Thirty-five kilometers from the nearest town on either side, Azraq refugee camp in Jordan is home to about 40,000 Syrian refugees. While much of the literature on refugee camps has focused on spatial politics and on the physical isolation of such sites, only a small number of scholars has primarily examined the temporal dimension. Time itself has not often been used as an analytical tool through which to understand the power dynamics at the center of refugee camp operation. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the camp, this paper contributes to this area of literature by interrogating the relationship between time and a politics of exclusion as it manifests through daily lived realities in Azraq. Azraq is an understudied site of intersecting and mismatched temporalities of emergency, bureaucracy, and development. Far from being an efficient and organized system, as is often portrayed by humanitarians, Azraq’s bureaucracy instead manipulates how time is experienced by camp residents, limiting assistance to the hours of the working day, deflecting long-term accountability, and undermining all sense of urgency. The camp administration continuously fails to meet the short-term needs of camp residents while pushing for long-term development projects with unclear timelines and goals, reproducing a state of emergency while defying the very logic of temporary emergency response. This cyclical temporality is what underscores Azraq’s ‘nine-to-five’ emergency, through which mundane bureaucratic procedures serve to keep refugees excluded from alternative possibilities for the present. This paper finds that perhaps more oppressive for refugees than the camp’s spatial isolation is this temporal exclusion from their imagined pre-war life trajectories, experienced as an existential breakdown in which refugees are hyper aware of the mismatch between time in the camp and outside. Azraq and its politics of time constitute a cruel reality in which a power system meant to aid refugees is experienced as one that excludes, foreclosing futures that it is supposed to preserve. This paper seeks to illuminate how analyzing time ​– as both a political tool and an existential experience ​– can expand our understanding of how biological and biographical lives are negotiated and controlled in such spaces and excluded from others.