This paper investigates US immigration law as a spatial system whose application results in geographic confusion. I take the case of Barton v. Barr as a vivid example of this structure, where the petitioner was found to be simultaneously “outside” and “inside” the country under a legal perspective.

In this article I develop a new conceptualization of “the minor” as a process of spatio-temporal remaking: a simultaneous de-territorialization and re-temporalization of the naturalized logics of the major. I argue that the bordering “major” depends on a racist temporal logic of denied contemporaneity, and show how, through social reproduction, migrants gradually re-work themselves into shared frames of futurity, a process that I conceptualize as the development of “frontier futures.”

In this article, we analyze the transformation of refugee governance in Kenya under the auspices of the War on Terror and consider how counterterrorism has become a way of governing both refugees and precarious ethnoracialized citizens.

Based on interviews conducted between 2016 and 2019 with resettlement agents, service providers and Iraqis resettled in the U.S., we argue that the condemnation of “expectations” (that is, realistic hope) coupled with the demand for refugees’ gratitude means that Iraqis resettled to the U.S. are asked to sustain a “hope against hope” for the fullness of American futurity, even in the face of its collapse.

Building on a case study of the city of Halba (Lebanon) where it maps a process of contingent encounters through which disparate resources, individuals, and groups are stitched together to generate large-scale housing projects that shelter refugees, this paper demonstrates the importance of studying displacement through a grounded reading of the spatial transformations it implicates.