Statelessness through the lens of time

February 2024

In this post, Ahmad Jaber Benswait, prospective PhD candidate at the University College London, Culture, Communication and Media department, explores the political dimensions of time and temporality with respect to his lived experiences of statelessness and displacement. This forms part of his doctoral research, in which he investigates statelessness as a temporal phenomenon and demonstrates how time is a crucial factor in shaping, constraining, and oppressing individuals.

In 2019, I sought international protection in the United Kingdom for being a stateless Bidoon of Kuwait in fear of persecution. It took four years for my claim to be fully determined. During this time, I was placed in state-provided temporary accommodation, which had living conditions similar to those described in research on immigration control hotels as a 'broader confinement continuum.' I spent around 1,400 days in these spaces, where I had limited freedom, such as being unable to sleep outside or have someone stay overnight in my room. I was also not allowed to work while waiting for my claim to be processed, affecting my means of livelihood.

My pending immigration status separated me from my wife and children for years, prevented me from attending my dear mother’s funeral and disrupted my academic career. Not to mention the fact that the time I spent waiting would not count toward the period I needed to have spent before qualifying for application of naturalisation as a British citizen. Being displaced and left in a state of limbo by a failing asylum system compounded the precarious conditions that I and other stateless people around the world routinely endure. Stateless people experience a constant and indefinite state of limbo that forces individuals, families, and communities to struggle endlessly in almost all aspects of their lives. To understand these struggles, it is important to examine them as temporal processes, such as waiting, procrastinating, and rushing, which are enabled by, but also enabling of, larger socio-political realities. By looking at statelessness from this perspective, I have gained a better understanding of the treatment of the Bidoon people by the Government of Kuwait, which treats their basic human rights as conditional privileges rather than legally protected entitlements.

There is a fundamental distinction between time and temporality, however, it is neither possible nor necessary to deal with in the space of this post. What really matters as far as this text is concerned is to showcase how particular uses and functions of time are complicit in the making, governance and exacerbation of statelessness. While there seems to be a lack of literature on the interplay between time and statelessness, there is a vast amount of literature on the implications of time and temporality on questions of identity and injustices experienced by people of marginalised identities. Among the influential works in the field is Henri Bergson’s distinction of time as a lived rather than thought human experience. In response to the traditional view of time as a linear, measurable and divisible ‘natural’ phenomenon, Bergson advocates an understanding of human experiences as a continuity of co-existing past and present events. Measuring time according to the logic of mathematics assumes that temporal units (e.g., moments, years, etc.) can be suspended, divided and counted. In contrast, time is far more fluid, complex and ‘incomplete’ in practice. For science, the units and tools of measuring human temporal experiences, e.g., waiting, are fixed, while the experiences may be lived as fast, slow, useful or detrimental, depending on individual circumstances. Take, for example, the experience of a stateless person waiting for a decision for a family reunion. Their lack of travel documents arguably makes the experience quite different and more intense compared to someone else waiting for a decision to pursue a better life. As such, the problematisation of the physicist view of time is one of the reasons why Bergson’s 19th Century take on time is still relevant and is echoed in other fields of the social sciences.

Time appears to be a determining factor of power relations and struggles. In this respect, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish shows the function of time as a regulator of social behaviour. It does so through the eyes of convicts being disciplined through a daily timetable dividing their days into time units for recursive activities, such as praying, learning, exercising and cleaning. This routine allows the prisoners to exert power over the bodies and minds of the inmates. Foucault’s depiction of time and temporality as technologies of power is further developed in Bourdieu’s Pascalian Meditations, which compares passive experiences of time, i.e., waiting, with more active processes such as delaying, rushing or taking by surprise. Bourdieu’s analysis of time has inspired sociologists such as Javier Auyero to observe temporality as a tool of subject-making in which marginalised people have to adapt to ‘ideal frames’, i.e., they have to become ‘patients of the state’.

As part of my research, I have been exploring the relationship between time, temporality, and statelessness, with a particular focus on the Bidoon people of Kuwait who have been displaced. My research primarily centres on the legal and administrative processes that use time to create unequal identities and determine eligibility for natural and civil human rights. I identify these processes as framing, pressing and repressing functions of time. This identification contributes a sociolinguistic lens to current sociological efforts to develop a common vocabulary for discussing time in politics.

Through the framing function of time, I question the Kuwaiti nationality law’s ‘temporal criteria’ in the definition and demarcation of Kuwaiti-ness. Individuals are divided into three categories: original, naturalised, and stateless (Bidoon) Kuwaitis. Unfortunately, unequal access to rights and privileges is tied to these categories. The Bidoon Kuwaitis are further divided into sub-categories through 5-year population censuses. This results in legal and public discourses that legitimise practices claimed to be ‘sieving’ which sub-category of them is (in)eligible to what treatment. This sub-categorising exposes the Bidoon community to different time frames and processes. For example, the government-issued cards they rely on for official transactions have a limited validity period. If their cards expire, they may be denied access to essential services. The Bidoon community is subjected to indefinite waiting in this process, which puts many life projects on hold. I refer to these processes as pressing and repressing functions of time, and they operate more tangibly in displacement contexts.

As a stateless refugee in the UK, I have experienced how time and temporality interfere with who a person may be and what they can (not) do or have. Experiences of arbitrary bureaucratic delays, waiting and rushing have indeed exacerbated my sense of being excluded, alienated, and controlled. However, I am now curious to explore the following question: how may the politics of time work not only against but also for the interests of stateless people?

_{Image by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash}