Amid the revolutionary fervour sweeping the Arab world, Jordan has gone largely unnoticed. This is despite the country going through the longest public sector strike in its recent history, disrupting schooling for more than 1.5 million students.

The Jordanian government should urgently address these shameful violations that national women’s organizations have been battling for decades,” said Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, “starting with the zealous use of detention powers by provincial governors, and the discriminatory male guardianship system that allows adult women to be arrested for leaving home without permission.

Providing legal work opportunities to refugees is not detrimental to the native job market. The inflow of foreign aid to Jordan to assist with some of the needs of refugees, as well as the conditions of the Jordan Compact, which included aid and trade concessions and employment support for Jordanians, may have played an important role in creating labour demand for Jordanians. So it is vital to ensure sufficient resources and public services are in place to support refugees and the host economy.

The protest was met with a harsh police response. According to reports, tear gas was used to control the protesters. Footage and images showing police violence flooded social media. A total of 50 teachers were detained but later released.

Since its release, the series has come under fire from critics who have denounced what they perceived as the show’s blatant inadequacy with Jordan’s traditions and values. Grand Mufti of Jordan Mohammed Khalaileh described it as a “moral breakdown that does not represent the habits and morals of Jordanians”, adding it was contrary to “Islamic precepts”.

Loyal to its traditional diplomatic strategy, Jordan is unlikely to explicitly thwart its long-standing alliance with the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but seems rather inclined to work preventively on developing further its ties with other states, such as Russia, China, and Turkey.

Jordan stiffened its border security rules between Jordan and Syria to fight the smuggling of weapons, ammunitions, and drugs – a traffic that had increased by 300% in 2013 alone. It has also enhanced its surveillance system to defend itself against the infiltration of IS fighters, including installing a network of radar and surveillance towers to detect the location of potential infiltrators several kilometers far off the border.

The negative consequences of Middle Eastern regional conflicts for Jordan find an echo in climate change, which also aggravates the country’s water problems: it causes less rain to fall and feed the Jordan River and the Yarmouk River (the two rivers are shared with Israel and Syria). This situation forces people to rely on groundwater reserves, and they are increasingly depleting.

But perhaps his most notable achievement to date is becoming, at the age of 20, the youngest person to chair a United Nations Security Council during a session in December 2015. In response to the prince’s call to engage young people in peace building and countering violent extremism, the council adopted the Jordan-proposed Amman Youth Declaration.

Marwan Muasher is the former deputy prime minister and foreign minister of Jordan. In the lectures he delivers and the debates he takes part in, Muasher criticizes the slow pace of reform, politically, economically, and socially, and he recently criticized the deterioration of higher education in the kingdom.