Jordan, throughout its modern history, has dealt with large waves of refugees, making it one of the countries hosting the highest percentage of refugees relative to its population. The kingdom hosts around 1.3 million Syrian citizens, including more than 671,000 registered refugees with the United Nations. Only about 10% of these refugees live in refugee camps, while the rest are spread across local communities, leading to increasing negative repercussions amid the ongoing Syrian crisis. Jordan, under its Hashemite leadership, provided assistance to refugees based on deep-rooted humanitarian, moral, and national values. However, the kingdom emphasizes…
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Timokleia Psallidaki is a member of the GAPs research team in Greece at the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE). She is a PhD candidate in Migration Studies and Human Geography at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Her research interests include migration, border transformations, practices of migrants’ settlement in the city, socio-spatial inequalities, European migration policies, mobility, and precarity. During my postgraduate studies in Urban and Regional Planning at NTUA, I engaged with critical geography perspectives that conceptualize space as a relational entity—one shaped by interconnections, multiplicity, and ongoing interactions between global and local dynamics. Perceiving space…
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The Syrian crisis, which erupted in 2011, witnessed one of the largest displacement waves in modern history, with more than 13 million Syrians forced to leave their homes under the weight of war and destruction, according to Najat Rochdi, the Deputy Special Envoy of the United Nations to Syria. In 2023 alone, the number of internally displaced persons rose to 7.2 million, while the number of refugees and forcibly displaced persons reached 6.5 million, distributed across 137 countries. Amid these events, Jordan opened its doors to more than 1.3 million Syrians, including over 671,000 registered refugees with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Although a small percentage of these refugees live…
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As the Jordanian government was devising strategies and policies to address the Syrian refugee crisis and repatriate nearly 1.3 million Syrian refugees, the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime on December 8, 2024, and the opposition’s takeover of power was a “new opportunity” to radically and completely reconsider its strategy towards Syrian refugees, especially since this crisis represents a major challenge for a small country where 31% of its population of 11 million people hold “refugee status,” most of whom are Palestinians and Syrians. The main question is: will the transformation in Jordan's northern neighbor really contribute to the voluntary and substantial return of refugees or will the refugees hesitate between staying in their host country…
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On December 8, 2024, Syria witnessed a transformative moment when armed rebels, predominantly led by ’Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), gained control of Damascus, leading to President Bashar al-Assad’s departure from the country. This development, marking the end of a 14-year civil war, has created a complex mixture of hope and uncertainty among Syrian refugees, including the 2.9 million living under temporary protection in Türkiye. While the political transition suggests possibilities for a return, the reality on the ground reveals a more nuanced situation where security concerns…
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In the context of return migration from Greece, whether considered through the legal and institutional framework or the research on the ‘Return Migration Infrastructures’, the issue of regularity versus irregularity is inescapable. Irregularity has become a central concept in dominant public discourses about migration, often defined in opposition to regularity—or, more specifically, legality. By equating irregularity with illegality, this binary logic is used to stigmatize migrants as ‘threats’ to national and EU social and political structures. This oversimplification, however, neglects the complex ways in which irregularity is not simply a status but a process shaped by…
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