ABSTRACT
Between 1991 and 1997, a total of 5,676 citizens of former Yugoslavia were reportedly granted temporary refuge status in Czechoslovakia/ Czechia. The shift from permanent asylum to temporary refuge had a profound impact not only on state protection, but also on the everyday lives and strategies of people fleeing a violent conflict. In this interdisciplinary chapter, the author explores temporary refuge first as a legal practice that codified the impermanence in refugee situations, and then as a lived experience of Bosnian recipients of this status. Based on oral histories, she then unpacks the way refugees structure their time in retrospect, and reveals the temporalities shaped by intersections, collisions, and asynchronicities between the institutional, biographic and everyday timescales.
