Description: "Fairly nascent in the field of urban studies and planning, this research focuses on the Lebanese-Syrian border in informal tented settlements (ITSs) inhabited by Syrian refugees. It explores the temporal dimension of borders and the spatio-temporality and modalities of 'waiting' experienced by refugees. A powerful contribution to ongoing debates on refugees, borders, and camps, this book offers a particularly compelling and much-needed conceptualization of the politics of time and waiting. By critically engaging with existing literature and empirical cases, the author demonstrates how states weaponize time-through prolonged uncertainty, bureaucratic delays, and forced stagnation-to discipline, control, and exclude refugees. Syrian refugees' livelihood and daily habits are therefore impacted due to these hegemonic and manipulative measures creating dire conditions. They encounter a conundrum of inhibitions and subordination. However, through the intersection of these multi-hierarchical vertical and horizontal forces that take place within and outside ITSs, socio-spatial coping, adaptability and collective resiliency emerge."--
Review Quotes:
"Meaningful and important, this book emerges as a sophisticated philosophy of space in areas populated by forced migrants." --Estella Carpi, University College London
"A powerful contribution to ongoing debates on refugees, borders, and camps, Waiting on Borders offers a conceptually rigorous, compelling, and much-needed analysis of the politics of time and waiting, especially in relation to how temporal strategies are used as deterrence mechanisms in border regimes." --Henk van Houtum, Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, Radboud University Nijmegen