Winner of the 2023 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies
TIME & POWER IN AZRAQ REFUGEE CAMP:
A NINE-TO-FIVE EMERGENCY
AS FEATURED IN
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 during 2017–2018, the book challenges the perceptions of Azraq as the ‘ideal’ refugee camp. I argue 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.
Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp also explores how refugees navigate this system, both in the day-to-day and over years, by evaluating various layers of waiting as they affect refugee perceptions of time in the camp―not only in the present, but the past, near future, and far future.
Far from an ‘ideal’ camp, Azraq and its politics of time constitute a cruel reality in which a power system meant to aid refugees is one that suppresses, foreclosing futures that it is supposed to preserve.
Virtual book launch
May 2023
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, Stockholm University
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, The George Washington University