What are the temporalities of the camp and its function within the border regime? How can we view and conceptualise camps through a temporal lens? How do encamped migrants resist the camp’s temporal violence and practice their temporal autonomy?

This paper, based on ethnographic work in Skaramagas and Elaionas camps in Athens in 2017, provides answers to these questions. It argues that camps are a temporal, as much as spatial, technology of bordering. On the macro-level, the camps in Athens created the spatial and temporal arrangements necessary for governing the emergency and re-establishing the lost order. However, on the micro-level, encamped migrants engaging in the chronopolitics of everyday life, subvert the top-down order and materiality of the camp, and its imposed temporariness.

They resist the abandonment produced by the camp, which is epitomised by time spent solely for survival, through spatio-temporal practices such as creating a home and devising a livelihood on the move.

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