Unravelling future in displacement: Legality as an existential condition

In January 2015, Lebanon introduced a visa regime for Syrians, provoking havoc and panic among those already displaced in the country as a result of the war in Syria. This paper examines Syrians’ affective reactions in order to retrace how displacement as an imposed legal-political category also becomes an existential condition. By drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork with Syrians in Lebanon, I capture the transformations in the transition from emergency to protracted displacement. The beginning of the “refugee crisis” saw Syrians struggling with socioeconomic hardships while their illegality was usually ignored. This configuration permitted the emergence of a presentist mode of being which nevertheless collapsed in the wake of the new visa regime. The elusiveness and illegibility of the new regulations made illegality and deportability real, tangible risks. This produced a sense of spatial–temporal entrapment in which the future colluded with the present and in which illegality became a status not only denying the entitlement to rights but also negating a claim to existence.