Waiting on Borders: Exploiting Time in Syrian Refugee Informal Tent Settlements in Lebanon (Refugees and Migrants within the Middle East)

A powerful contribution to ongoing debates on refugees, borders, and camps and the politics of waitingThe Lebanese-Syrian borderscape is predominantly porous and ambiguous, without an actual border control, and is incessantly contested.Repeated internal displacement and refugee crises have been a pervading political condition in Lebanon since the early twentieth century, but the most destabilizing refugee and displacement crisis stems from the regional influx into the country in 2011 of thousands of Syrian refugees. In Waiting on Borders, Paul Moawad focuses on informal tented settlements (ITSs) inhabited by Syrian refugees on this border, to offer a compelling conceptualization of the politics of time and waiting, especially in relation to how temporal strategies are used as deterrence mechanisms in border regimes and informal spaces.Here, waiting is not just an active political instrument used by authorities to manage and control mobility, nor is it just a passive state refugees find