PRACTICING TIME IN HUMANITARIAN WAITING-SCAPES

2023-2027, IHEID

Thesis Supervisors: Professors Anna Leander and Jonathan Luke Austin

PROJECT SUMMARY

This thesis explores the practices that shape, sustain, and transform waiting in the delivery of humanitarian programs. Waiting unfolds around consultation rooms, humanitarian tents, registration and distribution points as individuals queue in long lines. Waiting for cash and vouchers, medication, information, a listening hear. Sometimes, humanitarian waiting moves online, staring at SMS notifications or a humanitarian application - algorithmic waiting. Waiting is about the senses. We shift our weight from one leg to the other when one tires. Waiting is about emotions. Boredom, anxiety, and excitement can alternate and mix in a weird mishmash. Everybody waits, but waiting is also political and not simply a reflection of the human condition. Time and uncertainty are unevenly distributed, forging, and forged by relationships mediated by gender, class, race, and power relations. There are also forms of humanitarian waiting that persist long after direct violence has stopped. For instance, forms of suspension surround the presence of suspected landmines, as people wait for humanitarian demining operations to clear the land. In these areas, the land itself seems to “wait,” frozen in time. What strategies, gestures, interactions, and their material arrangements emerge within these waiting-scapes? How do time politics organize daily life and shapes social and economic relations within humanitarian infrastructures?

The present research uses ethnography and rhythmanalysis across three sites: Nakivale (Uganda), the Darién (Colombia–Panama borderland), and Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina). Taking them together makes it possible to approach humanitarian waiting through various bundles of rhythms: the waiting experienced while dwelling in a humanitarian camp, waiting in a context of return migration and the fading presence of humanitarian NGOs in a borderland, and humanitarian waiting in the sedimentation of long-term conflict afterlives.

WHERE

·       Nakivale, Uganda (humanitarian settlement setting)

·       Darién region, Colombia-Panama Borderland (internal conflict and return migration setting)

·       Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (post-conflict setting)

This doctoral research unfolds across three sites, each of which captures a distinct configuration of contemporary humanitarian waiting. Each chapter of the thesis focuses on one of these sites to apprehend how waiting takes shape materially, affectively, and practically across different conditions of humanitarian presence.  In other words, the objective is to reveal how humanitarian time is made, unmade, and inhabited.

The first site, the Nakivale Refugee Settlement in Uganda, epitomizes what is commonly understood as a “humanitarian situation.” The camp, as humanitarian infrastructure, is constituted as a dense network of coordination meetings, triage systems, assessments, and screenings. Here, being on hold is deeply institutionalized and bureaucratically organized, while also characterized by mundane and improvised waiting practices that develop in the interstices. Daily waiting, as people wait for cash-based assistance, for medical consultations, takes place in the more existential waiting for resettlement... This site allows an examination of how humanitarian architectures and practices of categorization produce rhythms of waiting and forms of temporal governance within a context of forced displacement and humanitarian settlement.

The second site, the Darién borderland region between Colombia and Panama, presents a context that until 2024 exhibited the traits of a humanitarian crisis but where the humanitarian presence has now receded. The area has witnessed the exhaustion of emergency infrastructures following the decrease of northward migration due to harsh border policies and the withdrawal of major donors such as USAID. This site makes visible the slow temporality of abandonment. It sheds light on the transformations of waiting from a context of intense informal migration with an important humanitarian presence to support people on the move, to a militarization of the borderland. Such transformation has important implications on the social and economic life of the region, including as villagers in the Darièn make do with what is at hands.

The third site, Sarajevo, is marked by forms of extended humanitarian waiting that unfold at the level of the ground and of memory. The focus here lies on long-term humanitarian engagements related to demining and the search for missing persons, where the temporality of waiting expands over decades. Sarajevo allows an exploration of how waiting endures as a mode of inhabiting the aftermath of war, how it settles into infrastructures, landscapes, and collective memory.