Traveling theory? Constructing women's citizenship in international development in Jordan.

In this paper, I discuss the concept of women’s citizenship in Jordan in the context of political ‘empowerment’ programmes in international development which are funded and/or implemented by European development actors. These programmes aim to encourage Jordanian women’s civic engagement, for instance their involvement in local development processes, their advocacy towards state institutions, their involvement in political parties, or their taking on leadership roles in community development. These are then labelled ‘citizen empowerment’ projects, leading me to ask, what can we observe about postcolonial Europe through examining its involvement in making citizens outside of its borders? Based on qualitative research as part of my PhD with multiple organisations in Jordan and Europe, I look at the female citizen who emerges in the development discourses of these interventions as well as the development structures that condition her appearance, in order to argue that it is actually postcolonial Europe that reveals itself through its development interventions in Jordan. Both its geopolitical interests in the region and its self-image are preserved through the figure of the empowered female Jordanian citizen. She is supposed consolidate the status quo insofar as it lets Europe simultaneously uphold its identity as a promoter and exporter of supposedly quintessential European democratic and liberal values, ensure that the change it actually achieves does not interfere with its foreign policy strategies, and maintain its inward-looking gaze that is inattentive to a postcolonial analysis of its role in the region. I therefore critically investigate the traveling of political categories such as citizenship from the global north/Europe to the global south/Jordan through development work, but also the implications of constructing political categories such as citizenship for women in the global south and what these reveal about their constructors, rather than the constructees.