Description
Migration is commonly imagined as an issue of space. Yet it necessarily takes place in time. Borders and bordering practices enforce the assignment of persons to territory. This spatial imaginary is continuously disrupted by those not in their ‘proper’ place, such as refugees, (irregular) migrants, stateless persons and even dual nationals, however. Although shoring up the system through infrastructure and increasingly restrictive regulations is presented as a way of securing and uniting communities against their outside, doing so divides societies as it disregards insiders’ affective, personal and familial relations across borders. What is at issue are not least people’s claims to be at home. While much critical analysis of migration introduces temporality by thinking in terms of process, emergence and so on, there seems as yet little work that explicitly reflects on temporality as an issue in itself. This paper thinks through the problem of temporality in relation to political subjectivity by examining how home is made over time and its implications for political subjectivity. Taking seriously the becoming-space of time challenges the conceptual duality of citizen and migrant in significant ways and therefore impacts how we should think power and governance in the international.
