Jordan’s Eternal Promise of Reform ACHIM VOGT W hen protests and popular uprisings started sweeping the Middle East and North Africa in early 2011, international observers and media were quick to point to whom they speculated could be the next »domino« to follow long-time dictators Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Husni Mubarak in Egypt. Among the countries mentioned most prominently, besides Yemen, Algeria and Syria at the time, figured Jordan. One of the key reasons for this – as it turned out, premature – as­sumption was the fact that the first demonstrations in Jordan were held as early as January 7: before Tunisia’s Ben Ali fled the country on Janu­ary 14 and substantially earlier than protests began in earnest in Egypt (25 January 2011). As soon as events in Jordan took a different turn, with an early cabinet reshuffle on February 1 and public overtures by the monarchy and the new government of the Hashemite kingdom towards the protest movement, commentators and analysts were equally quick to argue that, given the moderate regime and the genuine interest of King Abdullah II in modernizing his country, Jordan would be able to avoid major public unrest and the risk of an eventual collapse of the regime. Both assumptions proved to fall considerably short in their analysis. As it has turned out after more than nine months of an increasingly heterogeneous protest movement in the Arab world, the political equations for Jordan are far more complex, intertwined and overlapping on a national as well as a regional level than either analysis had considered. Therefore, long-term developments in Jordan are less predictable – and might even prove to be difficult to anticipate and manage for the regime itself. While the monarchy still has a chance to shape Jordan’s political future by actively promoting and managing a peaceful reform process, it also faces the difficulty of having to cope with the different currents of a protest movement whose extremely divergent positions, demands and expectations are hard to merge and will be difficult to transform in a meaningful way into a sustainable political agenda for the country’s ipg 4/2011 Vogt, Jordan’s Eternal Promise of Reform 61