Geopolitical Times: Timeliness and Being out of Time
By Jatin Dua (University of Michigan)
This essay is part of a Vital Topics Forum on “Geopolitical Lives”
In hindsight, Yusuf probably ended up on the wrong boat. In 2015, when the airstrikes started in Yemen, Yusuf and his brother first contemplated leaving. Following the Arab Spring in 2011, an uprising in Yemen forced the country’s long-term president Ali Abdullah Saleh to cede power to his deputy, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. However, Hadi’s government failed to bring stability to Yemen and was ineffective in dealing with numerous threats, ranging from the Houthi rebellion in northern Yemen to food insecurity and the continuing influence of Saleh in Yemeni politics. In 2014, Houthi rebels seized control of parts of northern Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa, and forced President Hadi into exile. In March 2015, a coalition of states, led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, carried out airstrikes against Houthi strongholds in the north. Saudi Arabia and its allies claimed that the Houthis were a proxy of Iran and part of Iran’s attempt to gain influence over Yemen. “When things started getting worse, we made our way down to Taiz and stayed with some family before so we could take a boat across the Red Sea. In those days, boats were leaving every day from Mocha and other places on the coast to Obock and Tajdoura [ports in Djibouti],” said Yusuf.
Geopolitics is a story about place, the “geo” a reminder that the realm of the political referenced here is one of claims over territory. In this story, certain places and people matter and others don’t. An important critique of geopolitics has emphasized this unequal and racialized distribution of concern, about whose lives are grievable and the geographies of indifference that shape the political (Butler 2009; Povinelli 2011; Wynter 2003). But the geopolitical is also about grievability as a temporally circumscribed notion. As mandates end, once embassies are evacuated, the temporality of geopolitics renders places and people out of time. The very language of geopolitics, with its emphasis on “crisis,” “flashpoints,” and “flare-ups,” is one that privileges this immediacy of attention. The geopolitical is a tale of timeliness, and as I reflect on here, being out of time.
Prior to 2014, a steady traffic of boats had operated in the other direction. Young men (this was mostly, though not always, a journey undertaken by men) would walk for days, weeks, and months from places as far afield as the Ogaden region in Ethiopia to the desolate coastline of Djibouti and Somalia. From there, they would embark on tahrib, a journey across the Red Sea to port cities in Yemen and then to Saudi Arabia, Dubai, or Europe. These boats operated adjacent to fishing skiffs, dhows, cargo ships, and navy vessels. When the Yemen civil war started, families—first the Somali families that had fled to Yemen during the Somali civil war and then others—found themselves on boats leaving the coast of southern Yemen and heading to ports in Djibouti and Somalia. Yusuf and his brother had hoped to travel together to Djibouti and eventually end up in Dearborn, Michigan, where distant cousins had settled. “The man who was making arrangements told us that we couldn’t go on the same boat; so, I let my younger brother go first and would follow him a week later.” Soon after his brother left under the cover of a moonless, humid night, rumors circulated that the Saudis would be blockading the coast and restricting all sea traffic. “In the days after he left, it became clear that I wouldn’t be able to make it to Djibouti. From where I was staying I could see the road from Taiz making its way down the mountains to Hudaydah [on the coast]. Every night, I would see a steady stream of lights twinkling on the road as cars and trucks with families started arriving to try and leave in time.” Yusuf found himself out of time. A few days after his brother had fled Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition blockaded the coast of Yemen, ostensibly in retaliation for missile attacks by Houthi rebels on Riyadh. Navigating the Bab-el-Mandeb all of a sudden became even more treacherous. “The cost to travel almost doubled, so I decided to take whatever boat I could afford.” Yusuf ended up on a boat to Bosaso, the largest port in Puntland, an autonomous region in northern Somalia.
It was just after Eid al adha in 2019, and we were sitting at the restaurant where Yusuf worked in Bosaso. Over the past few years, a number of Yemeni restaurants had opened up throughout Puntland. The deliciously sharp smell of fenugreek from the freshly made hilbeh and sabayad (Yemeni bread) baking in the front drew me to his restaurant. We met regularly and chatted about Yemeni food and Dearborn. Like many Yemenis in Puntland, Yusuf was struggling to get the right paperwork to travel onward. “When we came, people welcomed us. They prayed for us and raised money for us at the mosque. We found work, some with importers and exporters, others worked at restaurants like I am doing. But the goal was to stay only for a little while, before finding a way to America.” He explained that his brother had landed in Obock and made his way down to Djibouti City and got papers to travel to Europe. When he tried at the refugee resettlement offices in Puntland, he was refused and told that too much time had passed. “The UN people are suspicious that we are Arab Salah [Yemeni-descended communities in Somalia] and just trying to leave Somalia by falsely claiming we came recently from Yemen.”
Yusuf, like numerous others, found himself unable to successfully navigate the whims and vagaries of humanitarian bureaucracies. As many have eloquently written (Feldman 2007; Khosravi 2010; Ticktin 2011), these humanitarian orders ensnare, capture, and abandon those fleeing to safety. Yusuf also found himself constantly out of time. When he first arrived in Puntland, the civil war in Yemen was regularly on the news, and Yusuf described encountering a steady stream of well-wishers and those curious about the world he had fled. “In the mosque, at the mafrish, people talked about Yemen all the time, especially with the Saudi-led blockade and whether Somalia would have to choose sides between the Saudis and the Qataris.” Yet, this recognition did not extend to some of the humanitarian-assistance offices. With mandates aimed at assisting those leaving the Horn of Africa, Yusuf’s journey from Yemen to the Horn of Africa was not legible. He had applied too early, and by the time mandates had expanded to include Yemenis arriving in Somalia, his journey was seen as having occurred before the cutoff time for assistance.
These temporal traps are central, if at times unrecognized, to the management of populations and various practices of state and supra-state recognition. It is often time, as opposed to intent, that is the distinction between the refugee and the migrant, between those who can escape to safety and those left behind. Jurisdiction and recognition (the very building blocks of geopolitics) are not merely territorial contests but also structured within particular temporalities.
There was another sense in which Yusuf was out of time. By 2019, the civil war in Yemen had very much receded into the background. Yusuf and others stuck in Somalia found themselves struggling to make themselves legible to various international actors, as their lives and world no longer retained urgency as “geopolitical flashpoints.” This was not simply a case of imperial indifference or compassion fatigue (those are certainly at play), but a sense that one’s time had passed. As one of my interlocutors in Puntland remarked, “When I see the Yemenis at mosque on Friday prayers, I find myself surprised that they are still here. Not wanting them to leave necessarily, but still surprised that they are still around.” The Yemenis would also speak of their surprise. As Yusuf said, “I never thought I would still be here, but here I am.” His brother, on the other hand, had arrived at the right place and, importantly, at the right time. This was something he constantly brought up.
This timeliness maps onto an understanding of temporality—for both imperial agents and critics—as one where geopolitical time unfolds in a linear progression. Geopolitical time is epochal; it is built on notions of stages and linear transitions. From kingdom to state, from sail to steam, from land to sea to air. To make claims about the geopolitical invites this form of linearity (reflect here on the frames available to think through the China-Africa question that all seem to replicate the “new imperialism” idea). Geopolitical time privileges the self-representation of empire and relegates all others to the “waiting room of history” (Chakrabarty 2000).
Geopolitics produces in its wake those rendered out of time. Engaging geopolitics then becomes a form of engaging in this politics of timeliness (and being out of time). But there are other scales at which the geopolitical becomes legible, especially as it morphs into a tale of geo-temporal socialities. Here it is not linear time that is at stake but a kind of geopolitical unfolding that is recursive. Time folds in on itself, things return and reappear, but they do so in ways that are not the same. This is what makes geopolitics simultaneously familiar, and we can see forms and patterns that appear and reappear—Saigon 1975 reappears as Kabul 2021—but each reappearance creates a new possibility. This is not contingency as a hopeful modality of change, but also contingency as evasion as a way for imperial systems to morph and strengthen.
Yusuf recognized how the temporality of geopolitics had rendered him out of time. “I never thought I would still be here, but here I am” is a recognition that one still endures in a time that they were not meant to inhabit. For Yusuf, there is no resilience to be valorized in this statement, no reservoir of courage or strategy of mobility to be celebrated, but instead a tired yet persistent insistence on disrupting the temporalities of indifference that constitute geopolitical time.
References Cited
Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Feldman, Ilana. 2007. “Difficult Distinctions: Refugee Law, Humanitarian Practice and Political Identification in Gaza.” Cultural Anthropology 22 (1): 129–69.
Khosravi, Shahram. 2010. The “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. London: Palgrave.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ticktin, Miriam. 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337.
Cite As
Dua, Jatin. 2022. “Geopolitical Times: Timeliness and Being out of Time.” American Anthropologist website, August 4.