This Must Be The Podcast: Sean Yom

It is difficult to not worry about the stability and even survival of Jordan these days. Escalating Israeli aggression in the West Bank and political momentum towards annexation puts the Kingdom squarely in the crosshairs of potentially massive refugee flows, violence, and instability. The failure of Syria's post-Assad transition, a catastrophe encouraged by Israel and perhaps backed by the UAE, would once again put its southern neighbor at risk. Its finances are a disaster, long running structural problems exacerbated by the Trump administration's shuttering of USAID and the redirection of many international aid organizations away from supporting Syrian or Palestinian refugees. For anyone who has followed Jordan over the longer term, though, the current atmosphere of crisis feels less like a once in a lifetime departure and more the same as it ever was; it wasn't that long ago that I titled a POMEPS Studies collection Jordan, Forever on the Brink.

Sean Yom's new book, Jordan: Politics in an Accidental Crucible (Oxford University Press, 2025), urges us to give up on the tired cliches and conventional assumptions which tend to shape our thinking about the country. His comprehesive, opinionated take on the real nature of Jordanian politics argues energetically against the "forever on the brink" model, portraying Jordan's regime as far more robust and resilient than is generally believed (while pointing out the strategic and financial utility to the Kingdom of everyone thinking it's on the brink of collapse). He similarly skewers romantic illusions about the Hashemite monarchy, Jordan's self-presentation as a pro-Western oasis in a hostile region, the idea that Transjordanian bedouin still represent the "bedrock support" of the regime, that Jordan is boring, and much more.

But setting aside the cliches doesn't mean walking away from Jordan. Yom makes a compelling, impassioned case for understanding Jordan on its own terms. The Kingdom is clearly not a democracy, but there is real political participation and forms of representation. The country may not be on the brink of collapse, but it does face a unique confluence of regional and domestic challenges. The Jordanian-Palestinian cleavage may be far more complicated than usually portrayed, but it is only more interesting for that. Yom insists on seeing Jordan for itself, not as a function of American interests or of Israeli concerns or of broader regional politics. He has an inherently comparative sensibility and draws on a wealth of comparative theory, but insists on seeing Jordan as it really is without stretching it to fit concepts for the sake of analytical convenience. And he insists on putting the Jordanian people first, writing with an ethnographic sensibility. Too often, as he notes, Jordanians don't recognize their country in the books and articles written about it. They will recognize the Jordan he portrays here. Based on decades of deep field research and an encylopedic knowledge of the political science literature, written beautifully for a broader audience, Yom's book is a model of engaged scholarship which will likely productively annoy certain audiences.

I spoke with Yom about his book for the Middle East Political Science Podcast. Listen here:

I've been working on Jordan my entire academic career. It wasn't the first place I studied Arabic (that was Egypt, a year earlier) but it was the place I lived the longest, it was the subject of my dissertation (published as State Interests and Public Sphere: The International Politics of Jordan's Identity) and I have visited at least once a year for decades. So I'm always thrilled to see great new publications on a topic close to my heart. There's a growing volume of work out there on Jordan, and likely to be ever more as fewer and fewer countries in the region are open to academic researchers.

Yom's book is the best systematic overview of Jordanian domestic politics and foreign policy since Curtis Ryan's excellent decade-old Jordan and the Arab Uprisings. Jillian Schwedler's Protesting Jordan is one of the very best books in Middle East political science of the last half decade, a tour de force overview of a century of popular mobilization and contention which should have long since put to rest any idea of the country as quiet or devoid of politics. Jose Ciro Martinez's States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan is another of the most original and important books written about the Arab state in years, tracing state provision of bread from international supply chains to the bakery floor. Jessica Watkins similarly explores the nature of stateness in Jordan by focusing on policing in Creating Consent in an Illiberal Order, showing the points not only of state repression and overreach but also of citizen demands for law enforcement and the provision of order. Older, but still an absolute classic, is Andrew Shryock's Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination, which dug deep into the construction of Transjordanian identity and its many meanings.

A number of recent books focus on the operation of Jordan's political institutions. Earlier this season, we spoke with Steven Monroe about his new book Mirages of Reform, focused on the logic and results of economic reform initiatives in Jordan. Last season, we spoke to Scott Williamson about The King Can Do No Wrong, novel take on the functioning of the monarchy in the Jordanian political system. Jordan has also been the site for interesting work on the limits of decentralization – see Janine Clark's Local Politics in Jordan and Morocco for one of the best and richest full treatments of the topic.

There's also a lot of research on how Jordan is affected by the wars and conflicts surrounding it. Peter Moore's 2019 Middle East Journal article on the work on Jordan's GID represents one of the only empirical explorations of the financing and operations of that powerful intelligence service. Moore and Yom recently co-authored a fascinating article on Jordan's "extreme militarization", showing how security logic has permeated every domain of the Kingdom's politics and institutions – an argument which resonates powerfully with my current book project on the structuring effects of the warscape. Anne Marie Baylouny's When Blame Backfires is part of a vast body of work on the impact of Syrian refugees on Jordan. Some of the best young scholars working on that area (including Rawan Arar, Reva Dhingra, Lillian Frost, Sigrid Lupieri, and Elizabeth Parker-Magyar) are featured in a POMEPS Studies collection on the management of migration we released a couple years ago.

Yom's book ranges widely across social, economic and political issues. A few other books that I recommend: Fida Adely's recent Working Women in Jordan is a fantastic exploration of gender and employment. Joas Wagemakers has written on both the Muslim Brotherhood and on the Salafi movement in Jordan. Sarah Tobin has done phenomenal anthropological work on the practice of Islam in Jordan, including her book Everday Piety. I'm sure there's more that I've forgotten, but hopefully that's enough to get you excited about Jordan as a site of rigorous and innovative scholarship. Enjoy.