between Jordan’s tradition of legal pluralism and the hegemonic values that influence different kinds of social order. It also considers how the civil legal system takes account of tribal settlements with respect to the ‘personal right’ accorded to victims, and reviews how the blend of customary, formalised tribal, Islamic and civil legal traditions that co-exist in Jordan shape the field of practice within which the police manage grievances. Frequently exercising discretion, the police treat some of these grievances as crimes, and others as disputes between citizens, reflecting the common reticence of citizens to prosecute cases in the civil courts.

In Jordan, social order has historically emerged as a result of the regime’s laws, policies and institutions, but also as a result of practices established and modified from above and below. This chapter lays the ground for the book’s subsequent examination of how the Public Security Directorate intervenes into citizens’ lives and how citizens have recourse to the police, by tracing the emergence of several hegemonic projects in the Kingdom. These projects are largely grounded in the nature of patron–client alliances forged since the establishment of the modern state between the Hashemites and the East Bank Transjordanian population on the one hand, and Western liberal democracies on the other. Whilst uneven and increasingly amalgamated, these alliances have supported the dissemination of a tribal order, which for several decades enjoyed a large degree of hegemonic consent. and more recently a ‘neoliberal-civic’ order, which is facing an appreciable counter-hegemonic pushback from below and paradoxically fostering an increased reliance on kinship networks.

The everyday policing of common offences tells us a great deal about what kind of social order a states promote. Yet, this introductory chapter argues that while the ‘high-policing’ of behaviours deemed to threaten regime security in the Middle East has attracted scholarly attention, the ‘low-policing’ of more mundane, interpersonal disputes and citizens’ grievances has been largely overlooked. In a bid to address that deficit, this book studies the development of the state’s civil police agency, the Jordanian Public Security Directorate, since the formation of the modern state, and, drawing on legal anthropology as well as political science, focuses on how it manages certain kinds of common disputes in coordination and/or competition with other societal actors. The introduction emphasises the book’s key message, that rather than being primarily concerned with law enforcement, the police are preoccupied with order. In the Jordanian context, the type of order they promote is heavily influenced by tribal traditions, which have more recently been merged with conceptions of civic duty and neoliberal prerogatives. The chapter also affirms the importance of challenging binaries between ‘coercive’ and ‘consensual’ policing, by showing that in pursuit of hegemony, the police have recourse to varied strategies of power.

This chapter maps the emergence and development of the police as part of the Jordanian state’s institutional infrastructure. Starting with a brief overview of policing in early Muslim societies and policing in Transjordan under the Ottoman Empire, the chapter then focuses on the organisational development of the police (in towns and the countryside) within the Arab Legion under Glubb Pasha and the British Mandate until the separation of the police from the military in 1956 and the creation of the Public Security Directorate (PSD). The discussion of various police roles within the Legion indicates that while coercion featured prominently in the early days of the state, the police were concerned not only with ‘repression’ or ‘law-enforcement’, but also with social ordering. The chapter’s second section highlights and seeks to make sense of a series of seeming paradoxes within the contemporary PSD relating to ideas about it as a civic service or a quasi-military force, as a guardian of conservativism, and/or a heralder of modernity; and as being at once ubiquitous and /or ‘laissez-faire’.

Scholars of authoritarian resilience are often preoccupied with studying macro-events and institutions to explain regime durability. This book has, however, argued that studying the more mundane practices embodied in police management of common interpersonal disputes and problems can tell us much more about the social order that underscores regime survival, and about challenges to that order. This concluding chapter of the book considers the rise of ‘neoliberal securitised policing’ which has resulted from Jordan’s opening up over recent decades to globalisation and privatisation, and the increased importance the regime has accorded militant (and often Islamist) threats to national security. These trends clearly invite comparative and transnational analysis, but ultimately, it is argued, their iterations in the Jordanian context can be best understood at the micro-level, using a legal anthropology lens. The chapter also reiterates the utility of using a Gramscian framework to understand the construction, and undermining, of social order, in which a variety of strategies are used to arrive at consent.