Paper short abstract

This paper explores how queuing at government offices affects applicants' social interactions and administrative responses. It is, here, a transitional phase in which individuals navigate institutional, physical, and emotional burdens, either through mutual understanding or an outbreak of tension.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the micro-politics of waiting at the Saint-Denis prefecture in La Réunion, where transnational people process residence permits. Based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork, it analyses a specific moment during opening hours to show how the temporal suspension of bureaucratic waiting shapes social dynamics among applicants navigating regularisation in the country of arrival.

Applicants behave differently depending on the reasons and stage of their cases. Out of compassion, some offer advice or help to fellow applicants struggling with their files. Others keep to themselves, focused on their own journey. Complaints about the hardships of the process are common. Tensions may also arise when someone cuts the line or bypasses the unwritten queuing rules, exposing the delicate balance between individual necessity and collective order.

The paper centres on a specific event: a woman collapsing at the gate. The incident stirs reactions beyond concern for her wellbeing: anger over the physical and emotional toll of waiting, and frustration at an administration that processes applications under rigid rules. Each situation reveals the distance between the institution and the people it processes.

Solidarity emerges as a situational, fragile phenomenon inseparable from the temporal suspension imposed by administrative waiting, arising from the immediate experience of waiting together under constraint. The queue is where the complexities of transnational life are condensed into institutional precarity, physical exhaustion, and the human capacity for both compassion and friction. Support and suspicion are not opposites but products of the same conditions, making solidarity both possible and fleeting.