Melissa Gatter, Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp: A Nine-to-Five Emergency (American University in Cairo Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Melissa Gatter (MG): Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp has been born and reborn many times since 2016, when I was starting as a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. I came to my PhD with questions about time in refugee camp settings, prompted by my master’s research and humanitarian practitioner experience in Zaatari camp in Jordan. In Zaatari, I was interested in how children navigated humanitarian politics, but I was also left with curiosity about the temporal politics that camp residents daily engaged with and spoke about. I had observed that there was more to how the literature treats the supposed paradox of time in camps, that the only thing of temporal interest is that the camp is permanently temporary.
During my time in Zaatari, aid workers shared with me stories and rumors about Azraq, Jordan’s other official camp for Syrian refugees. Little had been published then on Azraq because it was virtually inaccessible to researchers and even journalists. When I did gain access to Azraq for my doctoral research, I knew I had stumbled upon a unique opportunity to bring attention to this understudied camp. My queries of time ultimately became an investigation into power, that of the aid regime and the Jordanian state, but also the residents themselves. What I witnessed in Azraq led me to write my dissertation, and then Time and Power, with a sense of urgency. It was the urgency that I felt was missing from Azraq’s management that I poured into this book.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MG: Where the literature on forced displacement and refugee camps has most often studied spatial power, leaving time to the background, Time and Power places the spatial and the temporal in conversation to paint a more complete picture of power in Azraq. It draws on anthropological and philosophical theories of time to situate the refugee camp within messy, intersecting, and contradictory temporalities and builds upon ethnographies of protracted settings of displacement (like Ilana Feldman’s Life Lived in Relief and Michel Agier’s Managing the Undesirables). The book approaches time in Azraq as being of analytical interest because those who live there have become conscious of it through their immobility, pointing to an existential relationship to time that concerned philosophers like Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. It is this existential relation that grants time its political significance in precarious places like refugee camps, leading to the book’s central question: how does power function through time in Azraq?
Time and Power sets out to answer this question through an interdisciplinary examination of several key themes. Through an ethnographic investigation of aid workers’ narratives and daily routines, I explore how the emergency of the camp is everyday reproduced through bureaucratized aid, bridging the literature on bureaucracy (such as Michael Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy) and humanitarian response (including Liisa Malkki’s The Need to Help). My focus on everyday interactions between camp residents and aid workers also illuminates the temporal aspect of surveillance in Azraq, offering new perspectives on care-control dynamics and disciplinary power that anthropologists of migration have theorized through a spatial lens. I also explore how residents spend and talk about their time in Azraq, approaching waiting analytically as multilayered, building on the work of anthropologists who have challenged accounts of waiting in precarity as merely descriptive fact (like Shahram Khosravi’s Precarious Lives). Reflecting how residents wait and imagine multiple futures from within a securitized and bureaucratized context, I consider themes of hope and hopelessness through Lauren Berlant’s lens of cruel optimism.
Apart from its centering of time in camp studies, Time and Power also importantly contributes a critique of Azraq’s position within the aid world as the “model” refugee camp. When I was on fieldwork in 2017 and 2018, very few scholars had written about Azraq. One such scholar was Sophia Hoffmann, whose piece in Security Dialogue questioned whether Azraq could stand as an instance of humanitarianism. My book ultimately addresses this question and warns against the reproduction of Azraq’s blueprint in future cases of mass displacement.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MG: Time and Power builds on the ethnographic research I conducted in both Zaatari and Azraq for my master’s and PhD, but the process of writing the book led me even deeper into my initial investigations. The book expands significantly on the arguments featured in my earlier publications, in which I critique the lessons learned from Zaatari’s camp management and reveal the work Azraq does to control refugees behind its caring façade, as well as in blogs, commentary, and panel discussions. Though not a central lens of my research, the gendered politics of displacement is still central to my ethnography, which foregrounds the experiences of women in the camp, and I have spoken about this in op-eds and podcasts. All of my previous work offers a sneak peek into the much fuller stories told in Time and Power.
It is important to acknowledge the global pandemic that took place between my PhD fieldwork and the publication of this book. The spatio-temporal oppression that many people, including myself, felt during the pandemic was already somewhat familiar to me because I had observed it in Azraq. I reflect on this in the book’s preface, and I hope this guides the reader to approach Time and Power from a more intimate understanding of the pain, anxiety, and uncertainty narrated in what follows.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MG: Time and Power is physically light, but it weighs heavy with stories that continue to play out beyond its pages. I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to those whose lives formed the scaffolding for this book and with whom I remain in touch. It is a great privilege to be an academic, to have the time and space to explore big questions about power, isolation and connection, hope and optimism, and I hope that this book has even a small impact on those who impacted me.
This book would be of particular interest to scholars of refugee camps, humanitarianism and development, time and space, waiting and agency, and the everyday in Jordan, the Arabic-speaking world, and beyond. I hope that Time and Power reaches students of all levels, as it is conversations with my students in the classroom that give me optimism about the direction of academic research, particularly in anthropology.
I wrote this book with development practitioners and policymakers in mind as a way of meaningfully contributing to the ongoing conversations around camps in the aid sector. I hope that Time and Power prompts those who work in development to have serious discussions about the social and political legacies of camps.
The kinds of conversations that Time and Power sparks should be had first and foremost with stakeholders in Jordan and neighboring countries, and I was excited to publish with American University in Cairo Press for its impressive reach to readers across the Arabic-speaking world.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MG: At the moment, I am working on an article on the concept of resilience, a word that tends to be thrown around in the development sector without much thought to its implications. Time and Power offers a brief look into resilience and resistance in the context of Azraq, but this article will take a more conceptual approach beyond the camp.
In the longer term, I hope to stay connected to Azraq. There is still so much to say about camps, especially when Azraq has been deemed to be the “model.” As the supposed future of camps, Azraq gives us a window into the direction the aid world is heading. I will also continue to study time. Time and Power has intentionally left room to explore camp legacies as they are crafted and as they endure through the present. My next project looks to explore the temporal politics of camp abolition through a postcolonial lens, taking seriously the question of what a world without camps would look like.
J: Can you explain the book’s subtitle, what is a ‘nine-to-five emergency’?
MG: The subtitle, A Nine-to-Five Emergency, refers to the aid regime’s treatment of time in Azraq. The “nine-to-five emergency” is a central concept of the book that I use to describe how bureaucratic proceduralism of aid in the camp undermines any sense of urgency and emergency. It captures the inherent contradiction of Azraq’s everyday in which camp residents struggle to meet their pressing basic needs, such as electricity and income generation, while aid workers approach their work as a routine nine-to-five job. The concept gets to the heart of the temporal power dynamics in Azraq, where the aid regime relies on the fact that “there is always tomorrow” but camp residents do not see “tomorrow” as a luxury. I hope that the “nine-to-five emergency” concept provides language for scholars to think about temporal power dynamics in other precarious settings.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction: Why Time?, pp. 1-4)
In a caravan some ninety kilometers south of the Syrian border, Fadwa knelt on her prayer mat. I chatted with her colleague, who, like Fadwa, lived in Village 3 and worked at the nongovernmental organization (NGO) center, where we had positioned ourselves directly under an air-conditioning unit. We spoke quietly, mindful of the children who were sleeping in this room that served as a nursery and of Fadwa, who at this moment was finishing her prayers. “As-salamu ‘alaykum, as-salamu ‘alaykum,” she whispered softly as she looked over each shoulder. She sat still a moment and then turned to join our conversation.
“So what topic are you researching here in Azraq?” she asked excitedly, and I gave her the usual response, that generally I am interested in time, how it passes and how it is experienced by people who live and who work in the camp.
“There is no time in the camp [ma fi wa’t bil-mukhayyam]!” Fadwa responded. “Our schedules are so full, we are busy all the time.”
“It’s a good thing you are busy, no?” I asked, remembering how others in the camp loathed the idea of sitting at home in their caravan with nothing to do.
“No, it’s not better!” both Fadwa and her colleague remarked in unison. Fadwa continued, “We feel pressure [daght] all the time, we don’t have time to rest, we don’t have time to give our minds a break [ma fi ‘andna wa’t mnurtah, ma fi wa’t mnurayyih balna].”
I would quickly come to realize from speaking with others like Fadwa just how loaded the concept of time is for Syrians living in Jordan’s Azraq camp. What did Fadwa mean when she stated that “there is no time in the camp”? She related “clock time”—for her, a daily schedule filled with work, chores, and childrearing—to an abstract concept of time that does not allow for a break from camp life. To say that “there is no time in the camp” not only conveys a sense of busyness in the everyday but could also portray a feeling of isolation from “outside” or “national” time. Time as Fadwa may have experienced it in her hometown of Quriyateyn, Homs, before the war does not exist within Azraq’s borders.
Several kilometers to the south in Village 5, Nour, a spirited Aleppan woman, directed an NGO center. Nour loved her job, where she was in charge of the residents employed at the center and oversaw NGO programming six days a week. She kept busy between work and home life, in which she and her husband were raising six children. Nour told me that she did not like to sit still and hated the thought of not having work to occupy her time: “If I didn’t have my job, I wouldn’t stay here one minute [law mani mushtaghleh ma badil dagigeh]!” At this time, she had been in Azraq for about two years, a period she likened to “a lifetime [‘umr].” Like Fadwa, Nour had a full schedule and had also grown tired of the camp environment; every few months it seemed she renewed her vow to leave the camp, declaring, “That’s it, I’m tired of the camp [khalas ta‘ibit min al-mukhayyam]!”
Nour expressed a sense of urgency, not wanting to waste one more “minute” in Azraq if she did not have the opportunity to work because she felt that the camp had already deprived her of a “lifetime.” Her experience was one of busyness juxtaposed to an uncertain duration of time that Fadwa and her colleague lamented in the discussion quoted earlier. Nour and Fadwa both demonstrated that time in the refugee camp is end- less and unwanted. While perhaps filled from day to day, Azraq time is also in abundance—there is too much of it—and neither woman has the ability to break from this time conundrum. In both cases, the abundance of time is not a luxury, but an experience of exhausting endurance. To desire a break from camp life is a wish for freedom not only from temporal confines but also from physical ones—that is, to be outside the camp’s borders. Azraq is separated from Jordanian civilization by thirty-five kilometers on either side—again, the abundance of space is not a luxury but a symbol of isolation, as a factsheet of the humanitarian agency CARE identified the camp’s location as precisely “in the middle of the desert” (CARE 2015).
There is a sense among Azraq’s residents that the time they desire— one in which future life trajectories are attainable and remain intact—is slipping away, that the future has been lost even before it has come. Many felt that the future had already “passed us by [rah ‘alayna].” Azraq is the kind of place with simple childbearing facilities and a cemetery, but not much for the life that happens in between.
This book seeks to foreground time in Azraq camp. It aims to examine how a politics of time shapes, limits, or enables everyday life for the displaced and for aid workers in the camp. Why look at time? Displacement is most often a study of space. But in displacement, it is seldom only a question of where but also of when. Power permeates through temporal politics just as much as it flows through spatial frontiers. To analyze time and space together is to view a more complete picture of how systems are articulated. It also illuminates the ways that such power creates opportunities for resistance and alternative subjectivities. Most importantly, it allows for a more productive dialogue between the two: how the camp system shapes lives and how camp residents navigate them.
Temporal experience easily carries “a guise of universality” (Cohen 2018, 10). The universality of time—one thing that every living being shares is the experience of time and its simultaneous finitude and infiniteness—lends it the tempting misperception of existing outside the political. But time is, on the contrary, inherently political. The geographer Ian Klinke (2012) argues not only that time is just as political as space; he puts forward the assertion that chronopolitics, the politics of time, must be acknowledged as existing and operating already within geopolitics. Following Klinke, anthropologist Laura Bear (2016, 488) traces how ethnography has challenged the idea of a “single chronopolitics”—that is, the concept that time is universally linear. Time is messy, multiplicious, intangible, everywhere- and-nowhere (see Adam 1998; Chakrabarty 2004; Jacobsen, Karlsen, and Khosravi 2021). Through ethnography, this book explores the multiple intertwining and often contradicting temporalities embedded within everyday life in Azraq camp, folding back layers of permanence and transience to reveal less visible “timescapes” (Adam 1998, 10). Invoking the vocabulary of timescapes enables us to conceive of time and temporal relations, including pace, rhythms, tempos, practices, interactions, bodies, and dimensions, in a more accessible manner.
Following time throughout the camp illuminates what appear to be opposing themes as actually interdependent: emergency and bureaucracy, waiting and resisting, care and control. A focus on space alone would reveal the oppressiveness of the camp—and it is oppressive—but this would be an incomplete examination. The contrasting, but not always opposing, temporalities experienced by Jordanian aid workers and camp residents within the same space illustrate how Azraq’s logic of emergency prioritizes the system over the individual. As is explored throughout these pages, time and space in the camp are interlaced vessels through which a bureaucratized response to forty thousand displaced residents is formulated. I call it a “nine-to-five emergency.”