Waiting as a redemptive state: The ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’ and the offer from the Hamburg government

Abstract

This paper explores an offer of possible legalization that the Hamburg government gave to a group of 350 illegalized West-African migrants in 2013. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2017, when the majority of the migrants who accepted the offer were still awaiting its redeeming, I explore the offer as an instrument of governing and as a lived timespace. Taking this route, this article seeks to contribute to the debate of waiting and the relation between time, space and government in present border regimes. In particular, I argue for the need to pay attention to how waiting, as a technique of governing migrants, works through linear and periodized temporal frameworks. Drawing on feminist critiques of temporal linearity and periodization, and on Povinelli's (2011) work on techniques of 'temporal bracketing', I investigate how violence and redeeming are coordinated spatially and temporally in the offer. I argue that temporal frameworks intertwine with territorial imaginaries in ways that allow waiting to appear as redemptive state. Moreover, I suggest that by attending to multiple and relational temporalities, the coordinates of suffering and redeeming in the offer might be redrawn.

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

“…The literature on the politics of waiting has explored the relationship between waiting and power, emphasising how waiting can function as a governmental technology of control, in a Foucauldian sense (Andersson, 2014; Auyero, 2012, 2021; Dotsey and Lumley-Sapanski, 2021; Drangsland, 2020; Griffiths, 2014: 1996; Hage, 2009; Ramsay, 2017). Foucault (1982, 2009) sees power not as intrinsically tied to specific institutions, such as the state, but instead as manifesting through disparate governmental technologies – the often mundane methods and procedures that govern and regulate people’s behaviour (Rose and Miller, 2010).…”

“…Waiting also has governmental effects, regulating behaviour. Drangsland (2020: 320) has explored what she calls the ‘redemptive’ nature of waiting, whereby promises of rights in the future serve to make present suffering seem ‘worth it’. By orienting our attention towards the future, waiting can normalise and legitimise dominating power relations or suffering in the present (Drangsland, 2020; Povinelli, 2011: 24; Ramsay, 2017: 523).…”

“…Drangsland (2020: 320) has explored what she calls the ‘redemptive’ nature of waiting, whereby promises of rights in the future serve to make present suffering seem ‘worth it’. By orienting our attention towards the future, waiting can normalise and legitimise dominating power relations or suffering in the present (Drangsland, 2020; Povinelli, 2011: 24; Ramsay, 2017: 523). Hence, waiting teaches people ‘that they have to remain temporarily neglected, unattended to, or postponed’ (Auyero, 2012: 9), encouraging patience and passivity.…”

“…In fact, waiting is common to experiences of displacement more broadly and central to both humanitarian and post-conflict temporalities (Brun, 2016; Mueller-Hirth and Rios Oyola, 2018). The literature on the politics of waiting has emphasised the power waiting entails, highlighting how it can regulate behaviour and generate docility (Auyero, 2012; Drangsland, 2020; Hage, 2009). It has also documented how long waiting periods are often a time fraught with marginality (Griffiths, 2014; Haas, 2017).…”

Bordering through recalibration: Exploring the temporality of the German “Ausbildungsduldung”

“…Indeed, my interlocutors often discussed how gendered family obligations, but also age, health, and educational background conditioned who could start and succeed in training. Their discussions and Nasir's concerns highlight how migrants negotiate waiting along various lines of differentiation (see Conlon, 2011;Mountz, 2011;Drangsland, 2019). For Nasir, his obligations to support his mother in Afghanistan now and in the immediate future created a painful condition of inability to accept the regulation's invitation to a German future.…”