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Abstract: While displacement has always involved the refiguring of space, scholars of forced migration have recently begun to consider how temporality might be crucial to an understanding of displacement. In this article, I consider the interplay of temporal and spatial uncertainty in the experience of exile for Iraqi refugees in metropolitan Cairo. By examining how Iraqis understand displacement as uncertain and how this uncertainty is a cause of significant distress, I show that an attunement to temporality can help us to understand refugees' experiences of displacement. Iraqi refugees spoke of exile in Cairo as 'living in transit'-a condition in which disjuncture between their expectations about exile and its realities contributed to an altered experience of time in which the future became particularly uncertain and life was experienced as unstable. One solution sought by refugees is resettlement, a process that often renders the future even more uncertain, at least in the short term.
Keywords: Egypt, instability, Iraqi refugees, resettlement, temporality, uncertainty, urban refugees
Uncertainty, unpredictability, risk, and disjuncture are prominent themes in the literature on globalization and transnationalism (Appadurai 1990; Beck 1992; Lewellen 2002). Theorists have posited that processes associated with globalization have led to an increase in the uncertainty of everyday life in late modernity. These processes are often spatial and temporal in nature and are associated with an increase in movement and a change in the pace of life. In contexts of increased mobility, however, there may be simultaneous closures and limitations on movement, especially in situations of displacement and dislocation (Lubkemann 2008). For example, as a result of shrinking global asylum space and global inequities in responsibility sharing around refugees and other displaced populations (Gibney 2004), many refugees are increasingly displaced for long periods of time in urban and camp contexts in the Global South. In these circumstances, refugees often find themselves 'stuck' for years in countries of asylum near their country of origin. For refugees unable to return home, unable to build lives in host countries, and unable to travel elsewhere, long-term uncertainty about solutions to their plight becomes part of the lived experience of displacement and exile. While flight from conflict often involves immediate, short-term uncertainty, the experience of becoming and being a refugee is marked by long-term uncertainty, what...