Syrian Refugees and the Politics of Waiting at the margins of the Turkish state

This article examines two Syrian refugee women’s experiences of waiting while living in the Turkish–Syrian border town of Gaziantep. Since the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011, 3.5 million Syrians have left their homes to seek refuge in Turkey. With the 2014 Temporary Protection Regulation granting Syrians temporary residence and limited access to social services, the Turkish state developed state of exception strategies aimed at minimising the impact of incoming refugees. Living within the temporality of war and refugeehood, Syrian refugees are subjected to various forms of waiting that are constitutive of temporal dispositions and strategies with which they negotiate the vicissitudes of the war, the precariousness of refugee life in Turkey, their emotionally and politically charged sojourn in the borderlands close to their home, and their future-oriented expectation of war’s end. Engaging with the anthropological concepts of waiting, patience, and migration, we examine how two Syrian women refugees navigate the uncertain temporality of their lives. To cope with the Turkish state’s arbitrary exceptional policies that constantly pause and interrupt the flow of daily life, they replace waiting for the demands of the present with forms of patience that keep their future expectation of return to Syria alive.