Publications

Wartime is fundamentally important to the study of international politics but not especially well understood. In this paper, we use timing theory and the concept of liturgy to unpack the contemporary dynamics of US wartime. A theory of political timing posits that all temporalities derive from and symbolize underlying social processes, and that these timing efforts unfold according to a master organizing standard. Liturgy highlights the way that ritualized acts help participants commune with the sacred – whether this be God or the nation-state. Scrutinizing contemporary US culture practices, we combine these ideas to argue that the notion of victory, as enacted through a widespread set of performative routines, acts as an organizing standard that embeds and reifies wartime in US security policy and daily life. Prevalent ideals of winning wars gather together a stylized past, explicate present problems, and generate expectations about future problems and conflicts. We tabulate several highly influential examples of this liturgy of triumph from national calendars, commemorative sites and events, and cultural practices like spectator sports. In addition to normalizing a view of wartime as having clear beginnings and uniquely successful endings, the US liturgy of triumph highlights a growing gap in the country’s relationship to the use of force. Most of what performative war liturgies commemorate is ‘finished’; it has been seen, known, and ostensibly won. Yet, much of what defines 21st century conflict is anything but certain or victorious. Moreover, US victory culture has only grown more acute the longer the concrete victories fail to materialize, suggesting a tragic code at the heart of US security politics.

Wartime dominates the 21st century. The term is ubiquitous in contemporary politics, providing an intuitive trope for narrating foreign relations, grappling with intractable policy problems, and responding to shocking events. Such pervasion makes it easy to forget that wartime is a relatively recent political invention. It began as an instrumental and somewhat stylized concept that authorized exceptional violence by promising to contain it within strict temporal boundaries. Yet in the same era that wartime achieved international prominence, war itself became an increasingly ordinary and extended dimension of politics. Today, ‘wartime’ refers to a number of unconstrained and often self-perpetuating violent practices that have changed global politics and national security policies in deep and enduring ways – nowhere more so than in the United States. To introduce the special issue, this article presents wartime as a neglected and paradoxical topic at the heart of International Relations. It sketches the concept’s historical emergence, from innovative Presidential discourse through expansion in World War II and the Cold War, to 21st century entrenchment in daily life and habits of foreign relations. We also make the case for why US wartime marks an especially apt example of a global phenomenon, and one worthy of increased scrutiny within International Relations (IR). Finally, we provide synoptic summaries of the articles that comprise the special issue, showing how they work together to interrogate key aspects of 21st century wartime. We conclude with reflections on how the study of wartime may be extended to better understand its impact on historical and contemporary global politics.

This essay examines the author’s experience since 2018 in developing and teaching a third-year undergraduate course on the history of time at a Singapore university, for students specializing in East and Southeast Asian history and the history of technology. History courses are traditionally taught in a chronological format, with clear periodization, and a nearly exclusive focus on written and audiovisual “texts.” The author has found that such an approach is less effective for a course on the history of time, a subject that suggests no obvious periodization or linear narrative, and for which many of his students lack a precise vocabulary. To solve these challenges, the author has borrowed autoethnographic exercises developed by scholars in other disciplines and assigned unconventional tasks such as building water clocks and curating time capsules. While the course has proven popular, it has also invited questions about what a global history of time looks like. Although the industrial and technological history of time is accessible to his students, much of the recent work on temporality presumes a familiarity with European and North American social and political issues that students outside of those regions may lack.

In Temporal Politics Adrian Little demonstrates how different conceptions of past, present and future contribute to the nature of political conflict in the world today. Reacting against narratives of political disillusionment and apathy, he focuses on how a new understanding of political temporality can inform our approach to political problems. He forms his argument around three major cases in which the nature of past, present and future is contested: Indigenous politics in settler colonies; the politics of bordering and migration; and debates over the future of democracy.

In this introduction, the editors of the special section situate the study of the Mexico–Guatemala border, lay out the themes of the collection, and summarize the individual contributions.

In recent years, security and immigration enforcement has expanded rapidly throughout Mexico. From checkpoints and patrols to a vast system of detention and deportation, Mexican officials have implemented far-reaching measures to curtail international migration from Central America. Many of these efforts have been concentrated along the Mexico–Guatemala border and deep within southern Mexico, culminating in Programa Frontera Sur, a militarized approach to border security implemented in 2014. In this article, we explore how security and immigration enforcement in Mexico rely on spatial hierarchies that divide north and south. The practice of security and immigration enforcement has received significant attention across many disciplines. The notion of spatial hierarchies and the ways in which scalar differentiation impinges upon well-being has been less covered. As we show, these hierarchies partition North and Central America according to colonial modes, subordinating the latter as inferior while working across global, national, and local scales. Crucially, the linkages between securitization and the spatialization of hierarchies provide insights into nation-building and regional identity, where Mexico and the United States are increasingly designated as separate from South and Central America.

This special issue calls on scholars to simultaneously centre and unsettle the margin: to recognise the multiplicity of margins as politically generative spaces, frequently contoured by sustained and varied forms of mobility. Taken together, the studies collected in this volume are a call to view margins as vital socio-political spaces and objects of study. They are created, transformed, or maintained through interactions among the multiple ethnic, political, or religious groups within it but also through connections to allies, families, and interlocutors elsewhere that people in the margins draw in. Powerful states, corporations, and other play a role, but the contributors do not presume they are the most significant force at play. To be sure, margins can reflect liminality and suspension, but they are also sites of contentious politics. As space–time compression, multi-localism, economic precarity, and political fragmentation continue apace, margins are decreasingly discrete spaces between, but are instead spaces where lives are made. As sites that help structure engagements among groups—and sometimes within the groups themselves—appear and fade, margins take on varied levels of significance as contestations and convivialities take shape and transform. They are multiple, often intersecting, sometimes geographic and formally demarcated, sometimes largely invisible or unspoken but no less powerful. And they can be anywhere.

How does time make itself evident? The easy answer is to point toward timekeepers. Chronicles trade in epochal time of years, decades, and centuries; calendars pinpoint dates, days, and weeks; mechanical timekeepers indicate hours, minutes, and seconds; and the sun’s position in the sky tells us whether it is morning, afternoon, or night. We see the time when we consult these various devices. This special issue about “Seeing Time” is not focused on the innumerable ways that people have told the time; instead, it addresses representations of time as both an object (a fixed moment conveyed by a timekeeper) and as a subject (a variable agent whose passage in and of itself may effect change). The distinction between the two is often elusive. As Roland Barthes famously observed, photography simultaneously a) conveys the viewer’s distance from a past moment and b) induces a hallucinatory experience of that moment as still present, something ‘false on the level of perception, true on the level of time’ (115).

That duality extends beyond photography into other visual media, as one might gather from the cover image of this special issue (see also Figure 1). Instead of the modern age’s ubiquitous clock-watcher gazing at a timepiece, Man Ray’s sculpture presents the timepiece as returning the viewer’s gaze (for more about clock-watchers see Sauter 2007; McCrossen 2013, 18–31 and 41–62; for more about clocks as objects see Birth 2012). Man Ray meant for the metronome to remind him of time’s relentless beat, duration, and passage. He paperclipped the eye to the metronome’s hand to underscore his sense that time literally kept him under watch, unblinkingly rendering its judgment. First created in 1923, and originally titled “Object to be Destroyed”, it appears here in the form of its 1964 replica, of which a hundred copies were made. The new title, “Indestructible Object”, announces the sculpture’s refusal to remain within the past (for its complex history, see Lee 1999; Mileaf 2004). While the work objectifies specific moments of the past – those signified by the date of its creation, recreation, and documentation – it also casts its unblinking gaze on the viewer’s ever-shifting present.

In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the histories of waiting, particularly in medicine, business, politics, and culture. This essay contributes to that history by tracing the evolving visual representation of waiting in popular American culture between 1870 and 1930. As contemporary illustrators, photographers and artists interpreted a metropolitan landscape populated by waiting subjects, they helped inscribe an increasingly routine experience with an enduring set of meanings – efficiency, convenience, equality, comfort, and alienation, for instance – while at the same time drawing upon and reinventing older visual traditions of social representation. The original subjects of waiting imagery were queues, which cartoonists and sketch artists used to imagine the shifting boundaries of citizenship. As urban realism and ‘muckraking’ came into vogue in the century’s final decades, the imagery of waiting shifted from allegorical queues to literal scenes of migration, poverty and unemployment. In the twentieth century, the archetypal scene of waiting shifted once again, this time to a more consumer-oriented landscape of monumental railroad stations, department store waiting rooms, and private and public bureaucratic spaces. By the 1920s, this article concludes, waiting imagery had transitioned from a tool of critique – a means of articulating social crisis – into a common advertising trope. This article attempts a thematic rather than formal analysis of the origins of that trope, in order to reveal how slowness, as much as speed and acceleration, became an essential part of the modernizing United States’ self-image.

Immigration governance scholars often focus on formal, national regulations and how local implementation and resistance rations access to space and resources. Research into ‘xenophobic’ exclusion across South Africa suggests recalibrating research along two spatial and temporal dimensions. First, while legal and political discourse often evoke national principles, exclusive speech and action can be highly spatialised and distinctly sub-national. Consequently, people objectively belonging to the same, excludable category (e.g., international migrants; sexual or ethnic minorities) face varied vulnerabilities corresponding to where they work or reside. Moreover, when mobilising nationalistic discourses of exclusion and belonging, sub-national actors customise and emplace them. Such co-authoring infuses them with particularistic interests and language while imposing spatial limits on their legitimacy. This in turn generates a dynamic patchwork of regulatory regimes where local variations may be more practically important than national policy. Second, the effects of co-authored exclusion are spatial, but their foundations may be temporal. South Africa’s national political project rests on forms of restorative justice: of building futures for those materially disadvantaged and disenfranchised by Apartheid’s racist machinations. For South Africans, making claims to a future in place (i.e., in the country or a given site) are predicated on one’s position in this national temporal arc. Even if apartheid disadvantaged millions across Southern African, non-citizens are historiographically excluded from these claims. Immigrants are, in effect, run out of time. By eliding shared pasts, officials and citizens deny the possibility of a spatial future shared with non-nationals. These elements help explain the popular legitimacy of anti-immigrant mobilisation and surface the multiple modes of citizenship and exclusion operating across the country. Recognising this, the article ultimately encourages scholars to re-spatialise and temporalise the study of migration governance in ways that also recognise the dialogical dimensions of bordering and emplacement.

Chapter within the Walled Borders, Walled Lives section of Borders and Border Walls: In-Security, Symbolism, Vulnerabilities.

More-than-human approaches to borders unsettle the anthropocentric reading of borders and bordering practices. They call for radically different imaginings of shared vulnerabilities and co-existence on the border. What remains marginal in these discussions is the way in which more-than-human borders continue to neglect social differences and unequal power relations among different (human) individuals. The question is not simply about the hierarchy between human and non-human lives, but how the construction of such binaries continues to privilege the life of certain humans while exposing their pervasive violence on others. Using the case of the development of Trans Frontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa, we argue that limiting the voice of the human in our readings of the border to create space for non-humans could draw attention away from significant political analysis of mobility privileges and practices of ongoing colonisation in the construction of more-than-human spaces. By drawing on Henri Bergson’s political philosophy of becoming and of open and closed societies, we suggest that more-than-human borders can be re-thought in terms of Bergson’s reading of movement, qualitative multiplicity, and open societies – a language that resists any forms of closure and a linear understanding of progress and time. A close examination of TFCAs suggests that practices that seek to enable connectivity and mobility across time and space can turn borders into spatio-temporal chokepoints, which preserve the familiar logics of colonisation and exclusionary bordering.

This article highlights the profound contribution to Citizenship Studies of Engin Isin’s Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. Over the last twenty years, scholars have drawn on this seminal work to show how those positioned at the margins of citizenship have been central to its transformation. Key to Isin’s approach is the notion of the city as a difference machine – a paradigmatic formulation that captures the social and spatial dimensions of citizenship struggles. Reflecting on this notion twenty years on, I ask how it intersects with an emergent planetary imaginary in which a politics of time, as much as space, is increasingly explicit. I make a case for attention to the clock, alongside and as part of the city, where the clock is understood as a non-exhaustive symbol of the temporalities in and through which subjects become political. I pursue this approach in relation to a specific example: a 2020 case before the High Court of Australia concerning the power of the Australian government to deport Aboriginal persons who were not Australian citizens. The case speaks to complex interconnections between Indigenous politics, planetary politics, and citizenship, in and through which the city and the clock are being reconfigured.

Identity crafts for migration and citizenship purposes require the assistance of brokerage actors that help secure documents, advise on self-presentations, and vouch for relevant credentials. While recognizing the contradictory roles these intermediaries play in both facilitating and controlling migration and the porous boundary between for-profit and non-profit actors, scholars have yet to explore what challenges these characteristics pose to the organization of a particular brokerage transaction. How do these intermediaries reconcile their roles as migration facilitators and surrogate gatekeepers? Does it matter to present the transaction as driven by financial rewards or other loftier goals? How are the boundaries between different types of intermediaries enacted and contested? I explore these questions through the case of a religious organization that helps migrants establish their religious identities for asylum claims-making on religious grounds. Combining insights from the “relational work” approach with ethnographic research in Korean evangelical congregations in the U.S., I show how the template of gift giving allows the church to focus on making the faithful as God’s intermediary, instead of screening them as the state’s private deputy, and avoid an accusation that its trade with asylum-seekers turns the Christian persona into a quasi-commodity. The boundary between the church and commercial brokers, between gift giving and market exchange, however, is constantly contested and renegotiated through the interaction between the transaction parties. In conclusion, I discuss how the relational work approach can advance our comparative inquiry into the brokerage transactions facilitating the “profane” exchange of “sacred” identities for migration and citizenship purposes.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British Cape Colony was the site of multiple and interrelated constructions of the foreign and articulations of some brand of ‘foreigner’ as threatening. This paper, part of a longer study, explores one construction of foreignness in relation to the ‘frontier’. It makes three main points. First, it analyses the frontier not as a structural condition or zone but as a subjective, political positioning. It proposes the concept of the ‘marchland’ to distinguish between spatial description and political space. Second, it looks at the rendition of the ‘foreign’ in the politics of the frontier, how African land and people ‘beyond the boundary’ were labelled ‘foreigners’ or treated as foreign through the invocation of European norms of international law. It addresses colonial politicisations of chiefly authority in those discourses. Last, it considers the frequently employed idea of ‘the pale’, which speaks to political difference and aids us in conceptualising foreignness in the Cape colonial marchlands. This history considers the relationship between accusations of foreignness and a specific, historical political subjectivity and politics – of the frontier – that politicised foreignness.

Metrics of success, status, and justice are founded on subjective narratives of spatialized pasts and futures. This article considers three moralised space-times – chronotopes – and their relations to people’s mobility within and from sub-Saharan Africa. The first stems from European efforts to promote ‘development at home’ which places Africans on a separate temporal trajectory. By discursively positioning Africans outside global space and futures, Europe subsequently denies claims to European space or lives beyond African territory. Moreover, coding border crossing as deviant justifies an apparatus to return Africans to their space-time where they can achieve justice. The latter two chronotopes emerge dialogically among citizens and immigrants in South Africa’s ‘global city.’ Amidst Johannesburg’s polyrhythmicity, citizens position themselves in a chronotope of stalled transformation where justice comes by remedying deprivations inherited from an apartheid past. This rubs against international migrants operating in a mode of deferred distanciation: using the city to achieve rights and recognition in future elsewhere. These competing temporalities deny possibilities of a mutually shared definition of justice or spatial claim making. This article ultimately positions chronotopes as critical elements in migration infrastructures that shape movements, conditioning interactions, and foreclosing (or opening) possibilities for justice across or within space.

Drawing on an ever-evolving corpus of scholarly, political, and public texts, this article reflects on the temporalisation and territorialisation of Africa in response to Europe’s ‘migration crisis.’ Re-awakened fears of the African other and its own divisive internal politics have presented Europe’s leaders with a dilemma: how to contain African ambitions to move while remaining true to their self-professed commitment to individual freedom, universal rights, and global progress. To solve it, Europe has updated longstanding colonial narratives and identities by constructing a timespace trap. This trap justifies exclusion as readying Africa for an elusive global future. Employing temporal forms of socio-spatial governance, the Europeans dangle a global and mobile future to Africans willing to mould themselves into externally defined parameters of moral respectability. Adherence to immigration regulations authored and often imposed by Europe, together with a demonstrated commitment to family, community, and country mark one’s suitability to enter a global future. But meeting these legal and moral standards effectively means building a sedentary life dedicated to ‘development at home’. Together with allies across sectors and continents, they are realising their ambitions through frameworks that morally justify intercepting and pre-empting movement as means of empowering and perfecting Africans. Doing so effectively excludes Africans from a shared, global humanity while discursively shielding Europe’s liberal commitments.

One would think that, after years of fieldwork and writing, I would be able to answer a pretty simple and straightforward question about who exactly I interviewed for my study of citizenship boundaries in the UAE: “Do you have any notion of the proportions [of interlocuters] of the different ethnic or descent lines that you spoke to?” This essay is about why it is so difficult to answer this question and the insights into citizenship that unfolded as I searched for an empirical answer. Spoiler alert: Answers to questions about “national” or “ethnic” origin are entirely dependent upon how we count—and miscount—time.

The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central Americans the opportunity to seek asylum. This example showcases how the digital world can have exponential material effects. While coverage on border security and migration has been extensive, within political geography, such concerns have rarely been paired with social media. In this article, we take as our object of analysis the digitality or “digital life” of the migrant caravan. Mapping the patterns of migrant caravan-related tweeting paired with the exploration of Twitter’s networked dimensions reveals the platform to be a fundamentally spatial technology. Rather than reflect, refract or distort, Twitter produces and (its power) is in turn produced through spatial mechanisms. We present multiple cartographic visualizations in support of this claim and highlight the ways in which a contextual knowledge of the subject under study—the migrant caravan—can further inform analyses of Big Data.

Time is not a metaphysical dimension independent of human struggle and agency, but a set of practices through which social and political life is organised. Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and protests against racism can all be understood as timing struggles – clashes over the organisation of dynamic structures, institutions and relationships – that are imbued with political power but also the potential for resistance.

This article contributes to the study of conditional inclusion by examining the strategic postponement of naturalization cases in the UAE and USA. In both cases, the naturalization cases of specific minority immigrant groups are delayed (potentially indefinitely) by one branch of the federal government in the name of national security. Drawing upon ostensibly opposite cases, I identify delays as an important but largely overlooked strategy of boundary-policing found across regime-types. The pattern of delays reveals whose attempts to become one of “us” is met with greater obstacles. The prolonged questioning of the moral character of certain minorities makes their access to rights contingent upon their behaviour, rather than a statutorily enacted and secure right. Instead of being fully included or excluded, the targets of these deferrals are conditionally included in the host state – suspended in limbo without indication of whether they will receive citizenship or how long they must wait.

This article explores the interpretive and divinatory practices and strategies used in the South African street-based lottery game fafi. The game, run by the Chinese community in South Africa and played predominantly by low-income black South Africans, utilizes a set of images and divinatory practices, particularly dream interpretation. The article analyzes the practices and history of fafi, alongside the financial and interpretive stakes of the gambling game, to understand contemporary orientations towards the future and uncertainty. Dreaming—learning how to dream and how to interpret dream images—as a gambling skill is understood in relation to traditional healing and diagnostic practices in South Africa. In the context of shifting urban landscapes, the piece argues that “the future” has become an entity to get ahead of rather than a projected goal or destination one hopes for.

In this book Andrew R. Hom (1) Provides a significant new interpretation of time itself, with novel implications for how to make sense of time in the practice and theory of international politics. (2) Provides a rigorous and holistic discussion of IR’s hidden temporal foundations (3) Bridges conventional oppositions in social science and international relations

When it comes to extending citizenship to certain groups, why might ruling elites say neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’, but ‘wait’? The dominant theories of citizenship tend to recognize clear distinctions between citizens and aliens; either one has citizenship or one does not. This book shows that not all populations are fully included or expelled by a state; they can be suspended in limbo – residing in a territory for protracted periods without accruing citizenship rights. This in-depth case study of the United Arab Emirates uses new archival sources and extensive interviews to show how temporary residency can be transformed into a permanent legal status, through visa renewals and the postponement of naturalization cases. In the UAE, temporary residency was also codified into a formal citizenship status through the outsourcing of passports from the Union of Comoros, allowing elites to effectively reclassify minorities into foreign residents.