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Abstract: This article introduces a time perspective on 'protracted displacement' and seeks to theorize 'agency-in-waiting' through a focus on the ways in which people simultaneously carry on during displacement, feel trapped in the present, and actively relate to alternative notions of the future. The article analyzes the protracted case of internally displaced Georgians from Abkhazia and the dominant discourse of return that characterizes their lives in displacement. Changing notions of hope are analyzed in order to understand the role that an uncertain future plays and the potential for agency that people develop during displacement. Agency-in-waiting and future perspectives, it is suggested, contribute valuable conceptual and political dimensions to the ways in which protracted displacement can be understood and addressed.
Keywords: agency-in-waiting, Georgia, hope, protracted displacement, time perspective, uncertainty
As a concept, 'protracted displacement' is often considered a static state of being, and for many people in those circumstances, this is undoubtedly how it feels. Individuals feel stuck in a present that they do not want to inhabit, awaiting a future they cannot reach-a future that is often unpredictable and uncertain. Yet even in this situation, which is experienced as 'permanent impermanence', 'everyday time' continues to flow through routinized practices and survival strategies. Scholarship has conceptualized long-term displacement as 'waiting' (Conlon 2011; Hyndman and Giles 2011; Mountz 2011; Stepputat 1992). In this article, I seek to build on and develop existing knowledge and scholarship on waiting by exploring how people's future orientation may change during a prolonged period of displacement. I examine how people's capacities for waiting can be analyzed through the changing dynamics of hope created in the meeting point between their everyday lives and geopolitical realities.
The article argues that we need to move away from understanding protracted displacement as static and toward a notion of it as fluid. This requires a critical engagement with the temporality of protracted displacement and particularly with how agency is conceptualized within that temporality. The temporality of protracted displacement may be framed as 'protracted uncertainty', as the editors of this special issue suggest (see the introduction), and I attempt to understand the process of protracted uncertainty through the interlinked concepts of 'waiting' and 'hope'. The article has been organized as follows. First, I discuss the meaning of...