How do we write about refugee camp dwellers without reproducing the exceptionalist logics wrought by the spatiotemporal confinements they experience? What can an approach attuned to the multiple temporalities and spatial configurations shaping everyday life in the camp reveal to us about how power unfolds under such conditions? Melissa Gatter’s Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp: A Nine-to-Five Emergency attempts to grapple with these questions by turning to what was once imagined by the humanitarian apparatus as an experiment in the making of an “ideal” refugee camp to be replicated globally: the Azraq camp in Jordan, where more than forty-thousand Syrian refugees are encamped close to a Jordanian military base. Gatter’s intervention in this text is twofold: first, to warn against replicating this idealized notion of Azraq by demonstrating how everyday life in the camp is complicated by a bureaucratized and securitized humanitarian system; and second, to complicate the overemphasis on spatiality in the scholarship on displacement by stressing the inseparable bond between temporality and spatiality in governing the displaced, and more specifically, the encamped.

Critiquing the humanitarian construction of Azraq as an ideal camp, Gatter examines how the politics of time “shapes, limits, or enables everyday life” in ways that reveal the entanglement of contradictory logics of “emergency and bureaucracy, waiting and resisting, and care and control” (p. 3). By traversing the dynamic relationship between local aid workers and Syrian refuge dwellers in the camp, Gatter reveals an intimate entanglement between the military establishment in Jordan, the international humanitarian apparatus, and the foreign and local financial capital shaping the spatiotemporal configurations around which life in the camp unfold. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2017 and 2018 in Azraq Refugee Camp, when she interned with several NGOs, in addition to a shorter stint at Za’atari Refugee Camp, Gatter refers to this contradictory experience, a product of the bureaucratization of emergency and the broader humanitarian apparatus, as the “nine-five emergency” (p. 25). Time and Power in Azraq is divided into five chapters, alongside a splendid contextual and theoretical setup in the introduction and a brief cautionary conclusion on the perilous futures of encampment. The first three chapters tackle these entanglements from the vantage point of local aid workers, and the two concluding chapters turn the ethnographic gaze to the camp’s Syrian dwellers—an organizational decision not without repercussions that I will return to later.

Life in Azraq is experienced in conditions of an “emergency within an emergency,” imagined and reproduced in the encounter between aid workers and the Syrian dwellers of the camp (p. 35). Yet, this emergency is constantly undermined by the “bureaucratization of humanitarian aid,” leading to an experience of the mundane, in which emergency is “distributed” over a stretch of time (p. 37). This stretching of time appears in conditions of waiting, repetition, crowding, and rushing that entangle the labor of aid workers with the lived realities of the camp’s Syrian dwellers. By diverting energies to the presentism of the mundane, absorption of emergency by the mundane emerges as an attempt by the humanitarian system to co-opt futurity. This becomes evident in the anxious oscillation between humanitarian and development logics, in which, rather than resolving urgent infrastructural emergencies in the camp, humanitarian resources are instead dedicated to future-oriented development projects. One illustrative example is the Azraq Solar Power Plants project, a collaboration between the UNHCR and IKEA that sought to provide renewable energy sources for the future while leaving unresolved the more immediate shortages of electricity experienced in the camp.

The deferral and postponement characterizing the bureaucratized humanitarian apparatus in Azraq are familiar to those versed in the anthropological literature on state bureaucracies. To that end, Gatter conceptualizes a “camp bureaucracy” that operates through the tactical governance of “impermanent operations for the short to mid-term” (p. 58). There, we move from the physical design of waiting areas and the “material making of bureaucracy” (papers, files, sticky notes) across the camp’s different villages to other innovations of temporal manipulation that characterize the bureaucratic proceduralism (referral system), and to the ways in which aid workers become emotional mediators who demonstrate the cunning “indestructibility of bureaucracy” (pp. 64, 75). Unsurprisingly, bureaucratic rationality emerges as an always-inefficient response to these emergencies, and Gatter argues that it is precisely this bureaucratic inefficiency that produces a condition of “never-ending emergency,” lending bureaucracy its indestructibility (p. 76). The camp bureaucracy operates alongside contradictory logics of care and control that entangle aid workers with the militarized apparatus of the camp and pre-encampment histories as they imagine, assess, and reproduce hierarchized regimes of threat and vulnerability. With sharp attention to the minute, Gatter shows that the open configuration of space within the camp, its embodied and material security infrastructures, and the movement of aid workers’ bodies between the camp’s dwellings reveal a more cunning panoptic project of intimate surveillance to “produce [gradations of] disciplined and obedient” subjects (p. 88).

Following the experiences of local aid workers in the earlier chapters, the two later chapters of Gatter’s Time and Power in Azraq deal primarily with those who are most affected by this humanitarian apparatus, the Syrians who live in these camps. Life in Azraq is characterized by an abundance of time dealt with by multiple scales of waiting; waiting in queues, waiting for services to arrive and urgent infrastructures to be repaired, and most of all, waiting for a future life beyond the camp. Tracing the multiple affective dispositions that emerge to manage this abundance of time, Gatter articulates “patience” as a primary mode of “productive waiting” in the meantime that simultaneously reproduces compliant subjects (p. 117). If the spatial configurations of the camp were one attempt to produce disciplined subjects, here the temporal terrain emerges to provide a complementary compliance. This abundance of time is filled by turning to opportunities provided by precisely the same humanitarian apparatus responsible for its making. Syrian camp dwellers find themselves practicing productive waiting by joining community craft workshops, incentive-based volunteering, and taking advantage of opportunities for temporary work with the several NGOs operating in the camp.

This productive waiting reveals an anxious relationship between the mundane (an expenditure in the present) and the ordinary (a site of futurity). Whereas the former is about sustaining biological life, the latter lays a claim to biographical life. In the last chapter Gatter describes how the future emerges as a site of humanitarian governance by way of these accumulated bureaucratic and humanitarian practices, which Syrian dwellers recognize as sustaining their biological futures while foreclosing biographical ones. In a final attempt to reclaim biographical futurity, Syrian dwellers maintain their aspirations for return by way of nostalgic yearnings for life in prewar Syria, binding their biological and biographical development away from the camp.

A running thread throughout Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp is the multiscalar movement of tracing how matter, narratives, aspirations, and bodies move across and within multiple, often intersecting, spatiotemporal scales. Yet, although Gatter attempts to resist the presentism of ethnographic fieldwork, and more importantly of the camp’s bureaucratic apparatus, by analyzing the entanglement of “multiple temporalities” (p. 4), her Syrian and Jordanian interlocutors continue to appear primarily as camp subjects—physically, bureaucratically, and imaginatively moving within the confines of the camp’s administrative, spatial, and temporal landscape—and less as subjects with biographical histories and entanglements extending beyond the camp’s confinements. That is, their physical confinement tends to be refracted into an ethnographic confinement. Here, the camp’s presentism molds an ethnographic presentism that unintentionally risks the kind of “temporal bracketing” Gatter astutely cautions against (p. 106). One reason for this may be Gatter’s own positionality as both a researcher and aid worker, an aspect she acknowledges throughout but which deserves further ethnographic description and analysis, going beyond the familiar tropes of the Western anthropologist-as-expert that appear in the text. This is also, in my opinion, an unintentional outcome of the author’s decision to organize the book into chapters focusing on aid workers and others on Syrian dwellers. Although we get brilliant glimpses of the multiple spatiotemporal relationalities around which camp life is entangled, particularly in the last chapter, in which aforementioned nostalgic articulations feature in imaginaries of return, the book would benefit from troubling some of its own ethnographic and temporal bracketing.

On 8 December 2024, Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell, ending more than fifty-three years of Baʿthist Assad rule in Syria. In the following weeks and months, Syrians began returning home, with a flood of stories emerging from returnees. Yet, many Syrians were unable to or fearful of return, despite the dire conditions of their displacement. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp is timely; it will help us understand the multiple spatiotemporal entanglements of humanitarian and national governance that inform how desires for return are negotiated, troubled, and fulfilled. This important text will be of interest to an interdisciplinary readership, including the fields of anthropology, refugee studies, humanitarianism, and development. The book’s accessibility and eloquent engagement with a wide range of theoretical debates renders it useful for undergraduate and graduate teaching across these multiple disciplines.