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.
Displacement is typically approached in anthropology as an exceptional experience that is associated with refugees and forced migration. Recent representations of a migration ‘crisis’ have reinforced the exceptionality attached to displacement. Drawing on research conducted with people in both refugee and non-refugee contexts, in this article I put forward a more expansive theorisation of displacement as a sense of temporal dispossession. Additionally, I describe how, by characterising refugees and other migrants as people who occupy a temporality that is distinguished by their migration status, anthropology denies coevalness with and between migrants and non-migrants and thereby reinforces the very logics of otherness that we might otherwise seek to critique. Recognising the shared temporal rhythms of displacement, and how these manifest broadly as the effects of global capitalism and neoliberal restructurings, is one way through which anthropologists can strengthen our analyses and critiques of bordering structures. We must firmly situate refugees and migrants within these shared rhythms of displacement, rather than exceptionalise them through the lens of ‘crisis’.
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