Waiting out the crisis: a strategy for resisting displacement in Burundi

Abstract This study investigates waiting and displacement by focusing on the period before people fled their country as opposed to the more common focus on the time after people have crossed borders. The research is based on several interviews with 19 Burundian refugees who fled Burundi sometime between 2014 and 2022 and were living in Belgium or Sweden at the time of the interviews. My interlocutors attempted to wait out the period when they were in danger and used various strategies to ensure their security during this wait. This waiting period prior to leaving the home country had some different characteristics to waiting after fleeing. This waiting was an attempt to hold on to a near past, a past of living securely in Burundi, rather than an attempt to access a new future, which is often the case in other waiting scenarios in migration.