Bringing together elements of critical refugee studies, Indigenous studies, and speculative studies, I employ a framework of radical speculation to think about the ways displaced people engage in resistance movements while strategizing for survival. Using personal narrative, story-telling, and archives, this paper is a preliminary exploration of several sites in which displaced Syrians are working to (re)build their lives, communities, and environments in precarity. In particular, I am interested in some of the ways Kurds, and Syrians in general, engage in radical moves towards self-sovereignty through (sometimes speculative-based) community organizing, story-telling, and an insurrectional politics all while in displacement. Primarily, I look to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES), the Kurdish-led and women-pioneered de facto autonomous region born from the instability of the Syrian civil war. The NES governing system, which consists of secular communes and a bottom-up governing system that brings together traditional Kurdish practices and leftist Kurdish ideologies includes aspects of radical refusal, insurrection, and speculation. Of particular interest is how these social and ideological structures can be (re)built in the refugee camp, as seen in the Kurdish camp of Berxwedan. Finally, I am interested in the spatiotemporal dimensions of the camp, especially as they are conceptualized as temporary spaces of passing-through despite the lived reality of those residing in them. Camps are intended to be transitory, often in a continuous state of assembly at or near borders, yet many refugees have nowhere else to go. I examine some of the insurrectional and radical politics of living being enacted by Syrians in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, including “illegally” dismantling and rebuilding the camp to create more permanent structures. My questions, while not dismissing the inherent oppression and violence of displacement, seek to examine displacement and the refugee camp spatially and temporally, not only as a contentious place of passing through but also as a site of living, creativity, and transformation; one which experiments with sovereignty outside of an inherited nation state; a site for a possible commons that models a more sustainable, queer mode of living.