Stealing Time

‘This outstanding volume takes our understanding of state crime and the undocumented migration process in an important new direction. By employing the concept of temporality, Monish Bhatia and Vicky Canning have brought together an innovative group of scholars who, collectively, weaponise what they call ‘migrant time’. Through this lens of temporality each of the chapters offers powerful new insights into the state’s repertoire of violence against asylum seekers and refugees while simultaneously bringing to the fore the resistance that this ‘hidden’ form of repression engenders in those subject to its harms.’ — Prof. Penny Green, Queen Mary University In this remarkable volume, we see vividly how time itself is an object and target of power, and rather than a natural fact, is produced through governance. By taking migration as their central framework of analysis, the contributors to this book provide a profound and memorable critical investigation of state power and the subtle violence of bureaucracy. This book is a landmark event in consolidating the incipient field of critical studies of temporality, and in situating human mobility and borders at the heart of understanding the place of time in social domination. —Prof. — Nicholas De Genova, University of Houston Monish Bhatia is lecturer in Criminology at Birkbeck, University of London Victoria Canning is senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol This book draws together empirical contributions which focus on conceptualising the lived realities of time and temporality in migrant lives and journeys. This book uncovers the ways in which human existence is often overshadowed by legislative interpretations of legal and illegalised. It unearths the consequences of uncertainty and unknowing for people whose futures often lay in the hands of states, smugglers, traffickers and employers that pay little attention to the significance of individuals’ time and thus, by default, their very human existence. Overall, the collection draws perspectives from several disciplines and locations to advance knowledge on how temporal exclusion relates to social and personal processes of exclusion. It begins by conceptualising what we understand by ‘time’ and looks at how temporality and lived realities of time combine for people during and after processes of migration. As the book develops, focus is trained on temporality and survival during encampment, border transgression, everyday borders and hostility, detention, deportation and the temporal impacts of border deaths. This book both conceptualises and realises the lived experiences of time with regard to those who are afforded minimal autonomy over their own time: people living in and between borders.