Monish Bhatia and Victoria Canning, eds. Stealing Time: Migration, Temporalities and State Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 233pp., £34.99 (paperback).
States routinely deprive people of their time: for punishment as in imprisonment, or for their own supposed good or the social good as in psychiatric hospitals or quarantine. Less commonplace, but all too common, is state expropriation of time to suppress political opposition as in political prisoners or as a preventive measure in declared emergency or exceptional conditions as in internment during war or the pre-crime of the “war on terror”. All of these processes involve state violence in varying measures and much has been written about them. If less attention has been paid to analogous processes in states’ treatment of criminalized or othered migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, border-crossers, or those so labelled, this volume is a timely and well-conceived redress. The book deploys the metaphor of “stealing time” to elucidate many facets of states’ forceful taking away of these people’s hours, days, months, years, lives. Most of the instances detailed in the book are unlawful or wrongful; all are harmful and dehumanizing: they are temporal state crime.
There are some key differences between the experiences of prisoners in gaols with a determinate sentence and the many asylum seekers held in indefinite detention: in the latter, “people count time up, rather than counting time down” (p. xvi) This structured uncertainty and insecurity, combined with well-founded fears for the future, inability to plan, and sheer torment of a present devoid of meaningful activity can be akin to torture, and is often deployed deliberately by the state to coerce detainees into repatriation or to deter others.
Bhatia and Canning (p. xvii) credit anthropologist Shahram Khosravi with the concept of stolen time developed throughout this book and reflected in its title; many of the chapters draw fruitfully on his work. The book arose from the “Borders, Racisms and Harms” symposium held at Birkbeck in 2018 and the discussions there on “state power and control over migrant time” (p. xvi) have led to a richly multifaceted book that hangs together exceptionally well for an edited volume.
The chapters cover migrants’ and border-crossers’ (and their families’ and loved ones’) experiences of stolen time in cases ranging across Afghanistan, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, the Mediterranean Sea, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Iran, Australia, Papua New Guinea (Manus Island), Sweden, Denmark, United States, Mexico, and India. It is “a collection by activists, scholars, researchers and border crossers” (p. xviii), with some of the authors belonging in several of those categories. A disparate range of genres and modes is deployed in its writing, and an array of research methodologies (all qualitative) reported upon. Yet the commonality of experiences told of is striking, with the multiple angles and voices reinforcing it.
A society (and global relations) that impel people into emigration or exile can “steal” time from those “left behind” in a highly gendered way, as the first chapter by Shuster, Hussaini, Hossaini, Rezaie, and Shinwari movingly shows in the case of migration from Afghanistan. The attention to gender relations and their intersections continues appropriately throughout the book. Karam Yahya, author of chapter 2, is one of the several contributors who combine the role of researcher and activist (as do the two editors). His chapter, moving as he did, through Syria, Jordan, Turkey, the Mediterranean, and Greece, explores the liminality of border-crossers, not just in the timespan of emigration and entry but over a long period, potentially years.
Chapter 3, by Meier and Donà, is an ethnographic study in the temporal “micropolitics” of states’ asylum systems and the asylum seekers who must navigate them, with fieldwork from London, Berlin, and Calais. Deprivation of time and enforced poverty interact. Most of the time is stolen in having to wait on uncaring bureaucracies, but then things can move impossibly fast, causing deep anxiety. The authors find everyday resistances to the dehumanization, through building routines of normalcy, sociality, and collectivity.
Tofighian and Boochani, in chapter 4, provide a powerful account of the “weaponisation of time” by the Australian state in detaining asylum seekers indefinitely offshore on Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, the so-called “Pacific Solution”. Kurdish-Iranian writer and journalist Boochani spent six years unlawfully incarcerated on Manus, eventually sending via text messages a whole prize-winning book reflecting on the experiences to Tofighian in Australia who translated and edited it. Existence in the privately run prison camp amounts to degradation and torture, in a regime Boochani and Tofighian term “kyriarchal”: a total medieval-style domination in which detainees were driven to self-harm, suicide, death by medical negligence and in one case by murder. The authors call it “a system for taking life” (p. 80). The chapter contains extracts from Boochani’s text messages, as well as Tofighian’s account of the collaborative documentary that Boochani filmed (also using mobile phone) on Manus: extraordinary works of resistance and solidarity.
Lindberg and Edward, in chapter 5, examine enforcement of deportation of unsuccessful asylum seekers in Sweden and Denmark through regimes designed to make life in these countries unviable for them so they accede to deportation. The respective detention and deportation centres are not prisons and are a far cry from the concentration camp on Manus. Yet despite the more humane veneer, they are manipulative and pettily dehumanizing. Some inmates resist by gaming the European system and moving on from one country and centre to the next instead of repatriation, but they are prevented from making a life for themselves: their lives, their futures, are being taken away. Lindberg’s insightful ethnography is well complemented by Edward’s auto-ethnographic type reflections, as an asylum seeker and activist, on the struggle over hope between the migrants and the system.
Canning’s chapter 6 also presents ethnographic research on asylum seekers in Denmark and Sweden, as well as Britain, focusing on the experiences of women. She argues that policies of enforced social isolation and disconnection deliberately contrive to produce harm, in order to assist deportation and as part of a deterrent “hostile environment”. “For survivors of sexual violence, torture or torturous violence … this harm compounds impacts of historical abuses and a structural lack of support in surviving violence” (p. 108). Temporal insecurity is central to this harm: how long might temporary residency last, when might deportation be enforced? In withstanding endless waiting and cruelly imposed stress, survival itself is “a form of resistance” (p. 107).
Chapter 7, by Silver, Manzanares, and Goldring, and chapter 8 by Gomberg-Muñoz, explore the stealing of time from Mexican citizens by their own state after deportation from the United States. Interminable bureaucratic time-wasting and frustrating Catch-22s are exacted in having educational qualifications recognized to secure a job, in seeking accommodation, in having children’s citizenship or custody recognized, in furthering education, in obtaining social security; the list and the waiting are endless. Gomberg-Muñoz records the activism of a number of deportee-activists and the organizations that they established to help alleviate such torment and time theft of later and future deportees. Though the “invested” time (in education, careers, families, friendships, cultural capital) stolen through deportation can never be recuperated, such solidarity re-establishes dignity and builds hope, allowing livelihoods and lives to be reconstructed.
Bhatia’s chapter 9 considers the violent border regime between Bangladesh and India, exacerbated by recent Hindu nationalism, itself the legacy of colonialism. The chapter begins with the harrowing account of a 15-year-old girl shot dead in cold blood by Indian border forces while crossing the usually porous border into Bangladesh for her wedding. Some 1,185 people were killed by India’s Border Security Force over 2000–2019, with 1,108 wounded and 1,401 kidnapped. Bhatia refers to this taking of lives as the stealing of time through its violent stopping (p. 174). This chapter is perhaps the book’s least explicitly concerned with stolen time. Nevertheless, it deals masterfully with the history behind the current deadly politics of borders and belongings. Right of residency in the state of Assam is now being taken away from many of the Muslim minority who have lived there for generations, in what appears to be a pilot for similar ethnic cleansing throughout India through the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019). Here we see generations of “invested” life-building time stolen, along with belonging, as surely as a bullet takes away a life.
In the tenth and final chapter, Illiadou examines the Greek state’s (and Europe’s) callousness to the many deaths of border-crossers seeking entry over the Mediterranean via Lesvos. The lack of prevention of these deaths, through denial of rescue, can be seen as complicity in them for their supposed deterrent function. The lack of care extends to the living, to the survivors in detention camps, and those who die there from fumes in freezing tents, from untreated disease and other preventable causes. The lack of care even extends to corpses denied appropriate funeral rites or buried without identification, causing further distress to their families and of course stealing their time in often fruitless attempts to find closure. Once again, this chapter highlights the quietly heroic efforts of activists extending solidarity and asserting humanity against its denial.
The volume ends with a thoughtful epilogue by Bridget Anderson (who is missing from the list of contributors), suggesting parallels between the state’s stealing time from border crossers and the temporal and spatial regimes imposed during the Covid pandemic as the book went to press. This is a good ending, but the book lacks a conclusion. Stealing Time is an important and readable collection of well-written chapters, well put together. Its committed combination of critical research and exemplifying activism works. That will do for a conclusion.