Conclusion

IN OCTOBER 2019, a year after our last research trip to the refugee camps in northern Ethiopia, Berihu sent us pictures of his newborn son. He had recently married an old friend who arrived during the brief window when the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea was open. When we last spoke in person, marriage and having a child had not entered into Berihu’s thinking.

Berihu’s story reflects the oscillations between the creative agency of time-making and the temporal suffering that we have explored throughout this book. He had recently graduated when we met him and had hopes for progress through further study or some form of professional employment; however, he lacked the connections needed to navigate the prohibitions on refugees working in the formal sector and wound up stuck in the camp, where he took a teaching job for incentive pay. Although he believed in the work, he quickly became disillusioned and sank into despair. He pulled himself out of it with meaningful caretaking work. He taught in the local elementary school, tutored youth through the Save Eritrean Seeds program that we discussed in chapter 4, started his first business (a bar), and began to farm (illicitly) on the rocky land behind it. He was simultaneously caring for the earth, the youth, his community, and himself.

Caretaking kept Berihu going but did not fulfill his aspirations, particularly as structural barriers to success repeatedly got the better of him. His business failed. He was repeatedly told that he could not pursue higher education. He moved his business to a different part of town, abandoning his efforts at farming. He still held out hopes for a life where he could progress.

Having a child and investing that child with hopes and dreams is, in many ways, an example of both caretaking and future-making. “I just live for today. I wish my son will get a better life for the future. I stopped wishing for myself to be successful. Maybe my son will hope for that. Maybe this is my last stage, my last place. The condition I am living in will be my last, with poverty and stress. But maybe my son will have hope for a different future,” Berihu wrote to Amanda. His hopes hinged on the distant future, as he appeared to be accepting life in parentheses, in the pause, in the empty present.

Like running a shop, completing a vocational training course, or any one of a number of other forms of caretaking, caring for a child structures daily life around meaningful work. Starting a family enables refugees like Berihu to imagine a future that goes beyond the bleak near term and is more distant and expansive than the bounds of an individual life. But unlike these other forms of caretaking, raising a child is a constant source of temporal suffering—a reminder of time moving forward, the stuckness and profound precarity of the near future in refugee camps, and the impossibility of linear, incremental progress. Starting a family and raising a child with care, love, and hope infuses meaning into the chronic present but also requires brutal honesty about the suffering inherent in the indefinite temporariness of that present and in the risky and unpredictable nature of the future.

But Berihu, it turned out, had not sacrificed hope for himself. He continued to talk about resettlement and worked extremely hard to seek scholarships abroad. He never abandoned his aspirations and goals, which were, in no small part, put in place by and through his education. And yet, he was constantly reminded of the limitations of his life in the camp. Even amid the foreclosure of options, refugees like Berihu are tenacious and insist on having choices.

Throughout this book, we have explored a variety of temporalities: 1) the complex and paradoxical temporalities of humanitarianism; 2) the utopian teleologies of developmentalism; 3) the temporalities of hospitality; 4) the condition of temporal suffering found in the stasis and stuckness of waiting in both the camp and cities; 5) the teleological orientation toward near future progress found in education; and 6) the orientation toward hopeful points in the distant future.¹ Some of these temporalities are explicitly teleological, while others are not necessarily so, and some are forms of time stripped of telos, such as empty time in the camp. Teleologies themselves may vary. They may be linked with modernist notions of progress or be indeterminate and open-ended. They may focus on the near future with its spaces of temporal discipline and planfulness or on the distant future, imagination, creativity, hope, and risk.

We conclude by bringing home several central assertions of our book. First, teleological time operates hegemonically to simultaneously frame both policy mandates and refugee desires for progress.² Notions of teleological progress wend their way through humanitarian policy and practice as well as refugees’ strategies of time-making. Second, even amid great constraints and violence, refugees make time. They make time meaningful and make choices based on their assessment of the balance of different temporalities. The policy frameworks that form the context of this book do not leave space for this kind of decision-making or for an understanding of future-making strategies that simultaneously hold open the possibility of multiple futures. Even though understanding how refugees make temporal choices will not resolve the vast problem of teleological violence, there are lessons to be learned from observing their strategies of time-making. Finally, refugee hosting in countries in the Global South, such as Ethiopia, is profoundly precarious and unstable. Refugees know this, but policy directions are often premised on the assumption that these large hosting states are and will remain stable. The kinds of places that refugees are relegated to in the name of progress may be the most profound form of teleological violence. These understandings of the way refugees make sense of and choose between temporalities amidst precarity and teleological violence can and should inform local policy and refugee management practices.

Choice and Time-Making

Teleological time and notions of progress are prevalent in the multiplicity of temporalities that refugees and policy actors are engaged with. These teleologies are hegemonic, but this does not mean that they deprive people of agency. Refugees retain the capacity to make choices about how they think about, plan for, fill up, or abandon time in the present, near future, and distant future, even as their choices are constrained and influenced by teleological notions of progress.

Throughout this book, we have centered refugees awareness of their lack of power over time and their efforts to maintain a semblance of choice amid that lack of power. Time-making reveals the delicate balance of laying claim to teleological time and making meaning out of time without telos. This delicate balance framed the present, the future, and the relationship between them. Refugees continued to care for the present and make their lives as meaningful as possible, despite constantly being pushed back into the “enforced presentism” (Guyer 2007) of the “chronic present” (Dunn 2017). If refugees’ focus on the present was on making life bearable and more livable through acts of caretaking, their focus on the future was on advocating for the right to progress—in other words, the right to have a future where they can “expect to have expectations” (Hage 2009) and exercise the “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai 2004). Refugees struggled because of the teleological violence and false hopes offered by education but did not give up on education; rather, they organized and advocated for their right to progress and to achieve “existential mobility” (Hage 2009).

Still, teleological violence is painful and dangerous. Refugees are stuck in a time where they often feel deprived of telos, even when there is the appearance of it being offered to them. Furthermore, the stuckness of the camp appears more sticky given the prevalence of teleological ideals that constantly assert the promise of progress. Under these conditions, refugees do more than merely survive but are a long way off from thriving.

Caretaking in the present is not a replacement for having a future in which time appears to move and refugees have the capacity to progress. For this reason, future-making, as another form of time-making, is a companion to caretaking. Future-making enables care for the future by allowing refugees to cultivate and protect, or at times, invent and act on, alternative futures. This sometimes leads to the abandonment of the kind of near-future plans that are often associated with teleological activities, such as schooling, and instead makes the future a site of creativity and inventiveness.

The orientation to the distant future, along with caretaking in and for the present, is a double-edged sword. It makes indefinite periods of waiting possible, but it also creates pressures that lead to migration. When does caretaking for the present and the future lead to waiting, and when does it lead to migration? How does it frame refugees’ choices? To understand what enables refugees to choose to wait in the present rather than to leave requires us to explore the forces that place pressure on the present.

One factor that makes waiting more tenable is the meaning refugees are able to derive from their caretaking activities. This is why vocational education and recreational programming such as sports, art, and small business development programs were important to refugees. It was not that refugees had any illusions that these programs would produce a better future, but they did serve to fill the present meaningfully. Hope makes waiting bearable and meaningful, and the loss of hope can make migration seem like the only option. Education, with its disciplined orientation toward the near future and its constant markers of time moving forward, was one such thing that could pressure the present and make it less bearable.

Conversely, waiting became untenable when caretaking activities failed, were not supported, or were undermined. Caretaking initiatives were essential to making the permanent temporariness of the present bearable but were always at risk of being forestalled. The closure of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) youth center in the Mai Aini camp was often talked about as a great loss, for example. Failing businesses were a lingering reminder of a stalled future. And refugee university students felt tremendously frustrated when they faced bureaucratic barriers to offering enrichment programming in the camps. The precariousness of caretaking meant that it was intertwined with temporal suffering.

What also enabled refugees to wait was making the future meaningful through future-making. As we detailed in the last chapter, successful cases of resettlement coupled with concrete indications that a process was moving forward made waiting less painful. Although resettlement remained an elusive point in the distant future, that future came to feel more tangible if there were indications that it might come to pass one day or that there were specific, meaningful actions refugees could take to influence that future. However, the distance that refugees felt from resettlement processes—a distance that was reinforced by physical barriers, such as talking to UNHCR representatives through glass plates, and temporal ones, such as being rationed a certain amount of time per quarter with a representative—sometimes led to an abandonment of hope and its replacement with the equally prophetic temporalities of risk.

Knowledge about the dangers of the migration route, constricting border control policies in Europe, and the difficulties faced once migrants arrive in their “target” countries—all components of many migration-deterrence campaigns—did not seem to have much impact on refugees’ sense of their choices. We found that refugees were well aware of these dangers. Knowledge of the risks of migration was present alongside awareness of its possibilities. There were always options. It might seem counterintuitive that anyone would take these incredible risks knowingly, and indeed, before deciding to migrate, refugees tend to plan intensively for months in advance. Their willingness to risk life, liberty, and safety may not make sense if we are thinking teleologically and see the refugee journey as a series of incremental steps toward something better. But if we understand that many refugees perceive time as having stopped moving, we can make sense of the decision to migrate as a means to make time move again. Temporally this decision is structured similarly to the decision to wait for resettlement. Both are end points that sit prophetically outside of the linear timeline, outside one’s immediate control. They are both arrived at through faith and hope and not consistent durational activity.

In contrast, one thing that pressures the present is a sense of personal or family crisis. Crises may create an acute pressure on the timeline, pushing refugees to exchange the temporality of hopeful waiting for risky movement (Belloni 2019). What ultimately pressured Habtom to move on was word that his parents back home in Eritrea were facing difficulties and needed money. This is not uncommon. Milena Belloni discusses this phenomenon in detail, noting that pressures from home and acute family crises frequently drove migrants to take risks. We often heard that refugees were pressured to migrate because they had heard that a family member was sick or financially in need. Alternately, refugees who heard that their families needed them and chose not to migrate often faced severe distress, succumbing to periods of depression, malaise, and drinking. Waiting became untenable when refugees faced news of a crisis at home. The stress of waiting then pressured them to choose either the temporality of hope or that of risk, both of which are prophetically oriented toward the distant future, but require very different actions.

Teleological time also pressures the present by setting expectations for the near future—particularly expectations about its alignment with the distant future. These thwarted expectations can result in refugees choosing risk over hope or despair. Being stuck back in the camp after graduation involves the steady erosion of possibility and the fading of credentials that were obtained through the discipline and hard work of schooling. These unfulfilled aspirations, along with an awareness of one’s unmet potential, press painfully on the present.

What Can We Learn from the Creativity of Time-Making?

One of our favorite places to visit in the Mai Aini refugee camp was the Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS) compound. It was a cacophony of noise and sound. A basketball game was always going on outside. In one room, students learned to play keyboards and guitars. In another room, a boom box played loud music while a dance troop rehearsed. Next door, children took an art class in a room covered with drawings. Around back, a dozen or so women sewed handmade reusable sanitary napkins, an entrepreneurial project that they hoped would become self-sustaining.

What was striking about the JRS compound, in addition to the noise and the obvious joy, was the absence of alienating humanitarian bureaucracy. There was little waiting and lots of activity. The mood was also decidedly different than it was in schools where refugees and Ethiopian national students alike were disciplined by the teleological ordering of the daily schedule, the school week, the academic year, and beyond. In the JRS compound, refugees were actively creating—sewing, learning an instrument, dancing, drawing. They were making things, not just filling time, and in doing so, they were making time meaningful.

We could make a compelling argument that far too little attention is paid to the vastly creative and inventive elements of the refugee experience. Indeed, scholars such as Oliver Shao have demonstrated that an attention to dancing and making music can complicate the image of the refugee as a burden or icon of crisis, importantly shifting research toward a social justice lens by shedding light on and potentially rectifying “the oppressive forces that shape our shared world” (2017). In the course of our fieldwork, we observed a handful of NGOs that were precisely concerned with supporting and encouraging refugee creativity—and therefore humanity. JRS was known for doing this kind of work. Similarly, the Danish Refugee Council supported musicians and held weekly cultural sessions in the Hitsats camp. Vocational education programming run by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) often focused on creativity. As we were conducting an interview with a program coordinator at NRC, we became aware of the delicious smell of fried fish wafting into the room and the sound of laughter and talking. When we finished our interview, we walked past a room full of refugees who were enrolled in a culinary training program enjoying the food they had prepared. Another day, we stumbled on a graduation ceremony for an International Rescue Committee beautician training program. We were instantly swept up in the joy of the moment and asked to pose for pictures with the robe-clad graduates. We posit that the joy in these events had nothing to do with teleological time or the near future. Refugees were well aware that there were no job prospects in the camp for them as beauticians or chefs (although, interestingly, musicians could get work playing at events like weddings and the JRS dance troop did tour in other parts of the country at times). The joy derived from these activities came from the way they filled the present and attached to a distant future. Refugees also noted that these vocational programs might give them skills they could use when they left Ethiopia, but they did not expect them to be useful while they still lived there. In contrast, this programming had to be rationalized to funders as meeting a larger objective—providing protection, education, or supporting livelihoods. These policy priorities did not support refugees’ creative endeavors, their efforts to fill the present meaningfully, or their dreams of a distant future elsewhere. Refugee and policy priorities seemed to make sense of the same activities in very different ways.

We considered including a list of policy recommendations in this conclusion to highlight the essential nature of the kind of programming that supports refugees’ efforts to care for the present and formulate a future; however, such a policy framing would itself be taken as a teleological tool to suggest that the refugee condition can be fixed or improved somehow in order to bring their suffering to an end. We believe the refugee condition is fundamentally flawed and cannot be ended without a radical reorientation of the global system of migration management and humanitarianism. We add our voices to the compelling critiques by the many scholars who have argued that the humanitarian system will never be able to deliver the kinds of lives that refugees need and deserve. We return to that discussion in the next section.

Having acknowledged that no policy recommendation is capable of “fixing” the global humanitarian system, engaging with a list of what-if measures is still a useful exercise. Such what-if exercises illuminate our flawed assumptions about refugees and how to “help” them and also give us a mechanism to shift our paradigms in how we think about them. What would happen if we shifted the paradigm with which we think about refugees as temporal agents and biographical subjects rather than biopolitical objects of humanitarian intervention (Brun 2016)? What if we—researchers, policy makers, and humanitarian workers—embraced the ambiguity of the refugee condition? What if we named the impossibilities of that condition and its vast injustices and still thought creatively and respectfully about how refugees rise to the challenge of living that life every day? What if we followed refugees’ lead by attending to and supporting their efforts and aspirations rather than imposing our own teleologically derived frameworks on them?

We suggest that a list of policy recommendations based on this kind of paradigm shift would encourage ongoing support for the kinds of programming that we described at the beginning of this section as well as for the provision of spaces for leisure and community gatherings, such as the closed IRC youth club. Given that refugees work very hard to ameliorate the pain of the endless present and that doing so often makes the long period of waiting and uncertainty tenable, any activity or space that supports their efforts by filling the present in meaningful ways is essential to staving off temporal suffering and stemming the flow of onward migration. These kinds of programming do not necessarily have to yield future results to be successful. Indeed, the imagined futures posited by vocational training are impossible. What would happen if the explicit policy goals of such programming better enabled refugees to care for the present?

Even more importantly, to support caretaking, it is essential for NGOs to learn about and support refugees’ own grassroots efforts to care for their community. Efforts by such organizations as the Eritrean Refugee University Student Association (ERUSA) and Hawat fill an essential gap, making camp life modestly safer and better. These kinds of initiatives make refugees feel that they have agency over their own lives and communities.

Attention to the future is also vital. We were repeatedly told of the hardships that a life of stuckness entails. Again and again, we were exposed to refugees’ dismay, anger, and suffering on realizing that there was no reliable, legal way out of Ethiopia that did not involve interminable waiting for something that may never come to pass. In a focus group with urban refugees, we spoke with Dawit, a talented refugee who had fled Eritrea with his son and wife. He was highly educated, was fluent in English, and had good family connections in Ethiopia. In other words, he was doing better than most. An NGO employed him to do interviews with Eritrean refugees in Addis Ababa. He was not paid for this work because refugees were not allowed to be employed by the NGOs that were there to assist them. However, he and the others working on this project were given a transportation stipend, which proved to be vital income for many. Dawit was not desperate for money and was mainly doing this work to remain professionally and personally active. He had been in Ethiopia for only eight months when I interviewed him to learn about his research findings. His concerns were familiar:

As a refugee I haven’t stayed long. What I learned is that some of the legal processes that should take a few years or months, take longer than you can believe. Some have stayed for 12 years and some for 6 years. This gave me a scare. As a refugee I don’t have a permanent status here. I don’t have a sustainable future for my kid. This makes you question whether your decision to come to Ethiopia was correct. This was quite frightening for me. You could see refugees that could go in [thinking they will stay for] two or three years tops and they stay for 7 or 8 years. This is quite a heavy thing.

Dawit continued, articulating the frustrations with the lack of clear information from UNHCR and the difficulties with getting an appointment and communicating with resettlement officers. He clearly noted what was needed to make this process less frustrating and more dignified: “What I am saying is if UNHCR could put a few guidelines about what programs are entitled to particular groups of refugees, it would create a better understanding than what is present now. . . . UNHCR needs to get to the level of the refugees. Most refugees aren’t even at a basic education level. They can read and write, but they don’t understand policies. Some refugees don’t even understand that they are refugees with no rights. They don’t understand what they are getting here in Ethiopia” (emphasis added).

Dawit was asking organizations such as UNHCR to figure out how to communicate clearly with refugees. Resettlement processes are notoriously opaque, leading refugees to theorize about them through accounts of corruption and stolen resettlement opportunities. Repeatedly, we heard refugees explain that there was no clarity about these policies. Repeatedly, we heard humanitarian workers say that they were being as clear as they could be and that refugees’ expectations were unrealistic. “They think that they have the right to be resettled,” one humanitarian worker told us. “They are very entitled.”

What accounts for this discrepancy between the assertion by humanitarian workers and resettlement staff that they are being clear and the confusion and complaints about a lack of clarity among refugees? This question was beyond the scope of our research but is something that humanitarian organizations need to address. What if resettlement officers and humanitarian workers made it a priority to be on the same level as refugees? What if they took it on themselves to understand why there are such vast misunderstandings between refugees and resettlement staff? What if, instead of labeling refugees as “entitled,” they tried to understand what resettlement means to refugees and how it functions as a temporal choice?

Ultimately, the refugees who populate these pages want a future that will lead somewhere—not necessarily to a particular location but toward the possibility of progress. We are accustomed to thinking about the choices that refugees make as choices between places—the choice of whether to go or to stay. Refugee policies, particularly this new wave of policies, reify the spatiality of this choice and ignore the temporal dimensions of refugees’ decision-making. Other studies have emphasized the agency that refugees and other displaced people exert through place-making, which pushes us beyond the purely biological emphasis of humanitarian biopolitics (Hammond 2004; Rishbeth and Powell 2013; Vasey 2011). We have suggested throughout this book that exploring refugee agency and choice through the lens of time allows us to see a much more volatile and fluid field—an alternate logic in which safety and danger, need and the satisfaction of those needs, look very different than they do if we focus narrowly on the biological being of the refugee or on the places where those biological beings reside and might be incentivized to make a life.

If place-making is about making space—including spaces in which one is forced to live—into a place endowed with meaning and relationships, then time-making is about laying a similar claim to time. Just as refugees make undesirable places bearable by infusing them with sociality and relationships, so too do they inhabit (and creatively make) particular points in time—the present, the near future, the distant future, and the past—crafting them and imbuing them with particular meanings. Just as place-making for refugees is an enactment of agency amid severe spatial constraints, time-making is an enactment of agency amidst temporal constraints. The present is rife with limited possibilities and elongated in painful ways. The near future, often teleologically ordered, is painful because what it promises—and the expectations it engenders—more often than not, turns out to be myths. It takes little effort to reveal that the promises of teleological time and the incremental way that it aligns the present with the near future will never come to pass for refugees who are ultimately thrust back into a subject position that demands gratitude and punishes those who are too demanding.

Time-making in this sense is a political project. It is an act of care that evades the politics of care with which humanitarian biopolitics is imbued. It is a politics that asserts that every human life has the right to progress and the capacity to imagine a future that is not stuck in the interminable present. What if policy makers, researchers, and humanitarian actors of all kinds engaged with refugees in this politics of time-making?

Earlier, we noted how understanding refugees’ temporal priorities might enable solidarities to form that could make the present better and the distant future more hopeful. It is important to focus on the everyday lived realities refugees face and refugee aspirations to appreciate how they open the world with creative future-work and care. But that is not enough. We also have to understand the profound damage done by global forms of teleological violence at work within these new incarnations of humanitarian and migration management policy.

The Teleological Violence of the Humanitarian-Security-Development Nexus

What we have called the humanitarian-security-development nexus is a form of borderwork intended to safeguard the borders of Europe through stringent forms of migration management and deterrence that simultaneously appear compassionate while also constraining migration. This concept derives from notions of compassionate borderwork (Little and Vaughn-Williams 2016) and the ideal of a humanitarian-security nexus that patrols the borders in the Global North in an ostensibly humane way while masking the overarching goal of securing borders (Rumford 2008; Jones et al. 2017; Pallister-Wilkins 2017). We have argued that setting up hosting states in the Global South as viable long-term refugee hosts is a component of these broader, global processes of borderwork and humanitarian security. The humanitarian-development-security nexus shifts the locus of European border protection southward while also layering the temporality of development onto the already contradictory temporalities of humanitarianism.

More specifically, the policy approaches driven by influential scholarly works (such as Betts and Collier 2017) and introduced in Ethiopia (and elsewhere) at the time of our fieldwork function as a component of humanitarian security, bordering, and migration deterrence. Here we would like to build on arguments made in chapter 1 to explore the way this particular form of transnational migration-deterrence functions to reinforce a racialized, global form of teleological violence.

What we have termed teleological violence is the systematic inculcation of a specific set of beliefs about progress and the equally systematic deprivation of the capacity to move toward those notions of progress. In chapter 1, we argued that the emphasis on local integration and developmentalism is a form of teleological violence because it pushes refugees toward a particular end by holding open the possibility that they can have a permanent, viable life in the host state but does not address the structural barriers (such as land, labor, and citizenship laws) to that life. The policy shift that formed the context for our fieldwork proposed to resolve the problem of the durable solutions through long-term hosting of refugees in the Global South and a revamped version of local integration. The merger of humanitarian and development efforts was central to this approach. Development and local integration were bundled with migration deterrence. This was problematic for a number of reasons. It neglected the fact that the success of the proposed development initiatives had not yet been demonstrated. It also neglected the very different temporalities of development and humanitarianism.

The complex and paradoxical temporalities of humanitarianism are at once slow and urgent, terminal and interminable, yet they are constantly (if futilely) seeking an end point to crises. As a crisis response mechanism, we might think of the temporality of humanitarianism as urgent, fast-paced, and responsive. And indeed, the humanitarian apparatus is designed to function this way. However, for the people in crisis, humanitarianism is always too slow, and the experience of being under the care of this apparatus is the experience of having to wait for bureaucracies that are always sluggish.

Protracted refugee situations only exacerbate this paradox. The urgency of the immediate crisis fades, but the crisis never reaches an end. As such, refugees are subject to the slow bureaucratic time of humanitarianism and the emptiness of the endless present. The sluggishness of humanitarianism is full of risks. These include boredom, the temporal suffering of waiting, and mental and physical health risks associated with what Peter Redfield calls “minimalist biopolitics” (2005). The biopolitical apparatus of humanitarianism may keep the largest number of refugees possible alive, but just barely. Food and medical care may be scarce, and preventable disease is prevalent.

The durable solutions promise an end to protracted refugee situations through three channels: repatriation, resettlement, and local integration. There has been much critique of these so-called solutions. Scholars argue that the global refugee regime has been an utter failure at providing any sort of durability and has only created a state of limbo and protracted precarity for refugees (Betts and Collier 2017; Long 2014). Local integration, in particular, while appearing to provide an end, often results in a series of partial, rather than permanent, statuses (Hovil 2014).

The policy clusters we have written about here were called on not only to address the crisis of humanitarianism but also to deter northward migration and thereby move toward an end to the so-called refugee crisis. But for whom or what entity did these new policies propose this end? The durable solutions are arguably more focused on absolving the humanitarian apparatus of responsibility than on caring for refugees, on providing an end to the organizational responsibility of humanitarian organizations rather than for refugees. At the same time, emphasizing local integration as the preferred durable solution promises an end to northward migration. By simultaneously absolving the humanitarian apparatus from this responsibility for protection and positing local integration as a viable end to migration, these policies become a component of what Tricia Redeker Hepner and Magnus Treiber refer to as a globally emerging “anti-refugee machine” that erodes rights to claim asylum in the Global North while relegating refugees to the Global South (2021). These policies seemed to signal the end of (or at least a rolling back of) internationally mandated care.

The focus on a revamped form of local integration in these new policy directions leans heavily on the teleology of development, but these are problematic. They assert the hegemony of teleological notions of progress. Even if they fail to make good on their promised progress, they function as a powerful engine to shape desires and aspirations (Ferguson 1999; Katz 2004; Mains 2011). Development is adept at creating beliefs about progress, but actual development projects and policies often fail to bring about progress.³ These failures to change people’s lives materially and the successful promotion of the idea that things should be improving create a sensation of time being stuck or even moving backward. James Ferguson notes how the failures of modernization combined with neoliberal policies and structural adjustment, which were “so long narrated in terms of linear progressions and optimistic teleologies,” came to be seen as a “slipping backward: history, as it were, running in reverse” (1999, 13).⁴

This combined assertion of the hegemony of teleological progress and its failure to yield actual progress has been felt throughout the postcolonial world. Studies of education and the failure of degrees to bring about promised progress are a particularly acute site of time appearing to move backward (Jeffrey et al. 2004, 2005, 2008). Specific to Ethiopia, neoliberal approaches to economic development and state formation shape Ethiopian developmentalism where high modernist teleologies still promise a trajectory toward progress in spite of producing high levels of inequality and declining wealth for the poorest (DiNunzio 2019; Mains 2011).

The teleology of development promotes spatial assumptions as well temporal ones. Progress, or the capacity to make time move meaningfully, is often posited as being located in a specific place or places, as we noted earlier (Dick 2010, 2018; Belloni 2019). Useful here to capture this relationship between time and space is Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope (2010).⁵ Hilary Parsons Dick helps us track linkages between broader, national, transnational, or globally circulating imaginaries of time and temporality and the ways individuals talk about the effects of time and space in everyday lives (2010).⁶ Chronotopes of progress and development are teleological in the sense that they assume movement toward a particular end. But they also fundamentally constitute some as farther back in time and lower in status, poised at an early stage of advancement, making marginalization seem natural and the scarcity of resources legitimate. Modernist teleologies thus promote particular notions of progress and produce desires for particular places because only particular places are posited as spaces where time can move.

Notions of progress that refugees and migrants carry with them are also spatialized in particular ways. Migration destinations are hierarchically organized in what Belloni calls “cosmologies of migration” (2019). These cosmologies, while bound up with a distinctly Eritrean political economy of migration, are ordered by teleological assumptions about the trajectory of progress. Countries that are less valued destinations of migration are places where progress is less possible, while the more “desirable” countries are spaces where progress is imagined to be more possible. Belloni’s notion of cosmologies of destinations thus points to a migrational telos. This cosmological, hierarchical ordering of destinations is temporal, placing some places ahead and some behind (Dick 2018). Because no one wants to be stuck in a place that is behind, these hierarchies can lead to greater risk-taking (Belloni 2019) and dedication to repeated attempts at border crossing (Andersson 2017), particularly when other options are foreclosed. Migration trajectories are thus a product of the broader global temporalizations that posit the “north” as a viable location where one can progress and the “south” as a precarious place of stuckness and danger.

Refugees’ spatialization of progress is disjunctive from the spatialization of progress inherent in the policy initiatives we have discussed here. In other words, refugees and migrants tend to locate progress in the Global North, while policy initiatives seek to relegate those from the Global South to developmental spaces within the Global South. The ends of both are ordered by global spatial and temporal teleologies of progress.

These global teleologies also relegate racialized subjects to spaces and temporalities where progress either moves ahead or is stalled. Shahram Khosravi, drawing on Frantz Fanon, notes the colonial racialization of time, which relegates non-Europeans to a space of “belatedness”:

Colonial racism is built on the idea of the belatedness of non-Europeans. A black person, a non-European, a colonized person arrives to white time, and it is already too late. She arrives to a pre-existing world of meanings, a world already shaped, in which a non-European is not a subject with a history and agency but is only an object, fixed as a category and imagined in a different temporality.

Part of the colonial condition is the racialization of time. Racialization of time means the other arrives to a world in which bodies are already divided. A world where access to resources and power is allocated according to this logic of belatedness. To a white time that is assumed and presented as secular, civilized, modern, progressive, neutral, the racialized other always arrives too late. (Khosravi 2021, 66)

The logic of belatedness casts the non-European as an object belonging to a different temporality, a temporality where access to progress and what Arjun Appadurai terms “the capacity to aspire” (2004) need not exist because those are not expected in places that are behind or belated; they are expected in places where time moves toward progress. We consider the colonial and racialized logic of belatedness as a form of teleological violence because it simultaneously relegates non-Europeans to times and spaces where progress is not possible and reifies the hegemony—and superiority—of the time-spaces where progress is thought to exist.

The teleology that simultaneously makes migration seem like the only way to create a future while blocking the possibility of safe and legal migration is a violent one that begins with the psychological and cultural violence of colonialism pointed to by Khosravi and Fanon. It is bound up with the idea that places “out there” are better than “here,” casting one part of the world as progressing and others as stuck or moving backward (Dick 2010, 2018; Ferguson 1999). Simultaneously, the vast machinery of white supremacist capitalism has created material realities that mean that some non-European time-spaces are neither safe nor viable places to live. In many ways, teleological violence writ globally is a double-edged sword that mirrors and scales up the kind of teleological violence we described as a product of education; it is a racialized global order that creates desires, establishes economic and political systems and patterns that produce the need for that desire, and then enables those same systems to deny—and block—that desire.

The violence of teleologies is in the holding up of an end and then foreclosing the possibility of reaching that end. The locus of the power to enact teleological violence resides with those policies, practices, institutions, and ideologies that may be intentionally or unintentionally in collaboration with each other to set and shift the ends. The move to emphasize what some would term local integration creates an end that relegates refugees to a time-space that they have already decided is not viable. Who is this an end for? It is hardly the end that refugees imagined for themselves.

The policies that provided the context for this book attempted to reorient refugee ends by supplanting the (already paradoxical) temporalities of humanitarianism with the teleological ideals of development and proposing this new temporal dispensation to disincentivize irregular migration and thereby secure the borders of the north. They problematize the teleology of humanitarianism by noting the impossibility of the durable solutions (particularly resettlement and repatriation) while shifting the locus of the end southward. In doing so, they relegate refugees to developmentalist teleologies that have previously failed to bring about their promises and that posit the Global South as a place that has not yet arrived, a place that is backward or unmoving, a place that is “belated.” Relocating the end to the Global South and relegating refugees to these spaces imagined as backward while simultaneously curtailing opportunities—both legal and illegal—for northward migration is the epitome of teleological violence. The violence of containing refugees in the Global South becomes particularly extreme given the inherent instability of many host states there—instability that refugees know can always erupt into political violence or war.

Notes

1. Paul Stubbs’s notion of heterotemporalities (2018) is useful to understand the overlapping forms of temporalizing at play in refugees’ lives.

2. As we have noted elsewhere, we see teleological time, particularly teleologies oriented toward modernist progress, as a “hegemonic temporality” (Stubbs 2018). Although there are alternatives that subvert teleological notions of progress, it is always that temporality that is being responded to, evaded, or averted.

3. See, for example, Ferguson’s assertion that urbanization in the Copperbelt was “a teleological process, a movement toward a known end point that would be nothing less than Western-style modernity” (1999, 5).

4. Ferguson poses a question: “Given the tropes of development, progress, emergence and advance,” how do scholars make sense of the “teleological metanarrative of modernization?” (15). We might think of our study as addressing the question of how people living with the effects of decline and stasis make sense of this metanarrative. Even for refugees, the metanarratives of modernization, development, and progress have staying power, so that as modernization, development, and progress fail to bring about their promises, the ideas and temporalities that undergird them are resilient.

5. Chronotopes highlight the socially imbued relationships between place and time and have been described as narrative “time-space envelopes” that draw time and space into a particular storyline.

6. Dick notes that modernist chronotopes shape relationships between place and time, positing Mexico and the United States as not only different places but on different temporal trajectories (2010, 2018). Dick states that while Mexico is the space of “tradition” and thus is rooted in the unmoving timeless past, the United States is the space of modernization, movement, and progress. We might think of this trajectory from tradition to modernity as teleological (although Dick argues that the spaces of tradition and modernity are contrapuntal, constantly informing and inflecting each other).