Jasmine Benhaida, Simon Mangon and Norig Neveu (eds.), The national fact in the Middle East. Jordan as a case study, Review of Muslim Worlds and the Mediterranean, n°157, 1/2025.

Presentation:

With the "national fact" as its point of entry, this issue reports on the revival of research on Jordan. Paradoxically, the country has a particular heuristic virtue when it comes to understanding the processes, dynamics and conflicts inherent in any national construction. Yet its national project has long been disputed or contested, including in academic research. For more than a century, the national fact has been considered in terms of its plasticity, its interweaving and its multiple modes of elaboration. The contributions analyse how it shapes and is shaped by society. In so doing, they move away from a binary opposition between state and society and between different social groups or fixed categories. From a multidisciplinary perspective, they place themselves at the intersection of different objects, actors and scales. Through an analysis of mechanisms, practices and discourses, they question the regimes of legitimacy and legitimation that structure the country's political, intellectual and economic life. The aim is to rethink Jordan, beyond the categories inherited from the British mandate, by deciphering, in their interaction, both everyday forms of nationalism and the discourses and staging of the regime. By reinscribing Jordan within globalisation, this issue questions the notion of sovereignty and the spaces and theatres of the national fact.