Gatter, Melissa. Time and power in Azraq refugee camp: a nine‐to‐five emergency. 200 pp., bibliogr. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2023. £50.00 (hardcover)

Melissa Gatter's Time and power in Azraq refugee camp offers a powerful contribution to the study of camps, forced displacement, and humanitarian governance. While its title focuses primarily on how time is experienced and manipulated in the humanitarian context, the book moves far beyond that, offering a rich epistemological reflection on how the politics of time and space structure everyday life in Jordan's Azraq refugee camp. Throughout the introduction, five tightly interrelated chapters, and a conclusion, Gatter advances a compelling framework for thinking about temporal and physical confinement. The book illustrates that time is inherently political, showing how the temporal regimes imposed by humanitarian actors shape the lives of both refugees and aid workers. Gatter unpacks how humanitarianism, as an ideology and practice, often annihilates the future, producing a form of bureaucratically managed stuckness that confuses refugees’ sense of their own existential temporality. Reminding me of Elizabeth Dunn's concept of bureaucratic ‘adhocracy’ in post-Soviet Georgia (‘The chaos of humanitarian aid: adhocracy in the Republic of Georgia’, Humanity, 3, 2012), Gatter's application of similar logics to the humanitarian context opens useful comparative insights into how chaotic systems such as the humanitarian produce structural inefficiencies while still projecting authority and care (p. 79). However, such chaos is also characterized by structural violence: Gatter focuses on the contrasting temporalities of foreign organizations (NGOs), who move fluidly between regions, and local staff, who remain embedded in long-term crises, critiquing these ethics of labour. Gatter also documents how the bureaucratic chaos of humanitarianism does not serve flexibility or innovation, as it might claim, but rather generates persistent inefficiency (p. 56). This challenges the usual assumptions about the ‘emergency’ ethos of aid and reframes the humanitarian apparatus as routinized and inefficient. One of the most original insights of the book lies in its conceptualization of waiting. Rather than framing waiting as passive or resigned, Gatter presents it as a performed endurance (p. 114), a cultivated patience that becomes part of the political theatre of aid. This stands in contrast to the aesthetics of urgency that dominate humanitarian discourse – where ‘crisis’ is perpetual and aid must be delivered immediately. I found this contrast between the mundane and the urgent particularly compelling, while also de-romanticizing the idea of waiting, which is characterized by the mundane (p. 136). The book also opens important epistemological reflections on the subjects that make the humanitarian scene. Gatter interrogates the category of the ‘refugee’, noting that while its analytical value is increasingly questioned, academic discourse remains conservative, clinging to this category while neglecting more context-sensitive identity markers. Her reframing of refugees and aid workers as part of a shared temporal regime (p. 60) is especially innovative, dismantling the long-standing dichotomy between these groups. Rather than viewing them as inherently opposed figures – those who help and those who need help – more importantly, Gatter shows how their lives become entangled through humanitarian time. This reframing also has significant implications for how we understand the figure of the ‘local’ in humanitarian discourse: local aid workers are not just recipients of policies but active agents who can reproduce the humanitarian bureaucracy, functioning, in effect, as street-level bureaucrats (p. 59). This insight complicates the assumption that distance is always a product of Western dominance; rather, it is built into the systemic organization of humanitarianism itself, a structure that fragments solidarities and reinforces hierarchies even among those it classifies as local. Thereby, the book implicitly exposes the stratified nature of humanitarian labour and allows for a more systemic understanding of the reproduction of inequalities within humanitarian regimes, rather than attributing them to cultural or national distance alone. A particularly powerful moment in the book is the assertion that this form of governance ‘facilitated a carceral authoritarianism with a humanitarian face’. It claims to assist, yet it constrains lives. This assertion raises a question that gets us back to Dunn's conceptualization: are we overemphasizing the totalizing nature of humanitarianism? Following Feldman's notion of the politics of living (‘The humanitarian condition: Palestinian refugees and the politics of living’, Humanity, 3, 2012; Life lived in relief: humanitarian predicaments and Palestinian refugee politics, 2018), there is space to consider how refugees live alongside or even outside the humanitarian frame. Gatter acknowledges this with her concept of the ‘biographical promise’ – the idea that life continues beyond the temporal and spatial limits set by humanitarian actors: even in spaces of confinement, new possibilities, desires, and ordinariness are constantly being created (p. 136). I would have been keen to learn how Azraq compares to other camps in Jordan or the long-standing Palestinian camps, as broader comparisons could have helped situate Azraq's temporal regime within a regional genealogy of encampment. In many ethnographies of humanitarianism, the state plays a coercive role. Yet in Time and power, the Jordanian state is largely absent. How do camp residents understand state authority in relation to humanitarian governance? Is the state experienced as part of the same apparatus? Finally, I would have welcomed more details on Gatter's dual identity as researcher and aid worker and how that shaped her fieldwork and her presence in the camp. Ultimately, Time and power in Azraq refugee camp is a significant contribution to the anthropology of humanitarianism; yet the book remains accessible to anyone interested in displacement and aid. By rethinking categories, questioning dominant temporalities, and documenting the entangled lives of aid workers and refugees, Gatter's work will serve as a key reference point for future studies in the field.