Enabling principles scores
In 1989, martial law in Jordan was finally lifted by King Hussein, prompting a flourishing of civil society after two decades of severely constrained political and civic expression. This era of political liberalisation, kickstarted by the spring 1989 protests over IMF-spurred subsidy cuts, marked a turning point. People flocked to the opportunity to establish independent institutions — political parties, civil society organisations (CSOs), news outlets, and the like — that had been barred from forming for so long. In the 1989 election, Muslim-Brotherhood-affiliated candidates made impressive gains, securing roughly 22 of the 80 seats. Following the legalisation of political parties in 1992, the Muslim Brotherhood established the Islamic Action Front as its political party. CSOs registered themselves in different sectors like service provision, aid, and advocacy; today, around 6,000 CSOs are registered in Jordan.
But the celebrated early-90s promise of liberalising reforms turned out not to extend much beyond the moment. Steadily since the close of the 90s, the Jordanian government has developed tools for managing popular mobilisation and discontent to keep critical and oppositional voices from civil society in check. Subsequent electoral amendments, particularly a 1993 reform removing multiple balloting, limited the prospects of opposition groups taking a majority. A slate of amendments, such as 1997 amendments to the Press and Publications Law, narrowed the scope of newfound freedoms. Then, the early 2000s saw the regime turn to focus on neoliberal economic reforms such as WTO ascension and market liberalisation; the political modernisation promised by 1989 was put on hold.
In Jordan’s Arab Spring, a new type of civil society actor emerged alongside established civil society actors. With the hirak tribal youth as prime example, these new actors were decentralised, existed outside of the registered civil society system, and came from historic strongholds of royal support, thereby exercising new pressure on the state to strategically respond. Such groups were joined in protests by long-standing groups, such as the urban-concentrated Muslim Brotherhood. The state responded with a series of concessions to protesters — dismissal of the incumbent government, promises of political changes, the recognition of a powerful, independent teachers’ union — while in the longer interim incrementalising initiatives such as electoral reform and decentralisation, and thoroughly cracking down on prominent hirak leaders in the ensuing years.
The state response to the Arab Spring is emblematic of its ‘soft security’ strategy steadily developed throughout the rest of the 2010s. In this model, dissent and protests that stay within the regime’s established red lines are allowed as a pressure valve release, state action is taken to make subsequent mobilisations more difficult, and selective clear repression tactics are concentrated on arrests and detention of the loudest critics to make examples of them. Now, legal frameworks constraining freedoms of expression (most recently, the 2023 cybercrime law) have evolved to a contemporary situation wherein a wide range of civic activities can be criminalised under broadly defined provisions, and bureaucratic requirements for registration and assembly allow ample room for authorities to intervene. At moments of stress, this is particularly convenient for the state.
These aforementioned tools were used by the state to address the 2018 protests on fuel price hikes and the 2020 crackdown on the teachers union; in the former, the protests were permitted in the face of widespread public anger while public spaces allowing for encampments were slowly obstructed; in the latter, the teachers’ union was permitted until it coordinated nationwide labour activity in 2019, at which point the state intervened to harass and dismantle union members until finally dissolving the union. The solidarity protests with Palestine following 7 October 2023 again demonstrate the state’s strategic combination of acts of tolerance and repression, wherein authorities allowed large street protests in the immediate months after, while increasingly applying the cybercrime law to squash expression that critiqued Jordan and the monarch’s policies towards Israel (a typical ‘red line’).
Since July 2024, several developments have overlapped to make the operational space for civil society in Jordan more constrained than at any point in the 2020s. First, the ongoing global decline in development aid — including from the United States, Jordan’s largest donor — has placed the financial sustainability of Jordanian CSOs in serious jeopardy. One analyst put succinctly the pertinent danger of this shift: by hollowing out Jordan’s civil society in Jordan, the state loses one of its largest ‘shock absorbers.’ Second, in 2025, Jordan intensified its repression of pro-Palestine activists and of criticism directed at Jordan-Israel relations; this has occurred alongside potential foreign policy shifts, particularly following the inauguration of the second Trump administration in January 2025. Third, in April 2025, the state banned Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood — an Islamist organisation with a long and shifting relationship with the monarchy, a leading organiser of pro-Palestine demonstrations, and historically the country’s most prominent opposition group. Its political party, the Islamic Action Party, remains active, but the crackdown on such a prominent and popular actor has generated significant uncertainty and produced a chilling effect across the broader landscape of Jordanian civil society, regardless of ideology.
This report evaluates the current enabling environment for civil society in Jordan, with a focus on developments from July 2024 to July 2025.
