Life and Precarity in the Border Zone of War: Insights from Ramtha, Jordan

On the Jordanian side of the border, the Syrian war may not look like the bloody, gory event raging only a few kilometres away.Indeed, apart from a couple of shells that fell on the town of Ramtha and its vicinity in 2015, war as a threat to life in the strict (biological) sense seems to be limited to the Syrian territories.Looked at from its margins, such as Ramtha, the war in Syria is mostly about distant columns of smoke, the occasional sounds of explosions, and the presence of refugees uprooted and separated from their families, and only sometimes injured, tortured or even dead.On the Jordanian side of the border, one could venture to a have a picnic in the borderzone village of Dhunaybah overlooking al-Weda Dam on the Yarmouk River, like many residents of the area do, or stroll around the agricultural fields overlooking the scenic waterfall in Syrian Zaizoun where some smoke indicating ongoing clashes and militia patrols could still be seen in the distance.In Syrian Dar, seven kilometres to the north of Ramtha, war as a threat to life is a real possibility, not just a trace from another time and place.However, if we consider war not only as it relates to biological life, but also to livelihood and the capacity to live a good life, as many Ramthawis did during my fieldwork in 2016-2017, the picture starts looking different and the contrast between Syrian Dar and Jordanian Ramtha becomes less stark.Of course, as recipients of the first wave of refugees when protests in Dar were met with lethal force by the Syrian state in 2011, people in Ramtha understood very well how their own lives on the Jordanian side of the border are not threatened in the same way the lives of fleeing Syrians were.Yet, they saw that war as destructive of their own lives as well.Many repeated a common refrainthat their city is dead, and that they themselves felt that they were dead.Given how much the lives and livelihoods of people in the Jordanian-Syrian border zone relied on cross border traffic and the infrastructure that sustained it, the closure of Jordan's two border crossings with Syria in 2013 and 2015 meant that not only spatial mobility has become restricted, but also the economic and social mobility that characterized life in the border zone.As one interlocutor put it to me: "war is destructive in every way.