ABSTRACT
Asylum is supposed to be a temporary situation. Yet for so many refugees, it is not. Despite spending years, and often decades, in situations of protracted asylum, the rights and protections that are provided to refugees are generally not the same as those provided to citizens, meaning that their lives can become characterised as an indefinite period of liminality that is dominated by concerns surrounding immediate survival in the present. In this chapter, however, Ramsay describes how the temporality of asylum cannot be singularly understood as a period of liminality. Instead, Ramsay relays how time is a subjective experience for refugees. For refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, time is experienced as circular and demands prioritising acts of regenerative potentiality, such as bearing children. These temporal rhythms can, however, conflict with the expectations placed on refugees in Uganda through the “self-reliance strategy” that defines the Ugandan system of asylum, which forces refugees to shape their daily lives to conform with distinctly linear configurations of time. For those refugees, displacement is not only a politico-legal experience of being external to a national order: it is also an experience of being ejected from familiar temporal rhythms.
