Displacement, time and resistance: The role of waiting in facilitating occupations led by internally displaced persons in Colombia

Abstract

This article contributes to the existing literature on the politics of waiting by discussing occupations led by internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Colombia. This literature has emphasised both the power that waiting frequently entails and, increasingly, the agency it can comprise. Yet less has been said about the potential role of waiting in generating resistance. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of power as intimately tied to resistance, this article explores how waiting can, in some instances, produce resistance. It uses fieldwork conducted in Bogotá, Colombia, between October 2017 and August 2018, including ethnographic observations and 120 interviews conducted with IDPs and state officials, to explore the centrality of waiting to IDPs’ experiences of displacement in Colombia. Contrary to those who would argue that such waiting encourages passivity, the article draws on a discussion of a two-year-long occupation by IDPs in Bogotá to argue that the long waiting periods facing the occupation’s participants prior to partaking in it were instrumental to facilitating the occupation. Waiting enabled the occupation in two major ways: by bringing together a group of people who would not have met had they not been forced to spend prolonged time together in close quarters and by constituting a key source of frustration motivating the occupation.

The Colonised Self: The Politics of UK Asylum Practices, and the Embodiment of Colonial Power in Lived Experience

“…This 'subject' contrasts with accounts of people seeking asylum as agentic people who resist and challenge control (Wilcock 2019;Schouw Iversen 2021;Saunders and Al-Om 2022). Rather, we argue that for our participants, the restrictive conditions within which people live seriously limit their already 'thin agency' (Klocker 2007).…”

“…A body of literature also examines the rationalities justifying the treatment of people seeking asylum and refugees in diverse contexts: Oesch (2020) describes refugee camps as ambiguous spaces where multiple forms of power work simultaneously to produce a system of 'variegated citizenship' that both includes and excludes refugees; Wahab (2022) identifies a 'hybrid governmentality' in refugee camps whereby 'modes of power' enacted by Bangladesh's government act on refugee camp residents to simultaneously marginalise them and protect the security of nation state citizens; and Lemberg-Pedersen and Haioty (2020) argue that biometric data collected from Syrian refugees is a form of biometric 'enrollment' and a 'technology of power' that acts as surveillance technology and engages refugees in acts of quasi-citizenship. Notably, others explore how hostile politics applied by successive UK governments lead to counter-conduct and/or forms of resistance by migrants (Wilcock 2019;Schouw Iversen 2021;Saunders and Al-Om 2022). Previous applications of Foucault to migration governance and control, therefore, focus on particular Foucauldian 'modes of power', 'resistance' and/or the rationalities underpinning specific 'technologies of power'.…”

A Study of the Plight of Media Industry Interns: Manufactured Consent in the Labor Process

“…Under such pressure, going to the internship is an important means of turning the uncertain future into a controllable present, exchanging the unstable labor of the present (putting in labor as a flexible worker) for a stable future after graduation and exchanging the management of uncertainty in the present labor practice for the delayed return that can be expected in the future [6]. Waithood contains a "politics of waiting" that encourages passivity, restraint, and self-management [7], normalizing and legitimizing dominant power relations or current labor dilemmas by directing the individual's attention to the future [8]. It is worth noting that not all interns are governed by the "ideal game", and some of them only want a stable job and time to "do what they like" in addition to satisfying their own needs in life.…”

Administrating Displaced People in Colombia through Humanitarian Government

“…Similarly, some research has studied the control devices that the government uses to discipline members of this population and strip them of their citizenshipfor example, the Single Record of Victims (Registro Único de Víctimas, RUV) and selfentrepreneurship projects (Aparicio, 2012). In addition, research indicates how waiting for government responses can lead to passivity and resignation or to forms of resistance (Meza and Ciurlo, 2019;Schouw Iversen, 2021). However, little has been said about the standardisation of these practices.…”