Waiting as a Racialised Phenomenon

Waiting as a Racialised Phenomenon offers a powerful and original account of the lives of migrants from East, West, North, and Sub-Saharan Africa in Türkiye, grounded in rich ethnographic research. Challenging dominant understandings of waiting as a neutral or purely temporal condition, the book argues that waiting is a deeply racialised process shaped by migration governance, labour regimes, and spatial marginalisation.

Moving beyond conventional accounts of migration as a linear journey, it reveals how migrants live through prolonged periods of uncertainty, suspension, and constrained mobility. These experiences vary significantly, shaped by the intersections of race, migrant status, class, gender, religion, and the social spaces migrants inhabit. In this context, waiting operates as a governance tool that reinforces inequality, shaping access to employment, housing, and participation in society. At the same time, the book foregrounds migrants’ agency, showing how they navigate these conditions by building networks of solidarity, care, and mutual support. Waiting thus emerges not only as a form of domination, but also as a space where resilience and collective strategies of survival take shape. The book ultimately provides a new conceptual tool with which to explore the links between waiting and racism in the context of the global South, arguing that waiting is a racialised phenomenon which can lead to additional exploitation.

This innovative and timely will appeal to academics and post-graduate students with interests in migration and borders, race and racism, temporality and the politics of time, anthropology, and international development.