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Paper short abstract:

We will share evidence from refugees in Uganda and Kenya and a theoretical framework of post-protection, drawing on post-development and other critical theory, to support the interrogation of anticipation within humanitarian and development studies and practice.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of time is central to institutional humanitarian protection, conceived of in relation to both ‘timely responses’ to emerging crises and anticipatory action to mitigate the impact of future events. Within refugee studies, the temporalities of forced migration and displacement have been contrasted with ‘humanitarian time’ and the so-called ‘humanitarian-development gap’ prevailing across years and even decades for many displaced people. The situation of growing numbers of refugees worldwide living in protracted, sometimes lifelong, displacement challenges the assumptions of linear time and lives upon which protection is premised. In this reality, the development interventions so urgently needed may in fact never manifest, regardless of the length of displacement. At the same time, humanitarian and development efforts to address these dynamics is compromised by trends such as the global polycrisis, enhanced border regimes, and the ‘responsibilisation’ of refugees through self-reliance strategies.

In this paper, we draw on our research with refugees in Uganda and Kenya and with internally displaced people in South Sudan to reimagine a refugee protection that is future-oriented and evidence-based, including through the use of conflict and weather forecasting. These practices – as undertaken by both humanitarian and development actors and displaced communities themselves – represent different forms of anticipation. They also present an opportunity to interrogate who 'protects' and how protection practices, development assistance, and even the notion of time is constructed in advance of actual events, illustrating an important critical social science perspective rarely present in development discourse or within research on anticipatory action.