This paper uses a temporal lens to examine the ways in which localization agendas in the humanitarian aid sector shape Jordanian aid workers’ upward mobility as humanitarian professionals. Localization policies call for humanitarian aid organizations based in the global North (e.g., CARE, Oxfam) to increasingly rely on global South actors to make aid more sustainable, equitable, and effective amidst an unprecedented number of protracted humanitarian crises globally. However, it is not yet fully clear what the effects of these policies are on aid operations, including how they impact the division of labor in the sector. Namely, how does localization affect the workers themselves who are employed in humanitarian aid? Drawing upon over 90 interviews with aid workers in Jordan from 2017-2018, as well as ethnographic observations of their daily routines in urban and rural areas throughout the Kingdom, I find that localization policies produce particular constructions of who local workers are, and how they can provide value to their aid organizations in ways that are often at mismatch with workers themselves, and the contexts they operate in. I find that these constructions of the local manifest temporally through the structures of recruitment, tasks, and turnover(s) that local workers experience in their jobs. Drawing upon sociological theories related to work and the labor process, I therefore argue that the organization of time in workers’ lives and daily routines, including how they strategically pace time and think about their futures both in and outside of the workplace, maintain and delineate local workers as a distinct other within the sector and in the global division of labor more broadly. In so doing, this paper calls into question who can claim, and what entails, being a humanitarian in the contemporary world and why. The MENA region’s status as the largest producer and host of protracted humanitarian crises worldwide, suggests that these findings have critical implications for labor market and employment dynamics broadly construed in the contemporary Levant as well.

One image of destruction in Palmyra has captured the global attention in 2015. It was an image that captured the blowing up of Temple of Baalshamin by ISIS. Since then, scholars, journalists and museums curators amongst many others, have been focused on this moment of destruction as if it the only time a site has been destroyed - as if it is the only site. However, little has been done to date on understanding the impact of destruction of everyday spaces, and the damage caused to people who lose the sense of belonging. What is more, rarely this destruction has been analysed through the lens of time. In this presentation, therefore, I ask, how do we make sense of long-term conflicts that radically reshape cities through slow violence manifesting itself visibly and invisibly in cities? How can we convert the one-off traumatic rupture of urban systems and its cinematic image of destruction, as in the case of Palmyra, into an understanding of slow and fast violence that takes place in cities across time? To answer these questions, I look at the city of Homs, which has been transformed by radical destruction to its social, cultural and urban environments. For over a decade now, violence, through destruction, injustices, and displacement, has accumulated in Homs slowly and repeatedly before fast violence took place in more extreme forms, creating and sustaining urban chronic traumas. Even after battlefields ended in Homs, everyday urban life has turned into slow moving and long in the making struggle. I build in this paper on Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence. Through this concept, I search for different sites and spaces in Homs that have been the locus of urban struggle, violence and trauma which have damaged the sense of belonging to many in Homs. Based on a series of interviews with residents who remain in Homs, I discuss the temporal and place-based effects of war in urban settings through the individual and collective slow suffering in cities. I also show how after the Palmyra moment that has been captured globally, everyday life becomes a war in itself not only for losing the cultural heritage sites, but for losing a sense of belonging and a sense of home.

This article investigates the temporal dimension of agency in displacement and how time is conceptualized and utilized in daily practice to renegotiate gender roles and gender relations among Syrian families in Lebanon. I argue that state and non-state actors in Lebanon pose a structural context that creates categories of inclusion and exclusion. For example, as Lebanon is a non-signatory state to the 1951 Refugee Convention, one can be recognized as a de facto refugee only if he/she is registered with the UN Refugee Agency. This and other structures posed by the Lebanese context define categories of belonging. However the boundaries of these categories are blurred, ephemeral, undefined, and strongly depend on the informality of the context. Consequently, Syrian families in Lebanon live in a state of limbo, suspended in time, in a state of “in-betweenness”. Based on these premises, and drawing upon eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Lebanon between 2017 and 2019, this study questions how Syrian families in Lebanon exercise agency in this context of temporal suspension, or liminality, and how gender roles and relationships are renegotiated in the space of displacement. My findings show that in performing gender roles and relationships in displacement, displaced Syrians were oriented towards habitual aspects, they imagined alternative possibilities, or they practically contextualized habits and projections. In this sense, their agency was temporally embedded and incorporated three different temporal elements: iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation of present circumstances. As a result, according to how people positioned themselves upon this temporal scale, they performed traditional or novel gender roles and relationships in the private and public sphere. The main contribution of this work is a theoretical one. By conceptualizing agency as temporally embedded it is possible to grasp a more in-depth perspective on how people reconstruct disrupted or transformed relationships as well as how they do gender and do family within the temporal (not only spatial) space of displacement. This study suggests that more attention should be given to the temporal dimension of agency in the space of displacement and that the element of time should be used as a lens to investigate in-depth how people’s lives are impacted by the multiple dimensions of displacement.

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.