PPE Research Fellow Focus: Lillian Frost

Lillian Frost, Assistant Professor of Political Science and PPE Affiliated Faculty member at Virginia Tech, held a PPE Research Fellowship with the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics during the academic year 2023-2024. The fellowship helped Dr. Frost to further develop and disseminate her research.

“With the generous support of the PPE Research Fellowship, I advanced my research agenda on the underpinnings of citizenship and legal discrimination by deepening my ongoing analyses of what citizenship means, how it is legislated, and how it operates in practice in Jordan.

First, as a PPE Research Fellow, I made progress on the article-length version of my first book project. This article is titled “Intentional Ambiguity: Purposeful Discrepancies between Law and Implementation in Jordan.” The article examines why states adopt ambiguous policies toward refugee groups that say one thing in law and another in implementing regulations. It answers this question by examining the factors that provoke executive leaders to adopt ambiguous policies through a careful study of Jordan’s diverse policies governing different groups of Palestinian refugees’ access to passports and nationality between 1948 and 1989.

Overall, the article argues that to understand the adoption of ambiguous policies, one must examine the political pressures and constraints on the state’s top executive leaders at the time. When these leaders face strong, contradictory pressures and/or constraints (e.g., from international donors, security leaders, or key popular constituencies) to both include and exclude a group through a specific policy, then they can choose to placate both sides by allowing the policy’s law to please one side and its implementing regulations to suit the other, thereby producing an intentionally ambiguous policy.

I presented and received valuable feedback on this article at the American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting in September, as well as at the Southeast Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Society’s (SERMEISS) Annual Fall Meeting, and the Emerging Immigration Scholars Conference at the University of California, Los Angeles in October. My PPE Fellowship was invaluable in helping to fund my travel to the two conferences in October.

I also benefited from presenting this draft article at the PPE Research Fellow Panel. Based on feedback from these events, I plan to submit this paper to Comparative Politics by the end of 2024.

In addition, I was fortunate to receive an award at the SERMEISS meeting, which was the Honorable Mention for the SERMEISS Best Article or Book Chapter Award in 2023 (for my book chapter, “Security Threats or Citizens? Fifth Column Rhetoric in Jordan,” published by Oxford University Press in Enemies Within: The Global Politics of Fifth Columns, edited by Harris Mylonas and Scott Radnitz).

Second, I was able to support work on this article, and the broader book project, by reviewing, organizing, and analyzing new archival files, which I collected on Jordan’s internal politics from the British National Archives at Kew in 2023.

My review of these archival files was particularly fruitful. In addition to finding helpful insights for my ongoing projects, I also used evidence from these archival files to write and publish a paper, titled ‘Threatening Refugees: Refugee Rentierism and Arms Deals in Jordan, 1967–77.’

I was invited to present this paper at the Project on Middle East Political Science’s (POMEPS) “Politics of Migration & Refugee Rentierism in the Middle East Workshop,” and to publish it as part of POMEPS’ edited volume on, “The Politics of Migration and Refugee Rentierism in the Middle East,” edited by Marc Lynch and Gerasimos Tsourapas.

The archival files also helped inform my revisions to two other articles. One titled, “Ambiguous Citizenship Policies: Examining Implementation Gaps across Levels of Legislation in Jordan,” published in April 2024 in Comparative Migration Studies, and the other titled, “Citizenship in the Shadow of Law: Legal Ambiguity and Authoritarian Power in Jordan,” co-authored with Steven D. Schaaf (under review with Law & Society Review).

Third, I advanced a related working paper, “Citizenship Spectrums: Misalignments of Nationality, Passports, and Belonging in Jordan.” I received valuable feedback on this paper at a PPE Working Paper Series talk and a panel at the International Studies Association’s (ISA) Annual Convention, both in April. My PPE Research Fellowship was critical in funding my travel to the ISA Convention. After incorporating the comments I received at these events, I plan to submit this paper for publication by the end of 2024.

Lastly, I was able to share my expertise on citizenship and Palestinian refugees in the Middle East in several forums this year. First, I spoke to the Virginia Tech Amnesty International Club as well as appeared live (via Zoom) on CNN Romania’s (Antena 3 Cable News) primetime “News Hour with CNN.” Second, I co-organized, with Dr. Carmen Gitre and Dr. Daniel Breslau, a three-part series on the current Israel-Palestine Crisis, which featured 10 top experts on (i) international law and human rights, (ii) the historic domestic context in Palestine-Israel, and (iii) recent politics as well as activism in Palestine-Israel. Lastly, I met with three first-year PPE students who interviewed me based on my expertise in Middle East politics, as part of an assignment for their first-year PPE course.

Overall, the PPE Research Fellowship has provided me with an invaluable opportunity to advance and disseminate my research. I have deeply appreciated how flexible the PPE fellowship was. The feedback I have received and networks I have built this year have been critical to advancing my research agenda and scholarly profile.”

To learn more about the Kellogg Center’s research fellowships, please visit this link.