2 AMMAN

Amman as a Gateway City for the Middle East

In the literature on global cities, there has been a growing recognition that the power and importance of global cities depends to a considerable extent on the relational networks that these cities have with the rest of the world; and in turn, attention has been focused on the pivotal role of a secondary tier of gateway cities that act as “spatial intermediaries,” linking their “respective hinterlands” with global city networks, thereby helping integrate “peripheral places” into the “core of the world economy” (Scholvin 2019b, 256; Scholvin 2020, 61). Accra, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Doha, Dubai, Durban, Johannesburg, Mauritius, Panama City, Rio de Janeiro, and Singapore all have been described as global gateway cities (Scholvin 2019a; Scholvin 2019b; Scholvin 2020; Sigler 2013). Sören Scholvin, Moritz Breuln, and Javier Revilla Diez (2019) suggest there are five features that can make cities into important gateways for extending global economy networks: logistics and transport, industrial processing, corporate control, service provision, and knowledge generation. “These features are not necessarily additive,” the authors argue, as “they can stand on their own or be combined in different ways, describing distinct types of gateways” (6). Following the economistic bias of the general literature on global cities, most of the research on gateway cities has focused on these cities’ role in the organization of global production networks within particular industrial sectors, for example, banking (Rossi and Taylor 2006), and oil and gas extraction (Breul 2020; Scholvin et al. 2017). But for Amman, it is its role in global knowledge production and dissemination networks that is most pivotal. Here, the research literature suggests that gateway cities help adapt “global knowledge” to “local specificities” (Scholvin 2019b,208); provide “critical knowledge” to global organizations about their local regions (Scholvin 2020, 61); and serve as “intellectual links between different scales” of the global, regional, national, and local (Scholvin, Breul, and Diez 2019, 11).

The choice of Amman as a gateway city for international organizations to incubate and pilot new development discourses, policies, and practices within the broader Middle East region actually is not entirely surprising, despite the city’s negative stereotypes, given Amman’s early colonial and more recent postcolonial histories. As a country, Jordan was effectively created by British colonialism in 1921 as a geographic buffer zone between Palestine on the one hand and Iraq on the other. Through a series of Anglo-Transjordanian agreements, Britain established and maintained several military bases in Jordan—notably, in Amman, Zarqa, and Mafraq—that had the express purpose of protecting the Hashemite ruling regime, and “was part of a larger strategic plan to protect British interests throughout the entire Middle East, especially the Suez Canal—the sea route to India—which was a major cornerstone of the British Empire” (Yitzhak 2015, 346).

Because of its geostrategic importance in the Middle East, Jordan has, throughout its history, received and depended on a steady stream of aid and development money, first from Britain and subsequently from the United States, for political and economic stabilization. British support to Jordan was vital through to the late 1950s. UK aid to the country amounted to tens of millions of pounds annually and helped shape modern Jordanian identity through the creation and support of its military institutions and legal structures (Massad 2001). In 1957, “the US declared that Jordan’s independence and integrity were of vital interest to the United States” in its global fight against communism, and it granted the country millions of dollars in aid and military assistance (Sharp 2008). From that point, Jordan became the second largest per capita recipient of US aid in the world, after Israel, due to its continuing strategic importance for the United States, at first in the context of the Cold War and the Israel-Palestine peace process and, later, after the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq (Fishman 2002).

In the late 1990s, following the ascension to the throne of King Abdullah II, the current reigning monarch in Jordan, Amman was promoted by the US government as a showcase for its favored neoliberal, free market reform model for the entire Middle East region. In 1998, the United States worked with Jordan to develop the first of a series of manufacturing free trade zones in the country, known in Jordan as Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ) (Middle East Company News Wire 2006a; 2006b). A series of economic liberalization policies also were introduced that removed rent controls, privatized public sector enterprises, and opened the country to extensive foreign direct investment (Hourani 2013). In 2000, the two countries signed the US-Jordan Free Trade Agreement (Moore 2005). In the following five years, Jordan’s trade with the United States increased nearly thirteen-fold, and the country’s rate of gross domestic product growth averaged 4 percent annually (Zoellick 2003a; Zoellick 2003b; Cook 2005). Jordan, thus, became a “poster child for the Bush administration’s project to transform the Middle East through free trade,” and the “seemingly successful economic and political reforms [in the country] have been used to advertise the American vision of societal transformation in the Middle East more widely” (Moore 2005; Baylouny 2006; 2008). Following the US-Jordan Free Trade Agreement in 2000, similar agreements have been negotiated between the United States and Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and Turkey (Sukarieh 2012a). The Jordanian Free Trade Agreement and Qualifying Industrial Zones were directly viewed by the US government as a model and cornerstone for the planned construction of a regional Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) that would be oriented to production for and trade with the United States economy (Moore 2005).

Following the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, Amman’s geostrategic importance to the United States and other Western and global organizations was dramatically reinforced. During the US period of Iraqi occupation from 2003 through 2011, Amman, arguably, became the city where the business of occupied Baghdad was effectively done. Even before the war had started, US political and military leaders saw Amman as an important base for their Iraqi operations, both because “Amman is linked to Baghdad with a 600 mile motorway that cuts through a virtually featureless desert—perfect terrain for US tanks and high precision air-launched munitions,” and because the US was coordinating with the Iraqi National Accord, an Amman based Iraqi dissident group that “has held talks in Washington about plans for a strike on Iraq” (Burke, Bright, and Pelham 2002). As Moustafa Hamarneh argues: “Amman was where US Provisional Coalition Administrator of Iraq Paul Bremer met with different Iraqi groups, including opposition forces. It also was the city where the training for the new state personnel who were to lead Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein was carried out” (personal interview, December 2006). In 2006, the United States formally announced that Jordan was its official partner in the Middle East for carrying out its war on terror throughout the region; and Amman was chosen as the center for training special military forces from US-allied states throughout the Middle East (Ayasrah 2009). The King Abdullah II Special Operations Center (KASOTC), founded in 2009 and located in Amman, specializes in training counterterrorist units, and has trained military personnel from Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (Shuetze 2017).

As part of its role in the US-led war on terror, Amman was the site for the creation of a campaign to promote moderate Islam as opposed to radical Islam. In November 2005, working in close cooperation with the United States, King Abdullah II released the Amman Message, signed by more than two hundred Muslim scholars from all Muslim traditions in more than fifty countries, which aimed to show “the modern world the true nature of Islam and the nature of true Islam” (Al-Shalbi 2017). The message calls for tolerance, compassion, moderation, and freedom of religion, and emphasizes how Islam honors every human being, regardless of color, race, or religion.

The Amman Message was subsequently adopted by six other major international Islamic scholarly assemblies, culminating with the International Islamic Fiqh Academy of Jeddah, the Islamic world’s leading juridical body, in July 2006 (Hasan and Ansusa 2018). Other high profile international statements that highlighted Amman as their base would follow. In 2012, for example, the Amman Declaration and Program of Action on Gender Equality was announced and adopted by most UN member states (Miller, Poumik, and Swaine 2014). The program of action sought to empower women from across the global South, and Queen Rania of Jordan was to play a vital role in this mission (UNwomen.org 2018).

The central involvement of Amman as a key gateway city for this series of political, economic, social, and military regional development and restructuring projects has had an inevitable impact on the social and physical geography of Amman itself as a city. This is most visible in the rapid growth of the city from encompassing eight local hills in the 1960s to sprawling across twenty hills in 2014; the city also has seen the dramatic increase in foreign and Western citizens among its settled residents (Scott 2016). Over the past two decades, the city has seen high-profile development projects, included the construction of the Abdoun Bridge in 2006, the Abdali Project for a new Amman downtown in 2010, the Amman light railway in 2011, and the Amman Development Corridor in 2014, as well as the many high rises in the city (Al-Salaymeh 2006; Beauregard and Marpillero-Colomina 2011; Musa 2017; Parker 2009). In fact, the Abdali Mall houses the Abdali Mall Recruitment and Training Center (AMRTC) and Makarem Academy, which are “high-quality training centers that are managed and operated by EFE-Jordan” (EFEjordan.org 2022).

The liberalization of the economy since the 1990s has seen the rise in wealth and number of a new elite, who have profited from real estate development and speculation, as the growth of private sector industry, particularly in telecommunications and service provision, in the country—and who have come into increasing conflict with an older Amani elite, whose wealth and power tended to be based on clientelist, monopoly contracts with the Jordanian state (Amawi 1996; Hourani 2016; Hourani and Kanna 2014). The same processes of economic and social change also have seen growing inequality and poverty in the city, and in Jordan overall. In 2008, after twenty years of market reform, 10 percent of Jordanians earned 40 percent of the total income of the country, while the 35 percent of the population below the poverty line earned only 2 percent of the total income (Jaber 2019). Research by Shahateet (2018, 283) found that “poverty in Jordan emerged as an acute problem only after the mid 1980s, where the economic situation was relatively stable before that, and the unemployment rate was relatively low,” and that the two periods with largest increases in the poverty rate in Jordan were after the first round of structural adjustment in the late 1980s and then between 2000 and 2003.

Amman’s development over the past decades has seen the city become increasingly divided between a West Amman that is oriented to the city’s international role as a key gateway city to the Middle East, and that “looks like any Gulf or American city,” and a much poorer East Amman (Potter et al. 2009). As Matthew Teller (2002, 75) writes, “today there are parts of West Amman that are indistinguishable from upscale neighbourhoods of American or European cities, with broad leafy avenues lined with mansions, and fast multilane freeways swishing past strip malls and black-glass office buildings.” The accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few has divided Amman into gated communities, home to the rich, and overpopulated slums. This division is further exacerbated by the networks of roads and bridges that have been built to “connect rich and gated Amman to the global market and isolate it from its poor neighbourhoods,” so that “rich areas are connected together and to the airport in a way to avoid passing through the poor areas of the city” (Parker 2009, 112; Sukarieh 2016). Abdel Hakim Al-Husban and Abdulla Al-Shorman (2013) argue: “There is a continuous process of spatial differentiation in the city of Amman, the profound division between east and West Amman. Amman has moved rapidly from a unified and homogeneous space to a very differentiated and hierarchical one … to the creation of two Ammans, a very rich part with modern and Western facades called West Amman and a very crowded, traditional and religious part called East Amman” (222).

Population density increases dramatically as one moves from West Amman—four hundred inhabitants per square kilometer—to East Amman—twenty thousand inhabitants per square kilometer (Potter et al. 2007). Architecture changes from a predominance of villas in West Amman to four-story extended family apartment blocks in East Amman (Ababsa 2012; Potter et al. 2005). The inhabitants of the two halves of the city also encounter the state differently, as West Ammanis make claims on the state to support their “bourgeois ambitions,” while East Ammanis “struggle to gain access to services, as well as cope with the benefits and problems wrought by a variety of urban projects, from squatter upgrading to sites and services to housing projects and income-generating schemes” (Shami 2007, 220–225). Young Ammanis who participate in projects and activities with youth development NGOs are keenly aware of the existence of these “two Ammans.” “The west is different, people are not like us, they speak differently, they dress differently, they walk differently,” says one student from Jabal el Nadhif, one of the designated “pockets of poverty” in East Amman, referring to her visits to West Amman: “The west is better, there are nice cars, their houses are different, and their shops are too” (Sukarieh 2016, 1215).

The Youth Development Complex in Amman

When Junior Achievement opened its Injaz office in Amman in 1999, it did so as part of the broader liberalization of the Jordanian economy that was taking place at the time. There was a recognition by the reform project leaders that for economic liberalization to be successful in Jordan there needed to be extensive educational restructuring as well. Education in Jordan is “not set for the twenty-first century, it is set to teach for work in the early twentieth century, perhaps the nineteenth century,” said Hussein, the director of curriculum change in the Ministry of Education in a personal interview in October 2006: “Any development project in this country needs to prepare the new labor force to work for this century, for the global economy.” This led, eventually, to the creation of the Education Reform for the Knowledge Economy (ERFKE) program launched in 2004, which continued through to 2016 (Kubow 2010). Around $800 million US went into the multidonor project, framed explicitly as a curriculum development project for the twenty-first century, which sought to develop the employability skills of young Jordanians to work in the global economy. Because Jordan is poor in natural resources, the idea was to develop Jordan’s human resources to remake the country into a world-class center of high-skill human capital, in the image of an Arab Singapore (Shirazi 2010). The “Education Vision” of ERFKE was to create “competitive human resource development systems that provide all people with lifelong learning experiences relevant to their current and future needs in order to respond to and stimulate sustained economic development through an educated population and an educated workforce” (Kingdom of Jordan Ministry of Education 2012, 3).

ERFKE was funded primarily through a loan from the World Bank, with additional financial and material support from USAID, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JAICA) (World Bank 2010). The total fund for ERFKE I and II amounted to around $800 million US (Kingdom of Jordan Ministry of Education 2012). Despite being a national educational reform program, the ERFKE head office was located within the US embassy in Amman, directed by David Sprague, an American career diplomat (Ali and Shannak 2012). The United States became centrally involved with Jordan’s education reforms, according to Sprague, because “the education of Arab youth is considered a high security issue for the US” (personal interview, September 2006). Key parts of the ERFKE curriculum reform were outsourced to a number of international NGOs, primarily through USAID’s Equip 123. These included the Academy for Educational Development, Bearing Point, and Injaz (Education Quality Review 2008).

Junior Achievement, which had played a close cooperative role previously with USAID in other parts of the world and had a long history of promoting enterprise education in both school and out-of-school settings in the United States, came to Jordan with the support of a USAID project grant of $1 million US (Abu Jaber, Kwauk and Robinson 2016; Sukarieh and Tannock 2009). Its mandate was to develop ways to bridge the gap between formal and nonformal education in Jordan on the one hand and the needs of the market and interests of private sector employers on the other (Sadeq 2014). The mission of Injaz, as stated on their website, is “to inspire and prepare Jordanian youth, and enhance their opportunities to join the job market as qualified employees and entrepreneurs, and to help them compete in the global economy.” The values that drive Injaz’s work are based on the “commitment to the principles of market-based economics and entrepreneurship” (Arab Foundation Forum 2022). When ERFKE was launched in 2004, Injaz was fully integrated into the Jordanian formal educational system, through the agency of USAID (Kingdom of Jordan Ministry of Education 2012). It works in direct partnership with the Jordanian Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation, and the King Abdullah II Fund for Development (Salti 2008). In 2005, the minister of education announced that “Injaz is an organic part of the Jordanian curriculum (Succarie 2008, 254). Queen Rania served as an ambassador to Injaz from 2000 to 2015 and facilitated the partnership between Injaz and the Young Arab Leaders that was central to the expansion of Injaz throughout the Arab world (as discussed in the following chapter) (IPR Strategic Business Information Database 2005).

Indeed, a sign of this deep integration is the way Injaz is promoted in schoolbooks in Jordan. Each and every textbook for the country’s civic and national education course opens with an advertisement for Injaz, including the logo in the first page of the book; and in one of the textbook’s chapters on Jordanian youth in the civic education program, Injaz is presented as being one of the vital organizations working with youth in Jordan and helping them integrate with the global economy. The civic and national education textbook shows the Injaz Jordan logo that features young people holding hands and climbing a hill. The one who reached the hill holds a light on his hand, “representing success and a bright future if they work together with Injaz” as Dima Bibi explains (personal interview, November 2006). The page also features a picture of Queen Rania as the ambassador of Injaz. The textbook has a chapter on state projects provided for youth in the kingdom: Injaz is the only nongovernmental organization presented in the chapter. Injaz is introduced as “a national nongovernmental organization, that was announced in 2002, after running activities before under Save the Children Programmes in the country. The aim of Injaz is to train young people and facilitate their integration in the job market, as employees or as businessman.… Injaz is tailored to youth between 14–22 years old” (Education and National Textbook Grade 8 2005, 30).

Injaz was, thus, embedded within extensive international and national, state, and third sector networks from soon after it was first launched in Jordan. As a Jordanian trainer working for Injaz notes, this has had a massive impact on the work Injaz has been able to do in the country:

Not all NGOs are the same. When you have [the Jordanian] royals and USAID behind you, then you get access to almost everything in Jordan. If I want now to start an NGO to, let’s say, empower young people to take their lives back and push for more equality, I will be put in jail! If not, anyways, I won’t have access to money or to the infrastructure through which I can disseminate these ideas. But even if I want to replicate the same ideas of Injaz … without having royals, the American Embassy, the private sector behind my NGO, I won’t have the same effect (personal interview, January 2007).

Having royal support not only helped Injaz find its way to the national curriculum but facilitated access to the central institutions of the Jordanian state and society. For example, Injaz was able to partner directly with the Central Bank of Jordan, as well as the Jordanian Ministry of Education, to support and disseminate its financial education program in public schools throughout the country. These partnerships also made Injaz highly visible in Jordanian media and public spaces. “When you have Queen Rania as ambassador to Injaz, it makes it by default a high profile NGO, and all news outlets will cover all Injaz events,” Dima Bibi, the director of Injaz Jordan explained (personal interview, November 2006). A student participating in one of Injaz’s workshop programs jokes: “I feel I live with Injaz. At home, there is me, my father and Injaz in the books, on TV and in the newspapers. When in school, it is in the books as well as in the extracurricular activities where we get the visitors from the private sector to tell us about what they do. When I am in the streets, Injaz is everywhere in the billboards. We joke and always say it is our new friend, a friend to all of us” (personal interview, November 2006).

One of the Injaz billboards from 2005 proclaimed in both Arabic and English writing: “The lesson is to turn ideas into reality through hard work and perseverance.” Other Injaz billboards advertised the date and venue of the annual Injaz Career Fair with a large picture of Queen Rania, ambassador to Injaz. In 2010, an Injaz billboard seen throughout Amman featured an image of a loop that began with “Think,” followed by “Do,” then “Do Again” and “Keep Doing,” ending with “Success” (personal fieldnotes, September 2006).

As it does in other countries, Injaz works through developing official partnerships with both multinational and national private sector corporations and arranging for them to play a direct role in shaping and providing public education for children and young people. Corporations such as McDonald’s, Safeway, and Aramex provide additional funding for Injaz, consult on the development of Injaz programming, provide volunteers to teach Injaz courses, host internships, present their own “success stories” to public school students, and sponsor individual schools (which gives them a space to do their own advertising within the public education system).

The success stories are notable for the ways in which they play up the role of entrepreneurship in leading to financial success while obscuring the importance of family and class background. One of the success stories presented in Injaz workshops in Jordan, for example, focuses on Nour Kabariti, who is introduced as a self-made entrepreneur. After graduating from college, the story goes, Nour decided to start a business making chocolate, as there were no chocolate manufacturers in Jordan at the time. Nour worked very hard to get the chocolate company going, and now it is a highly successful business that employs many young Jordanians. What usually gets left out of the story is the fact that Nour Kabariti also happens to be the daughter of a former prime minister of Jordan. Fadi Ghandour, who is on the board of directors of Injaz, tells a similar story of how enterprising spirit and years of hard work enabled him to establish Aramex, now the largest courier company in the Middle East. What Ghandour often skips over is the significance of being an heir to the wealthy and elite Ghandour family in Jordan: Fadi Ghandour’s father was part of King Hussein’s inner circle and founder and CEO of Royal Jordanian Airlines (personal fieldnotes, December 2006).

Injaz does not only serve private sector interests through eroding the distinction between public education and the private sector, promoting free market ideology, and teaching enterprise and business skills, but in more direct ways, as well. Safeway, for example, is an American supermarket company that only recently opened branches in Jordan and is actively pushing to replace the former structure of small, local grocery stores with its own superstores. Through promoting student internships with Safeway and other multinational corporations, Injaz is directly supporting their market expansion agendas (Sukarieh 2012b; Sukarieh 2016). Similarly, Injaz also partners with Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority (ASEZA) and Saraya, two Jordanian development corporations that have pushed through major real estate development projects in Aqaba and Amman (USAID 2009). In fact, ASEZA was funded partly by USAID, which also has direct links with both Injaz and EFE (USAID 2009).

In Injaz workshops, students learn how these developments are bringing Jordan into the ranks of the developed world and will create new jobs for Jordanians; and they are told the skills they will need to develop to obtain new, twenty-first-century jobs—which turn out mostly to be jobs in the tourism sector. These tourism jobs are being promoted to the young sons and daughters of the families who were displaced from the Aqaba seafront by the new ASEZA and Saraya development project. The Injaz training workshops were launched as a strategy to address the criticisms and protests of the displaced local families who were opposed to the development and gentrification policy in Aqaba (personal interview with Mayyada Abu Jaber, February 2007).

What tends to go unsaid in the workshops themselves is that these development projects are displacing local communities and undermining their sources of income—fishing and locally organized tourism in the case of Aqaba, and small businesses in the case of Amman. Indeed, there is an irony in that Injaz claims to be teaching entrepreneurship to Jordanian students while teaching them to take jobs in global corporations that are unsettling and eradicating local enterprises (Sukarieh 2016).

Junior Achievement/Injaz was just one of many youth-oriented NGOs to arrive in Amman at the start of the twenty-first century, along with organizations such as the Center for Civic Education/Arab Civitas (USAID 2005), Save the Children USA/Najah (Queen Rania Media Center 2005b), Ford Foundation/Naseej (Naseej 2012), and Education for Employment Foundation (EFE). All these youth and education NGOs are linked closely to one another, and, like Injaz, they also are connected with a network of international funding bodies and overseas state development agencies (USAID, CIDA, JAICA, World Bank, Ford Foundation, Gates Foundation, etc.), state and royal actors within Jordan (the ministry of education, King Abdullah II Fund, individual schools and universities, etc.), and private sector corporations (both multinational and national).

EFE, for example, which opened its office in Amman in 2005, was funded initially by the US government (through MEPI and USAID) and later by a range of bodies including the International Youth Foundation, King Abdullah Fund, Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO)of Jordan, Coca Cola, Intel, and CNN. MEPI funding for EFE accounted for $500,000 in the first year alone (Salama 2012; Dhillon and Yousef 2011; Muskin 2012). The work done by this collection of youth-oriented NGOs was also carefully and continuously coordinated with one another. Injaz, thus, focuses primarily on working with middle class and elite youth in schools and universities. EFE focuses on job training, job placement, and employability skills development for youth from low-income families, especially those living in pockets of high poverty in East Amman. Save the Children runs the School to Career program, which seeks to build national capacity by training schoolteachers, principals, and counselors how to teach soft skills and employability to their students; it also runs Najah, which targets out-of-school youth, especially from families living below the poverty line (personal interviews with Dennis Waldo and Hadeel Abu Shama, November 2006).

For many of the American staff involved with running these NGOs, the work of providing employability and entrepreneurship training to Jordanian youth is directly linked to the broader interests and agendas of the US war on terror in the region. As Dennis Waldo of Save the Children argues:

If you stand in the future and look back to 2006, you will think that you have to work on youth, before they explode. Well, we are here in the country to help now. We can wait until extremism foils an entire country and then start acting. Look at what happened in Afghanistan. Jordan has progressed a long way toward development, and we do not want it to go back like Afghanistan. We need to act now.… There is always going to be a problem of extremism, but the ultimate goal is to spread a culture of hope. We want to make extremism not as the norm but an aberration. Jordan is strategically a very important country … for the US and, of course, the international community” (personal interview, November 2006).

As in Washington, DC, the coordinated work of these youth-oriented NGOs depends not just on their institutional and financial networks but on their close physical proximity to one another and regular, formal and informal social interaction. All these NGOs are headquartered in West Amman, within a two-kilometer radius. Injaz is located on Mecca Street, about a ten-minute drive from the Royal Court, where the offices of Queen Rania are found. EFE is based on King Hussein Street, as are the King Abdullah II Fund and Crown Prince Fund offices. “Being ten minutes to the court helps ease the connections,” says Dima Bibi, the head of Injaz in Jordan: “I do not have to go through the traffic of Amman, I can work until half an hour before the meeting and leave” (personal interview, November 2006).

Most of the NGO management is comprised of upper-class Jordanian women who also live in West Amman—so that work and social networks are densely integrated, and meetings can be set up quickly and easily. West Amman is also the site of the big events run by these NGOs. Injaz, for example, hosts a job fair every year in the West Amman Hilton, and a Young Entrepreneurs Gala Dinner in one of the high-end hotels of West Amman—the Marriott, Four Seasons, Kempinski, or Grand Hyatt (personal fieldnotes, October 2006).

These events are attended by the administrators, trustees, and directors of all the organizations that make up the youth development complex in Amman—most of whom themselves live in the neighborhood. The events are seen as vital opportunities for networking. As a Jordanian director of EFE explains, NGOs will “try to sell their ideas to entrepreneurs, to get them on board with their NGO, solicit their funds and their support in providing volunteers for teaching the youth.” Alongside cooperation, there exists intense competition among these NGOs, as well. “It was hard work to convince the entrepreneurs to pitch in money for us and not Injaz,” the EFE director says. “We needed to convince them why EFE and why not Injaz. But once you get a few who get excited to adopt your project, then others will follow” (personal interview, November 2006).

Young Jordanian Leaders and Jordanian Youth

As the discourse of youth, youth empowerment, and youth development was endlessly promoted by a network of international actors in Amman, a distinct bifurcation emerged in the ways this discourse began to operate within the regional Jordanian (and Middle East) context. On the one hand, youth was adopted as a key frame for articulating and legitimating the class interests of the new, Western-oriented elite in Jordan that stood in tension, and sometimes in outright conflict, with an older elite in the country. These were represented by the organization of the Young Jordanian Leaders. On the other hand, youth was mobilized as a device to manage, contain, and integrate middle class and, especially, low income and poor communities located in East Amman and elsewhere. These communities become represented and imagined through the metonym of Jordanian youth. Together, these two sides of youth discourse served to reinforce and promote a model of neoliberal reform and social and economic development in the country (Alissa 2007; Sukarieh 2016).

The economic reforms brought in by King Abdullah II in Jordan since the late 1990s were explicitly and ubiquitously framed as being a project for youth and by youth. These reforms were promoted by a young king and a young queen described as a “Royal force for change,” who were surrounded by young elites based in West Amman, working for progress, change, and modernization in a youthful society (Alissa 2007; BV World 2015). Oprah Winfrey once described Queen Rania as “young, tall, beautiful, smart and determined to right the wrong in her country” (Winfrey 1999). “The good thing is that our King is young and modern,” says one Jordanian CEO in a personal interview in October 2006. “He studied abroad, and he wants to effect change, because the ultimate power is with change.” “She is young, and she knows how to talk to young people,” the USAID director of education in Jordan says of Queen Rania. “She is committed to change, and youth is all about change.” “USAID did not pick Queen Rania to be an Ambassador for Injaz because she is the Queen of Jordan,” the director explains, “but because of what she represents: change, youth and a commitment to education” (personal interview, January 2007).

Queen Rania’s view of change is based on turning Jordanian society into an entrepreneurial one. As she said at a Young Arab Leaders conference: “What we want is an Arab World where entrepreneurs teach and our teachers innovate … where young people start-up companies, fail, get inspired by their failure, and create bigger and better ones … and where there is a revolution every day in streets and squares across the Arab world—a revolution of ideas and innovations” (BV World 2015).

The new elites of Amman in the late 1990s and at the start of the new millennium were mostly relatively young, often between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five, and were the class segment who had pushed for the liberalization of the Jordanian economy and benefited the most from it. They were successful private sector entrepreneurs with business interests in banking, finance, law, and information and communication technology, oriented toward internationalized, global markets. Almost all of them had received their university education in the West, mostly in the United States and the UK; and they tended to be fluent speakers of English, which they embraced as if it were their native language. They were closely integrated with Western and international institutions both, through shared intellectual agendas, economic interests, social networks, and financial connections (Alissa 2007; Sukarieh 2012a). These elites positioned themselves as the new guard in Jordan, who were for change, flexibility, openness, and globalization, and were in conflict with the old guard in Jordan, who were resistant to change and whose interests lay in maintaining patronage benefits with an extensive public sector run by the Jordanian state (Bank and Schlumberger 2004; Knowles 2005; Knowles 2011).

Ironically, the difference between these two “guards” tended to be much smaller than rhetoric would suggest. Many of the new elite were the children of the old elite, and had gained their initial wealth, status, and privilege directly through the patronage economy run by their parents’ generation. And despite the invocation of the value of privatization, marketization, and openness against the older model of patronage, nepotism, and corruption, many of the new elite benefited from close connections and insider contracts with the state, just as their parents’ generation did (Alissa 2007). In 1999, King Abdullah II created a new Economic Consultative Council (ECC) to guide the state’s liberalization policies and projects. It would become one of the most powerful political actors in the country. The membership of the ECC was made up almost entirely of private sector entrepreneurs from the new Jordanian elite (Bank and Schlumberger 2004; Knowles 2005).

This young, new elite has actively sought to articulate its own interests through the creation and participation in a series of “youth organizations”—albeit ones that are radically different from the youth development NGOs that work with middle class, working class, and poor youth in the country. Both the class background and age range of the groups these organizations cater to are considerably higher than those that are the focus of concern for youth development NGOs. In 1998, a group of these young business leaders based in West Amman formed the Young Entrepreneurs Association (YEA), a nonprofit organization “dedicated to promoting and encouraging entrepreneurship in Jordan and educating Jordanian businesspeople on the social and economic values of non-conventional ideas” (personal interview with YEA president, January 2007). As YEA President Nour Kabariti explains: “There is a culture of dependence on the public sector in Jordan, and Jordanians lack a culture of entrepreneurship; Jordan is not like Lebanon with a long history of a culture of Entrepreneurship. We need to spread this culture and tell Jordanians that there is work outside of the public sector, and the market is open and ready for entrepreneurial ideas. The organization is also a way for those of us who are entrepreneurial to meet and discuss new ideas and think how to spread this culture of entrepreneurship” (personal interview, January 2007).

YEA produces a monthly magazine that focuses on sharing success stories of young, new entrepreneurs in Jordan as a way to inspire others to embrace their vision of change and growth through private sector enterprise. The mission of YEA is to change the culture of Jordan to promote entrepreneurship. “Entrepreneurship has not been part of the Jordanian business culture,” the YEA organization claims. “Thus, a new business mentality and new generation of entrepreneurs beyond the traditional inherited business philosophy of local industries is needed in order to claim a greater share of the regional and international export markets” (arab.org 2021).

In 1999, the first Arab chapter of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), defined as a global leadership community of CEOs, was opened in Amman, according to Louay Abu Ghazelh, the president of the organization and a board member of EFE Jordan (personal interview, October 2006). The YPO was founded by Ray Hick in New York in 1950 for CEOs who are under the age of forty-five and are leading a company with at least three hundred employees. By 2019, the organization had around thirty thousand members across more than 130 countries (YPO 2022). In 2005, Queen Rania was invited to be one of the inaugural groups of Young Global Leaders, an organization developed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland; and in 2006, Amman became host to one of the first chapters of the newly formed Young Arab Leaders, a regional organization also developed under the tutelage of the World Economic Forum. Young Arab Leaders, discussed in detail in the following chapter, is a network of business elites in the region formed under the patronage of Queen Rania, King Abdullah II, and Mohammed Bin Zayid Al Maktoum of Dubai (Queen Rania Media Center 2005a).

Through all these organizations, the new Jordanian elite identifies itself with the positive rhetoric of youth as agents of change in society, as globally integrated and Western-oriented market reformers, the leaders of a new vision for their country. “You are special,” as Queen Rania said to the inaugural gathering of her fellow Young Global Leaders in 2005, “and the vision, drive and determination that have made you successful individuals can be combined to lift the lives of millions around the world.” Calling on “the world’s young movers and shakers to claim their stake in how the future unfolds,” and “challenging them to become the dynamic engine of change and global progress,” Queen Rania asked the new Young Global Leaders to “extend your influence down as well as up—mentoring and coaching the young men and women who want to grow up to be you” (Queen Rania Media Center 2005c).

Indeed, the Young Jordanians have enthusiastically taken up Queen Rania’s call to act as mentors and coaches for Jordanian youth, and to work in close cooperation with Jordan’s new youth development NGOs like Injaz and Najah, often serving on the boards of directors for these organizations, sponsoring internships, and sharing their own stories of success through putting themselves forward as inspirational role models. The first call for an Injaz internship sponsored by the Young Arab Leaders in Jordan read as follows:

You want to reach the top; we will give you the opportunity.… The majority of young Jordanians’ reality of today is that if you are not connected with the right people, you will most likely not be able to get the job of your dreams, or the opportunity to blossom into the person you deserve to be. YAL intern will abolish this reality of yesterday and today and collectively build a new reality of tomorrow by introducing the true concept of internship as a form of social responsibility and a catalyst of personal development to both the employer and intern (personal fieldnotes, April 2007).

YAL members often are featured in Injaz success stories of Jordanian entrepreneurship. Sa’d Mouasher, for example, is profiled as being a young banking director of the Ahli Bank—a bank that is partly owned by his own father. Karim Kawar is profiled as the young owner of the Kawar Group, a multisector group of companies—that, again, is a business established by Kawar’s extended family. Ahmed Attiga, the CEO of APRICOM (the Arab Petroleum Investment Corporation) and a former director of the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank group), is also a YAL member profiled in the Injaz curriculum in Jordan (personal fieldnotes, January 2007).

This work is not done as an act of altruism but because the project of actively intervening in and managing the lives and outlooks of local Jordanian youth is seen as directly linked to the Young Jordanians’ goal of realizing their own visions for dynamic and modern political and economic development in the country—and, also, somewhat more prosaically, an agenda of protecting and extending their own interests and material gains as business elites in Jordan (Sukarieh 2016).

For Queen Rania and the Young Jordanians, “youth” has become a shorthand and ideologically convenient way for referring to the mass of the Jordanian population that has not yet been integrated into their neoliberal economic, social, and political reforms in the country, while eliding any need to talk about issues of class, faith, or political ideology. As with US and international organizations in the global youth development movement, a link is traced between lack of job opportunities for Jordanian youth and a growing risk of terrorism and other violence and unrest in the region.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2005 Amman hotel bombings, for example, Queen Rania addressed the First Annual Forum of the Young Arab Leaders in Dubai, where she referred to youth as a “sector” in need of reform:

I meet with you, today, as I, together with the people of Jordan, recover from the criminal acts that struck our beloved country on November 9, 2005. These vicious acts have reaffirmed that we can stand up against this evil ideology, and have reinforced, without doubt, that we are witnessing a clear battle between two conflicting ideologies. One that is based upon the principle of life and hope, and another that is rooted in murder and chaos. We believe that the future is what counts, while they live in the past and seek to destroy that future. This future, represented by a fourth sector in society, is the target of today’s ideological struggle. We have become accustomed to dealing with three classical sectors: The public, private and civil society sectors. We have overlooked the fact that a fourth sector is the true representative of our future, one that comprises more than 200 million Arab citizens, citizens whose voices have not been heard through the three-sector equation (Queen Rania Media Center 2005c).

This fourth sector, which needs to be protected from the threat of fundamentalist ideology and needs to be reformed, is youth. Since fighting terrorism is to be done through the opening up of a market economy and the integration of the Middle East region into the global economy, perceptions of both the problems of and solutions for local Jordanian youth are projected in economic terms. Youth lack the skills to work in the global economy; they are lazy; they expect the government to help them; they are intolerant of others; they are irresponsible; they do not like to take risks and be entrepreneurs; they do not know how to work in teams; they are politicized and prone to fundamentalist recruitment. “Solving problems that stem from intolerance—like terrorism—requires culture, dialogue, education and increased opportunities,” Queen Rania argues. “We have to create opportunities for our youth so they have a chance in life … whenever you are frustrated and you feel like you do not have a future or you can’t get a job, then you are more susceptible to be influenced by terrorism and extremist ideology” (CNN 2009).

The Young Jordanians, in effect, almost become a homegrown or domestic group of Orientalists in that they participate in promoting a stereotyped view of Jordanian culture as incarnated by the local youth population. The problems of youth are the problems of this culture, a problem of “traditional mentality.” Youth, thus, need to be managed and modernized, protected from the fundamentalists, taught how to become entrepreneurs, to take responsibility for their lives, to accept the virtues of work, and to learn tolerance (Sukarieh 2012b). As a Jordanian CEO, who was also a member of the YGL and director on the Injaz advisory board, told me, “After 11/9 [the date of the Amman hotel bombings], the business class became aware of the need to intervene [in managing local Jordanian youth]. I told them, ‘See, if we do not act, this is what we will get: terrorism’ ” (personal interview, October 2007). “To prevent another 9/11 from taking place again,” argues Saeed Al Muntafiq, the head of YAL in Jordan, we have to “manage youth, who have the future in their hands and who can effect positive change.” “Youth are the future, the saviors,” says Al Muntafiq, and “if we do not catch them early on in life, I do not think we will have anything to look forward to” (personal interview, November 2007).

Such reforms are exactly what youth development NGOs in Jordan, such as Injaz and EFE, have been set up to carry out. The main objective of Injaz, for example, is to provide Jordanian youth with skills that will make them employable in the global market economy. This is achieved through a series of courses at both secondary and post-secondary levels, a career month program, a job shadow program, and student exchange and internship programs. Courses offered in Jordanian secondary schools include Personal Life Planning, Personal Economics, Enterprise in Action, Success Skills, Leadership Courses, Travel and Tourism Business, Entrepreneurial Master Class, and My Money Business. Courses provided by Injaz in Jordanian universities are Fundamentals of Market Economy, Success Skills, Business Ethics, Leadership Course, Company Course, Entrepreneurial Master Class, and Easy Learning (Arab Foundation Forum 2022; Injaz.org.jo 2019). Injaz runs these courses in all twelve governorates in Jordan, working with students in the seventh to twelfth grade both within and outside their formal schooling, as well as with students in all of the forty-six universities and colleges in the country. Through these courses, which are supported by a group of about two thousand volunteers from the private as well as civil society sector, Injaz claims to reach over 750,000 students annually throughout Jordan (Injaz.org.jo 2022).

Through these programs and courses, Jordanian youth learn of the benefits of a free market economy, the importance of entrepreneurialism, and the primacy of business interests. According to USAID, the old curriculum in Jordan was not providing students with these skills, since it depended solely on rote memorization. Critical thinking has become the rhetoric used by the private sector and international organizations to push for curriculum change. However, the erosion of any clear distinction between public education and the private sector threatens to undermine and eliminate any space for genuine critical reflection and consideration of alternative models of development. At the most general level, a program like Injaz does not encourage students to reflect on whether a model of free market economy is good for Jordan. Instead, it actively seeks to inculcate students into support of the free market model.

At the most specific level, the involvement of corporations in the Injaz program and, through it, in public education can make it difficult for students to critically evaluate the role of these corporations in Jordan. Take, for example, student internships with Safeway and McDonalds via the Injaz program. Safeway just recently has arrived in Jordan and is actively pushing to replace the former structure of small local grocery stores with its own superstores. Ironically, Injaz is teaching entrepreneurship to students while teaching them to take jobs in global corporations that are eradicating forms of local enterprises (personal fieldnotes, December 2006).

Programs offered by EFE in Jordan are similar. The mission of EFE in Jordan is “to create economic opportunities for Jordanian youth through demand-driven employment and entrepreneurship training linked to job and start-up support,” and “to empower youth to make a viable living, support themselves and contribute to Jordan’s future economic development” (Reliefweb.int 2020). To do this, EFE offers employability courses on the topics of workplace success, labor law, information technology, and English. The workplace success course focuses on assisting youth in developing the teamwork, leadership, presentation, decision-making, critical thinking, time management, and organizational skills that EFE and its business partners deem necessary to become successful employees.

EFE programs in Jordan include job training and placements, entrepreneurship training, and training on how to find a job. EFE Jordan’s job training program consists of a range of technical training courses in the fields of sales, hospitality, welding and fabrication, beauty, heating, air conditioning and ventilation, garment industry assembly line fabrication, land surveying, mobile maintenance, call center, data entry, and digital marketing. It also runs a social entrepreneurship program comprised of three courses called Ripples of Happiness, the Media Fellowship Program, and the Intel Learn Entrepreneurship Program (EFE.org 2017). EFE seeks to tailor its training courses to immediate market needs, through meeting directly with Jordanian employers and asking them about their workforce demands (Jordan Times 2021). Since 2007, EFE claims to have graduated eighteen thousand Jordanian youth, 85 percent of whom were placed in jobs and 70 percent of whom were females (Azzeh 2017). EFE primarily works with low-income youth and high school dropouts, providing vocational training for relatively low wage jobs that do not require post-secondary education; many of the jobs EFE is training Jordanian youth for are located in the new Free Economic Zones that have been established in the country.

One of the things being accomplished through these programs being run in Jordan by Injaz, EFE, and other youth development NGOs is the promotion of a sense of individual responsibility for economic wellbeing. What determines whether a young person makes it in the system is whether an individual has a good work ethic, is disciplined, has a sense of leadership, and has entrepreneurial skills. These programs, thus, promote the myth that the free market economy is open to everybody, that it is just a matter of skills you learn in order to succeed. It also obscures the structural injustices inherent in the system and the withdrawal of the government from providing for public welfare.

A three-month training course on microcredits run by Save the Children’s Najah program, for example, begins by teaching the young participants to be entrepreneurs, practicing skills such as developing an idea, reading the market, testing the idea, formulating a business plan, looking for funds, and presenting the idea to funders. During the course, students also read about success stories of Jordanian businesspeople who have made it in the market. They either visit their businesses or listen to them speak in their workshops. The stories are told in a teleological way. The businessmen are self-made, successful due to their hard work. Trainees also take English classes since it is “the global language” or “the language of business.” They are told by their teacher that “if you want to be an entrepreneur you need to learn how to write in English, no banks accept business plans that are not written in English.” Najah, unlike other microcredit projects elsewhere around the world, does not aim to capitalize on the poor (Roy 2010). Participants were not asked to take out loans to start their own entrepreneurial projects but were offered up to four hundred Jordanian dinars (equivalent to $600 US) out of a fund paid for by Save the Children, USAID, and corporate donations (personal fieldnotes, December 2006).

Similarly, in an employability course run by Injaz, students are exposed to “success stories” intended to inspire students by exposing them to stories of business and economic elites in Jordan. The idea of these stories is that “if these entrepreneurs could do it, you can do it too, you just need to persevere, take risks, be open to change, and learn how to work in the global economy,” said Soraya Salti, one of the developers of the Success Stories program. “We want to provide them with role models from their own society to tell them that it happens here in your city, it is not restricted to the American dream” (personal interview, November 2006).

As with Najah, the success stories did not discuss the social background and cultural capital of these elites, who were presented as being self-made. In addition to providing success stories to youth in writing, the program invited “entrepreneurs” to tell their stories individually and have a discussion with the class on-site (or, sometimes, in hotels or in their places of business). These encounters, however, sometimes had the opposite of the intended effect. For example, Injaz invited Nour Kabariti, daughter of a Jordanian prime minister and member of a prominent upper-class family, to speak to their students. Nour tells her story in a fairytale like way:

After I graduated from school, I wanted to come back and work for my country, and I was and still am against working in the public sector, I found it very limiting and non-creative. I remembered as a child I always wished there was a Jordanian chocolate factory. I studied the market, discussed it with my friends and family, and everybody encouraged me. I then looked for the place and travelled to buy cheap cocoa and started the project in 1995. Now we employ 50 workers, and the Jordanian chocolate is marketed not only in Jordan but also throughout the Middle East and we are thinking of expanding now. And here we see the dream of a child to have Jordanian chocolate was turned into a chocolate factory that employs many workers and helps so many families. Who would want to work in the public sector or even in the private sector when you can be your own boss?

Kabariti never once mentioned money. During the subsequent discussion, one of the students asked about the start-up capital necessary to launch the factory. Kabariti responded that she had a hundred thousand Jordanian dinars in her own savings to begin with (worth about half a million US dollars in the 1990s). Her reply was followed by another question about where she managed to get that amount of money. Her answer: she received help from her family and friends (personal fieldnotes, December 2006).

Strong promotion of a culture of entrepreneurship is at the heart of most of these training courses. Youth in Jordan are taught through these youth development programs that the United States is the leader of the global economy, not because it is exploiting other nations’ resources but because young people there have a set of skills that make them competitive, and this is due to the successful education system in the United States that is designed to this end. “The lack of entrepreneurship culture is a challenge in Jordan” declares Ahmad Al Hanandeh, Jordan’s minister of digital economy and entrepreneurship (The National News 2022). Because of this lack of entrepreneurship culture, Queen Rania inaugurated the Center for Entrepreneurship in Amman to “promote the culture of entrepreneurship, especially among young Jordanians” (QRNCE 2022).

According to Soraya Salti, enterprise is “a mindset not a sector, and to develop we need to change the mindset of youth in Jordan to embrace entrepreneurship” (Kravis Prize 2015). Injaz and the youth development complex in Jordan, thus, work not only to pull Jordanian youth into the global market economy but also to address the problems of economic instability that have been caused by the neoliberal economic reform process in Jordan.

Aware of the insecurities that economic reforms will reproduce for Jordanian society, and bearing in mind the riots that erupted in the two phases of reforms during the previous reign of King Hussein in 1989 and 1996, USAID and the Jordanian government are supporting programs such as Injaz, EFE, and the ERFKE curriculum reform in an attempt to prevent any return to such social unrest by turning the insecurities of the system back onto individual Jordanians themselves. (Succarie 2008). Not only are youth in Jordan asked to internalize these insecurities; they also are encouraged to believe it is their choice, turning them away from making demands on the state for protections from the shocks of the market. If, in the old system, they were workers by necessity, today they are now entrepreneurs by choice.

Amman as a Laboratory: Lessons Learned on the Ground

One of key roles of gateway cities, as Sören Scholvin (2019b, 208) argues, is to help adapt “global knowledge” to “local specificities.” In being the entry point for youth development NGOs and other Western and international organizations to work in the Middle East, Amman functions as an essential testing ground to try out policies, programs, and practices; to identify key kinks and other problems; and to polish these up before exporting them out to the broader region. “If ideas are invented in the West, then here is the laboratory to test these ideas,” one young Jordanian workshop participant reflected. “We are the army of youth on which all of these NGOs work” (personal fieldnotes, September 2006).

In running workshops and classes and internship programs in Jordan through the first decade of the twenty-first century, Injaz, EFE, and the other NGOs in the youth development complex were not universally welcomed and embraced by their students. There was continuous resistance, contestation, questioning, and conflict. Perhaps the strongest resistance came from Ma’an, a strong tribal area very supportive of King Hussein, but also the first governorate to start bread riots after the first round of structural adjustment and the lifting of subsidies on bread. Ma’an also was the first governorate in which Injaz tried to open offices outside of Amman. A few months after the launching of Injaz in Amman, the Jordan Injaz advice was to close the office, as “there are two staff only and no students.” However, the director of Injaz insisted on going to meet with the community, and as she recollects the story: “It turned into a hornets’ nest. They accused us of coming to influence the minds of their youth, their most valued asset. The Imam in the mosque was preaching against us. The head of the school district would not come near us and sent orders to all schools, at his own expense, not to cooperate. We were shut out” (Salti 2008, 92).

In some instances, courses had to be shut down completely due to student opposition (Sukarieh 2016). But the existence of this extensive, local contestation by Jordanian youth to many of the new youth development programs does not mean these programs were complete failures. On the contrary, it is through the direct experience of contestation that program developers and organizers were able to learn and adapt their models, to figure out what needed to change and what could be left the same, so as to increase their chances of larger, region-wide success.

Two lessons, in particular, stand out. First was the need to indigenize or Arabize the youth development programs. The EFE Jordan website introduces the NGO as a “locally registered non-profit organization established in 2006 that leads to national initiatives to create economic opportunities for unemployed youth across the kingdom” (Azzeh 2017). The Injaz website, likewise, claims they are an “independent Jordanian NGO” (Injaz Jordan 2022). This focus on localizing and indigenizing development has been described as the “new tyranny” in international development projects, as such discourses of localization and participation hide power differentials in decision-making and conception of projects between the funders and the funded, and between local and global offices (Kothari and Cooke 2001).

Some of this Arabization and indigenization was simply for purposes of access and comprehension. The English language is not widely understood among Jordanian youth, laws and contexts are different from the US situation where much of the youth development curriculum has initially been created, and concepts and models widely familiar to youth in the West often are alien to youth in Jordan. It was in Amman that “we made the program indigenous,” explains the director of Injaz Al-Arab. “We not only translated the programs to Arabic, we Arabized them.… In the sense that we took the ideas and totally adapted them to the Arab world.… The program on volunteering, well Arab culture was always a volunteer culture, and we started to collect all these [Arabic] words where community was built on volunteering, faz’a, ‘aouni, and so on, so the students won’t think it is coming from abroad, something that is not Arab” (personal interview, November 2006).

Whereas the Junior Achievement curriculum in the United States is filled with profiles of famous American entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and others, in Amman, Injaz program developers worked on supplementing and replacing these with entrepreneurial success stories from Jordan and the broader Arab world. “We want to provide them [Arab youth] with role models from their own society to tell them that it happens here in your city, it is not restricted to the American Dream,” says the Injaz Al-Arab director (personal interview, November 2006). In addition to providing success stories in writing, the program invites local entrepreneurs to tell their stories individually and have a direct discussion with students. These entrepreneurs were mostly the Young Jordanians, who also took up places on the boards of directors of Injaz, EFE, and other youth development NGOs in Amman, such as Fadi Ghandour, Karim Kawar, Mary Nazzal, and Doha Abdelkhaleq.

Arabization also was driven by the depth of anti-American sentiment among many Jordanian youth. A PEW poll in 2003 found that only 1 percent of youth in Jordan had favorable sentiments of USA: 90 percent of Jordanian youth believed the United States gave preferential treatment to Israeli over Arab interests; and 78 percent of Jordanian youth thought positively about Osama Bin Laden. Jordan was one of the few Arab countries where “opinions of the USA are equally negative among female and male respondents (PEW Research Center 2005). While elites in Jordan (the Young Jordanians) were strongly favorable to and integrated with the United States and the West, having studied in their universities, speaking the English language, and working for or with American companies, the same was not at all true for the broader Jordanian population. Many Jordanian youth participating in programs run by Injaz, EFE, and other youth development NGOs reacted strongly against the fact that these programs were often funded and sponsored by American organizations and run by Americans with extensive American curriculum content.

In Amman, the United States is widely seen as an imperial force. “Why would we believe the Americans have our interests in their heart while they are waging war in Iraq and helping Israel?” one student asked, in what was a common refrain. “America is an Empire, all what Americans care for and want is to steal the oil and they want to control us, nothing that comes from them is good for us. Since their involvement in the region, tell me one good thing they did and it was for our own benefit.” “I know that Jordan lives on USAID money, but it is another thing [for USAID] to fund education programs” in the country,” says another student (personal fieldnotes, December 2006).

During the Arab Spring uprisings in Amman in 2014, the original Memo of Understanding that existed between USAID and the Jordanian ministry of education to run the ERFKE program as well as partner with Injaz was uncovered, printed, and broadly condemned as a form of cultural imperialism. Mohammad Masri, a political scientist at the Jordanian University, explains: “If one looks at class in the polling of perception of US policy [in Jordan], it is obvious that the more you go up the ladder of the social classes, perception of the US becomes more favorable. This is due in part [to] the interconnection of interests, western education, as well as closeness to the royal court. But also the poor’s perception of the US is related to their religious affiliation. The intersectionality of class and religion plays a major role in the poor perception of US policies amongst the lower classes in Jordan as elsewhere” (personal interview, January 2007).

As a consequence, youth development NGOs actively sought to de-emphasize and obscure not just their links with the US government but with the United States overall. They did this through name changes (so that Junior Achievement is known in the Arab world as Injaz), translating and Arabizing their curriculum, recruiting local Jordanian teachers and youth workers to run their programs, and appointing Jordanian elites to senior management positions and boards of directors. During the first few years of Injaz Jordan’s Success Stories program, from 1999 through 2003, Jordanian students were taught about Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, George Clooney, and Steve Jobs—all stories taken directly from the Junior Achievement USA curriculum. By 2004, all these stories had been replaced with local success stories of Jordanian business leaders, such as Fadi Ghandour, Bassem Awadallah, and Nour Kabariti. As Khaled el Saheb, one of the directors of Injaz, explains, “the creation of the local success stories was not only to tell the Jordanian students that there are entrepreneurs in Jordan, as some of them started to question whether such success stories existed in Amman, but also because of the war on Iraq, there was a need not to be seen as promoting the USA” (personal interview, September 2006).

Indigenization of the youth development complex was mostly complete when Jordanian elites themselves began to set up their own youth development organizations, in a direct echo of those been brought into the country from overseas. Fadi Ghandour, CEO of Aramax, after working with Injaz in Jordan, thus set up his own youth NGO, Ruwwad al Tanmeyah–Entrepreneurs, which focuses on working with youth living in poverty in Jabal Al Nadhif, one of the most impoverished areas in Amman and all of Jordan. Ghandour’s initiative started, similarly to EFE, as a response to the “terrorist attack” in Amman in 2005. As the story on the Ruwwad website states: “In November 2005, three hotels in Amman were simultaneously hit by suicide bombers and more than 60 people lost their lives. One of the young people killed in the attacks was Mousab Khorma, a Jordanian entrepreneur and close friend of Fadi Ghandour’s. Fadi called for a meeting with various friends and business partners. He introduced the newly established Ruwwad, presented a film on the community and raised donations for the Mousab-Khorma Scholarship Fund (MKYEF). The Mousab Khorma Scholarship Fund has now become the cornerstone of Ruwwad’s work with youth and local communities” (Jamali 2011).

Ghandour explains that the idea for Ruwwad was directly inspired by conversations with other youth development leaders participating in West Amman social networking circles (personal interview, December 2006). In 2002, Princess Basma Bint Talal, the cousin of the current king, established the Princess Basma Youth Resource Center (PBYRC), explaining: “Ours is a youthful country, almost 70% of our society is under the age of thirty. In Jordan, and indeed everywhere, young people can contribute much with their dynamism and energy. Their wellbeing, and that of society, depends on the existence of an enabling environment that supports the rights of all people to participate fully and actively” (PBYRC 2022)

Like Injaz, PBYRC starts from the premise that Jordan is a youthful society and considers youth to be agents of change who stand “at the heart of national development processes.” Princess Basma calls on the “younger generation to take the lead in overcoming the obstacles they face while seeking to realize their aspirations and dreams.” The resource center brings together thousands of students from around the country to “provide training, awareness raising and employment opportunities” for young people in Jordan. Some of these training programs are run directly by Injaz (PBYRC 2018). In 2008, Queen Rania’s Jordan River Foundation launched a Youth and Social Innovation Program to “empower” local Jordanian youth by training them in social entrepreneurship; the program was funded initially by a grant from USAID, and then later supported by partnerships with the private sector as well as funds from different European states. As with the PBYRC, the Jordan River Foundation hosts Injaz trainings for Jordanian youth all over the country—as Queen Rania, of course, was simultaneously serving as an ambassador for Injaz Jordan (Jordan River Foundation 2020). Prince Hassan, the uncle of the current king, has likewise set up the Prince Hassan Youth Award, which focuses on teaching Jordanian youth the virtues of tolerance as well as entrepreneurship skills (Petra 2015). The youth development complex in Jordan, in other words, rapidly became a project that was embraced and promoted by national political and economic elites and was no longer solely a Western or American intervention.

A second lesson learned by the youth development NGOs during their testing period in Amman was that even if there was extensive youth resistance to their workshops and other programs, it did not necessarily matter, as most of the young students participating in these workshops kept coming back anyway; and new cohorts of students kept enrolling in subsequent workshop programs, as well. A large part of the reason for this was the harsh and blunt effect of basic material constraints and incentives. Youth unemployment has been high in Jordan for many years. Between 2004 and 2006, for example, only 41 percent of youth not enrolled in school were working, while 42 percent were not active in the labor market. The situation is particularly dire for young women. While young women are staying in school slightly longer than their male peers, their labor market participation rates upon completion of school are much lower. The total female labor force participation rate among fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old women was estimated in 2010 at 10.5 percent (Kanaan and Hanania 2009).

Many of the Jordanian youth in the workshops run by Injaz, EFE, and other youth development NGOs simply did not have many alternatives available to them. They were unable to find regular employment and were desperate for ways to find an income. As Ahmad, a university graduate who graduated in 2005 and was still without a job three years later, told me: “I have been in almost all the Injaz trainings and job fairs. It started with writing a CV training in the university. At first I believed that I needed these skills to find a job, and I truly was engaged and took the workshops and programs very seriously. When I kept going to workshops and not finding jobs, now I come because I have nothing to do and because something inside me still tells me maybe it works, maybe I network. Well, it is always nice to meet new people through these trainings too” (personal interview, November 2008).

Many valued the opportunity to learn English through the youth programs, and English was seen as important for opening up job opportunities. As twenty-year-old Suha says: “I think the best program is the English program, learning English is important to all jobs, and so for me I keep registering in the English programs as also if I migrate, it will be helpful for me” (personal interview, November 2008).

Despite their many doubts and criticisms of the youth development curriculum ideology, some still hoped they might be able to become entrepreneurs and that the lies fed to them by their training might, nevertheless, be true. In a group discussion after one of the classes on entrepreneurship, a group of Injaz students expressed their disbelief that the training would help them become entrepreneurs. As one student explained, they were well aware of the “lack of full disclosure of information on how to become an entrepreneur and especially the background of the entrepreneurs in the success stories. We are not fools, we know from family names where they got their money to build their businesses, this is never relayed to us. To become a Fadi Ghandour, surely you need more training than those you get in Injaz, you need a father who was a millionaire and degrees from top schools as well as connections to the royals.”

But when I challenged the group, asking if they were aware then why did they still join, another student told me: “Well, there is nothing here, and sometimes it is psychological, you do not want to believe it won’t work, because you need a glimmer of hope to cling to, you want to believe that it might work despite all the constraints.” They hoped, against the odds, that by visiting West Amman and meeting with entrepreneurs—“the businessmen and the thieves, and all those who control the country and control the money,” as one student put it—they would be able to find jobs for themselves. “Let’s work, if it works, fine,” a young Ammani female student explains. “If not, we try other things, I do not care who teaches me, I just want to work hard and get a job” (personal fieldnotes, November 2006).

The lesson for the youth development complex was that they didn’t need to change everything about their curriculum and programming just because they were confronted by extensive and continuing student criticism and resistance. They didn’t need to fully convince local Jordanian youth of the correctness or justness of their message. Rather, they needed only to be able to tap into some small sliver of hope for social and economic advancement and provide enough material incentives and opportunities—even if these were accessible only to a few students and even if these remained mostly low-level and low-wage positions—to be able to keep their workshops and classrooms full of students, year after year after year.

Spreading the Programs Regionally

In 2015, Amman played host to the Global Forum on Youth, Peace, and Security, under the patronage of Crown Prince Hussein, the son of Queen Rania and King Abdullah II. The forum was held to build support for the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace, and Security, which had been introduced by Jordan during its membership on the UN Security Council that year (Sukarieh and Tannock 2018). The forum led to the creation of the Amman Youth Declaration, which sought to increase young people’s participation and leadership in issues of peace and security and enhance their involvement in violence prevention and peacebuilding.

Adopting the core discourse of the youth development complex, the Amman declaration starts with the premise that “today’s generation of youth is the largest the world has ever known and that young people often form the majority of the population of countries affected by armed conflict” (UN Security Council 2015, 2). The declaration points to the threat posed by “the rise of radicalisation to violence and violent extremism especially among youth, [that] threatens stability and development” (1–2), and it argues that the solution is to “provide youth employment opportunities and vocational training fostering their education and promoting youth entrepreneurship and constructive political engagement” (3).

“The adoption of the Amman Youth Declaration represents a historic milestone for engaging youth in peace and security,” Crown Prince Hussein wrote after the end of the forum. “Youth delegations have the responsibility to carry the Amman Youth Declaration and expand the network of peace builders around the world” (UN Security Council 2015). The Global Forum and Amman Youth Declaration were also historic in another respect. After two decades of serving as a key gateway city for introducing and testing youth development programming for the broader Middle East region, Amman had acquired a place on the map, not just regionally but globally, as a key center for the promotion and support of youth development work worldwide.

As the initial piloting of youth development programs had taken place in Amman, the city became a showcase for demonstrating and exporting these programs through the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. A director of EFE explains the process: “EFE developed its program in Amman for a few years before starting to spread to other countries. Amman was the site that allowed us to test the ideas we had to work with youth in the MENA region and adjust them to the demands of the market and the culture. We took the lessons we learned with us to other [EFE] chapters in the MENA region” (November 2006).

In this, EFE was following a pattern echoed by many other youth development organizations as well. Even Ruwwad Al Tanmiya, the youth entrepreneurship NGO launched by Jordanian CEO Fadi Ghandour, opened branches in Lebanon (2007), Gaza and the West Bank (2008), and Egypt (2008) after piloting its program in Amman first for two years (Jamali 2011). The director of Injaz Jordan subsequently became the director of Injaz Al Arab as the organization began opening chapters across the Arab world; several of her core staff from Jordan joined her in making this transition (Reimers, Ortega, and Dyer 2018). Injaz Al Arab remains headquartered in Amman.

Before new Injaz chapters are opened in other Arab countries, staff are brought in to Amman to see the work of Injaz Jordan in operation, learning about everything from governance and administration and relationships with the Jordanian state to the micro-details of classroom curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher training. “We usually take them on a tour to visit schools and different sites, they talk to young people who share their experiences with the organization, and of course, we show them some success stories,” an Injaz Al Arab senior director told me in a personal interview in July 2019. He also detailed how, for example, Injaz Bahrain was launched in 2005, following extensive discussions between Queen Rania and Princess Hessa Bint Khalifa, the wife of the current prince of Bahrain. Before the launching of Injaz Bahrain, the princess sent two of her aides on an internship to observe how Injaz Jordan worked and how it is managed and governed.

When Queen Rania visited Bahrain in 2006 and 2010, she accompanied Princess Hessa—who had by now become the director of Injaz Bahrain—to visit Injaz programs in the country. Queen Rania publicly praised the Injaz programs in Bahrain, stating that “the ‘Banks in Action’ competition shows INJAZ at its best,” while promising that “teaching our children the value of money, the spirit of business, and the rewards of hard work improves not only their future prospects as job seekers but our future prosperity as a region” (Ammon News, 2010). As Salti (2008, 92) writes, the presence of Queen Rania as an ambassador was central to the regional spread of Injaz, as the queen worked on “drumming up support at the Young Arab Leaders gathered in Dubai; launching Injaz in Kuwait, where she grew up and is considered a beloved daughter; encouraging Arab first ladies to support Injaz in their own countries; and rallying powerful business leaders from East and West at the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to join Injaz al-Arab’s campaign to Empower One Million Arab Youth a Year by 2018.” Soraya Salti (2008, 92) quotes Queen Rania’s comment at a gathering of Injaz students and supporters in Kuwait: “It is my dream to see the flag of Injaz waving high in every Arab city!”