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.

During the presidency of Donald Trump, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeted migrant justice activists, journalists, and advocates with deportation proceedings. The recent political repression has a revanchist character that appears to be a new pattern introduced by Trump but is part of a longer project of securing the smooth functioning of economic and racial social control in the US.

Legal geographers have recently highlighted the importance of attending to the interaction of time and space to understand law and its enactment. We build on these efforts to examine the spatiotemporal influences over the processes by which asylum claim determination procedures in Western industrialised countries seek to reconstruct past events for the purposes of deciding refugee claims.