Longing for Something Better: The Temporal Dimension in the Migration Narratives of Iraqi Asylum Seekers

Abstract The act of crossing political borders and exposing oneself to diverse social worlds often involves a process of looking back to one’s own past, evaluating one’s current circumstances and planning for the future. Time emerges through the interpretive and imaginative capacities of actors as they draw on memory and anticipation to orient themselves. Experiences of temporality and continuity are simultaneously subjective and socio-culturally constituted. This qualitative study adopts an interpretive approach that seeks to hear asylum seekers’ narratives as experiencing subjects and to explain their lived experiences as they navigate the physical and mental dimensions of forced migration time-scapes. Guided by a theoretical lens of longing , the study explores how Iraqi asylum seekers ( n = 165) draw on memory and anticipation to orient themselves within their migration trajectories and to imagine possible futures. Abductive analysis of the material demonstrated that longing operates as a cognitive–affective orientation that shapes forced migrants’ agency by structuring projective imaginaries, generating landscapes of both hope and despair that are shaped by profound temporal dissonance. As the article highlights the diversity of forced-migration experiences, as well as identifies meaningful commonalities of the cognitive–affective processes through which individuals negotiate their agency and belonging, it provides analytical tools for understanding how forced migrants strive to move forward amid institutional and structural adversity.