Countdown: Timespaces of Deadlines and Displacement

Abstract

This article examines how politically structured deadlines and their accompanying countdowns generate dynamics of displacement by shaping anticipations of violence and prompting accelerated migration. Drawing on ethnographic research on Burundi's 2015 third-term crisis and The Gambia's 2017 electoral impasse, we show how constitutional deadlines became timespace devices— instruments of temporal power that condensed speculations about danger, suspended ordinary relations to place and compelled anticipatory spatial decisions. Developing the concept of timespace, we conceptualise displacement not only as a reaction to violence but as an anticipatory practice shaped by the entanglement of approaching futures, remembered pasts and rapidly evolving presents: one in which people assess risks, map geographies of safety and make decisions, more or less urgently, about staying or leaving. By interrogating the timespace dimensions of politically structured deadlines, we argue that such deadlines are not merely temporal markers but mechanisms that progressively narrow open horizons of expectation into affective thresholds of anticipation, bearing unequally on differently positioned people and generating divergent anticipatory logics within a shared timespace of urgency. Situating these dynamics within broader debates in migration and displacement studies, the article calls for closer attention to the temporalities of anticipation and the social life of deadlines as forces shaping mobility and collective experience.