The Many States of Excess: Everyday Statecraft and Imperial Entanglement of Iraqi Exiles in Amman

This dissertation is a historically-informed ethnographic investigation of statecraft in exile. It is oriented by three overarching claims: excess, exile, and the state—three claims here understood as co-constitutive of one another, but also constituted against an ongoing encounter with imperiality. I consider how the social and political production of “excess”—legal, bureaucratic, moral, and existential—provides an analytical lens and modality for understanding how ordinary people legitimize particular statecraft projects in the aftermath of authoritarian and imperial violence. This dissertation contributes to the anthropological literature on the state by developing the conceptual framework of the “surplus state” to understand the dynamic relationship between projects of rule and their subjects. Focusing on Iraqi “guests” who arrived in Amman following the invasion of 2003 and who come from different socioeconomic, political, and migration backgrounds, I examine how exiles wrestle with the legal and existential uncertainty of their exilic predicament as they await resettlement, debate past and future state imaginaries in cultural salons, and lay citizenship claims among their jaliya. I demonstrate how, in attempting to grapple with these anxieties, Iraqi exiles find themselves turning to practices, relationalities, and sites that are themselves also deemed marginal, excessive, threatening, and legally troubling, ones that despite their tactical value in grappling with this excess, nevertheless, reproduce classed, urban, and gendered hierarchies in exile. Moreover, I show how, by turning to such historically and politically constituted excess, those Iraqi exiles legitimize different claims to rule. Iraqis in Jordan find themselves entangled with myriad projects of statecraft that simultaneously disorder their everyday lives and render their exilic presence as characterized by excess and surplus: whether in navigating the ambivalent legal terrain of Jordanian statecraft that forecloses future formal citizenship, in their routine bureaucratic encounters with multiple local and international resettlement and charitable organizations, or in the hauntings of a violent authoritarian past whose reverberations continue to trouble governance in Iraq and an omnipresent U.S. imperial statecraft. Furthermore, this dissertation contributes to anthropological literature on exile by moving away from familiar terrains of loss, estrangement, and ightirab, and towards what comes to be ethnographically constituted as an “excess” in encounters with the fetish of the state. This analytical turn demonstrates how exile had emerged not only as technology of colonial governance, but also as one of the legitimation practices of modern statecraft through a logic of excess.

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