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Short abstract

Drawing on rhythmanalysis, this article explores how humanitarian infrastructures sustain and transform regimes of waiting. Queues around offices and distribution systems organize refugees' everyday life, shaping moral economies of access and improvisations as practices of endurance.

Long abstract

“Come back tomorrow” becomes a refrain. Waiting structures the routines of displaced people. Based on ethnographic rhythmanalysis, this article explores the practices that shape, sustain, and transform humanitarian waiting-scapes. It argues that infrastructures of humanitarian governance produce distinct regimes of waiting.

In the Nakivale refugee settlement, waiting organizes daily life around mobile clinics, consultation rooms, distribution points, resettlement and protection offices. Yet waiting exceeds administrative delay. The future becomes an affective force acting upon the present, orienting gestures and decisions, a “memory of the future” (Manning).

Waiting spaces are sites of exposure to violence: from assaults within queues to risks intensified by returning home late after a day spent waiting. There is also the violence of waiting in spaces never designed for reception, which may reactivate traumas linked to displacement.

Within these conditions, moral economies of waiting emerge. Beyond institutional triage based on vulnerability categories, the day-to-day discretion of the staff in charge and refugee-to-refugee ethics shape queueing dynamics. A pregnant woman may pass first, a teacher may be served sooner as it affects a whole class.

The article traces the improvisation techniques (Simone) unfolding in these waiting-scapes. Yet, as the prospect of resettlement gradually fades, waiting under such conditions remains a wearing exhaustion (Povinelli). For some, waiting eventually becomes impossible. Stopping waiting then takes different forms: withdrawing through alcohol or suicide, repatriating, leaving for the capital city. There, another regime of waiting, more diffuse yet no less structuring. Waiting rarely disappears. It is displaced, diffused, internalized, or delegated.