TIME AND POWER IN AZRAQ REFUGEE CAMP
A NINE-TO-FIVE EMERGENCY
FEATURED IN
REVIEWS
BOOK LAUNCH
IN THE WILD
 Cairo, courtesy of Dr Aya Musmar |
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 Seattle, courtesy of Dr Rawan Arar |
 Amman, courtesy of Dr Hala Ghanem |
 Dresden, courtesy of Dr Patricia Ward |
Winner of the 2023 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies
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Azraq refugee camp, built in 2014 and host to forty thousand refugees, is one of two official humanitarian refugee camps for Syrian refugees in Jordan. My book investigates the relationship between time and power in Azraq, asking how a politics of time shapes, limits, or enables everyday life for the displaced and for aid workers.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2016 and 2018, Time and Power challenges the perceptions of Azraq as the ‘ideal’ refugee camp. It argues that the camp operates as a ‘nine-to-five emergency’ where mundane bureaucratic procedures serve to sustain a power system in which refugees are socialized to endure a cynical wait―both for everyday services and for their return―without expectations for a better outcome.
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Available at AUC Press or anywhere books are sold.
ENDORSEMENTS
With wide-ranging, outstanding ethnographic material and with excellent, equally outstanding theoretical analysis, I have rarely been so immediately and deeply taken by a book as this one.
Sophia Hoffmann, University of Erfurt
In this detailed ethnography of temporal bordering practices in the Azraq refugee camp, Melissa Gatter offers valuable insights into the everyday bureaucracy, affects, future imaginaries, and resilience among exiled Syrians. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp is a notable contribution to contemporary studies on forced displacement, camp, and temporality. Gatter’s book is a contribution also to the small but growing literature on forced migration in the Western Asia.
Shahram Khosravi, author of Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran
How does time pass in a refugee camp? This seemingly straightforward question is at the heart of Melissa Gatter’s wonderful ethnography of refugee lives and aid regimes in Azraq camp in Jordan. Her focus on tempo, pace, and time opens up the multi-faceted world of street-level-humanitarian bureaucracy, hope and despair in ongoing displacement, and people’s desires for ordinary futures.
Ilana Feldman, author of Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics
Authored by a writer of Northern origin who masterfully adopts a Southern viewpoint, it not only enriches the discourse but also challenges conventional assumptions about the so-called future of camps.
Hala Ghanem, Journal of Refugee Studies
Through her deft interplay between anthropological concepts of temporality and bureaucracy, Melissa Gatter offers readers a nuanced, creative, and widely adaptable approach to thinking about experiences of time within totalizing institutions.
Malay Firoz, Middle East Journal
In fields characterized by theoretical work on time and temporality that is highly abstract, Gatter’s ethnography of everyday life in Azraq stands out, first and foremost, for its rich, empirical account of the lived temporalities of displacement and their politics...Time and Power demonstrates that time is also a powerful analytical tool through which we can read, understand, and make sense not only of abstract ideas but everyday life too.
Mirko Palestrino, International Studies Review