Anticipating Denied Futures: Temporalities of Protracted Refuge Among Congolese in Kampala

This article develops a temporal perspective on protracted displacement by analysing the experiences of Congolese refugees in Kampala. It argues that displacement is both a spatial and a temporal condition, in which asylum and resettlement regimes are experienced as dispossessing refugees of their capacity to orient themselves toward the future. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research (2013–2025), the study traces the shift from initial expectations of rapid resettlement—imagined as a linear trajectory from Congo to Uganda to the Global North—to what many describe as a “life without a future.” This form of temporal dispossession shows how humanitarian and state regimes are experienced as governing not only mobility, but also refugees' capacity to imagine and inhabit the future. The article makes two main contributions to debates in migration and displacement studies. First, it contributes to the temporal turn in migration studies by distinguishing denied futurity from “waiting”: the collapse of future imaginaries reveals a condition in which waiting itself becomes difficult to sustain. Second, it highlights the ambivalent role of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity as a key arena of temporal reorientation. Religious narratives of “God's plan” reinstate teleology and sustain traces of futurity, while also functioning as vernacular critiques of humanitarian failure; yet they may simultaneously reproduce forms of deferred hope. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that time is a key terrain of governance, dispossession, and contestation in protracted displacement. By foregrounding the ambivalent role of faith, it shows how Congolese refugees negotiate temporal agency when institutional pathways have foreclosed the future.