Incommensurable Futures and Displaced Lives: Sovereignty as Control over Time

Abstract

The recent mass displacement of refugees has been described internationally as a “crisis.” But crisis implies eventfulness: a distinct problem that can be solved. The urgency of solving this problem of displacement has seen the use of expansive techniques of sovereignty across Europe, the epicenter of the crisis. Focusing exclusively on the formation of sovereignty through the analytical locus of crisis continues, however, to reproduce the trope of the “refugee” as a category of exception. This essay considers the experiences of people who were resettled as refugees in Australia and whose displacement has ostensibly been resolved. Drawing attention to their continuing experiences of violence, it considers how the temporal framing of displacement is itself a way to conceal formations of sovereignty embedded in the very processes designed to resolve displacement. Doing so opens up new ways to think about control over time as a technique of sovereignty.

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…He shows how the shift to militarized borders disrupts what had been cyclical returns of migrants, such that those left behind face indefinite waiting for the return of their loved ones, whose returns are now too dangerous and thus never materialize—both in the sense of migrants’ abilities to finish construction on the houses that they begin to build for their eventual return and in the sense of their ability to ever return to Oaxaca to inhabit them. Another place where we can locate this selective denial of futurity is in how refugees who are resettled in Australia do not experience this as the end of a linear trajectory but instead as a violent rupture of a potential future that they were able to access while in refugee camps (Ramsay ). This is most acute for mothers whose children are taken from them in the name of child welfare and for those who fear that this might also happen to them.…”

“…The politics of time in many of these essays are also a politics of space, from workers whose words travel while they cannot (Mankekar and Gupta ), to traces of futures never realized (Ramsay ; Sandoval‐Cervantes ; Yarrow ), to the rapid transformation and attempted management of environments that will not stand still (Vaughn ; Zee ). Like the essays that foreground temporality but also implicate spatial arrangements, many essays that foreground movement and its limitations also implicate time.…”

The business of anthropology and the European refugee regime

“…Another pitfall of crisis chasing entails the modes of temporality that crisis communicates (Ramsay , 2019). In highlighting temporal urgency and the (presumed) need for intervention, crisis chasing replicates logics of violence and securitization through which governments transform border crossing into a problem (Bigo ; De Genova ).…”

The Long Turning: A Palestinian Refugee in Belgium

“…Webs of insecurity that follow refugees across borders are woven more thickly on the loom of the asylum regime and are not disentangled (or undone) even by legal recognition. As Georgina Ramsay (2017, 517) argues, “even after, and as a result of being provided with a legal national identity,” racialized forms of state power continue to mark and subjugate refugees as “culturally ungovernable.” As Suhaila is again denied the rights and entitlements of citizenship, and waits for her case to be decided in a reception hostel in St. Niklaas, “at once [a] citizen‐in‐waiting and deportee‐in‐waiting” (Haas 2017, 76), the asylum system reveals itself to be as much a source of insecurity as its remedy (Brekke and Brochmann 2015).…”