Frost Comparative Migration Studies (2024) 12:23 organizations do not provide a legal framework to govern certain rights. The absence of a Lebanese state policy to respond to the initial influx of Syrian refugees is an instance of the former, and debates about whether UNHCR could process Syrians under Lebanon’s preexisting MOU with UNHCR is an instance of the latter (Janmyr, 2016, 60–62, 64). Still other examples could reflect intentional ambiguity. For instance, Lebanon’s introduction of regulations to govern Syrian refugees in December 2014 could represent hidden intentional ambiguity if those regulations specified rights that differed from those Syrians had in preexisting laws, such as the law regulating foreigners or 1993 bilateral agreement with Syria. Lastly, this typology highlights which types of intentional ambiguity are more likely in different political regimes. For example, signaling and performative would be more likely in a more autocratic context because they require that executive policymakers draft, or oversee and approve the drafting, of primary (not just subsidiary) legislation. These forms are possible in more democratic contexts, but it would require executive control over citizenship policies. In contrast, hidden and persistent intentional ambiguity are more feasible across regime types because they only necessitate that executive policymakers control subsidiary legislation—though they also require enough centralization that high-level executive leaders at least oversee and approve such legislation.10 Regardless, it may be more difficult for more democratic regimes to sustain intentionally ambiguous policies when there is a free press, robust civil society, and balance of powers that can track subsidiary legislation and hold the executive accountable when it contradicts the law. Overall, this typology of intentional ambiguity helps to advance conceptualizations of legal ambiguity and implementation gaps. It also helps to unite existing studies by recognizing that intentionally ambiguous policies can govern citizen as well as noncitizen groups. In doing so, this analysis advances work challenging the legal boundaries of citizenship—including studies on postnational citizenship (e.g., Soysal, 1994), denizenship (e.g., Joppke, 1999; Turner, 2016), semi-citizenship (Cohen, 2009), paper citizenship (Sadiq, 2009), and noncitizenship (Tonkiss & Bloom, 2015)—and it acknowledges the statuses, rights, duties, and senses of belonging of groups who lack nationality in a state. Examples of intentional ambiguity in Jordan The following cases illustrate intentional ambiguity by focusing on different cases in Jordan. They highlight how state officials can knowingly adopt a policy where the law and regulations say two different things. This paper does not focus on why officials adopt intentionally ambiguous policies, which is the focus of other work11; instead, it elaborates the concept of intentional ambiguity and demonstrates that it is a type of implementation gap. Jordan has been a major refugee host state for almost its entire existence. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire resettled refugees, such as Circassians, Chechens, and Armenians, on the territory that would become Jordan 10 If there is a high degree of decentralization and central authorities are not drafting (or ensuring compliance with) subsidiary legislation, then an enforcement gap would be more likely. 11 Author book manuscript in progress. Page 7 of 18