Refugees and preppers: Anticipatory practices in the face of uncertain futures

Abstract In this paper we suggest that attention to the social practice of prepping, with its particular focus on how people navigate uncertain and potentially disastrous futures, can help broaden our understanding of forced migration. We argue that the emerging literature on doomsday prepping provides a particularly interesting vantage point from which to study the relationship between forced migration, temporality, mobility, and political agency. Preppers and refugees share a propensity to doubt the certainty of the hegemonic futures of states, providing alternative epistemologies and ontologies of what the future might bring. In this manner, their strategies to ‘bug in’ and ‘bug out’ create unruly subjects, that are, we argue, better understood in terms of temporal politics than spatial governance. We contribute to migration studies in two ways. First, by exploring the question of anticipation, we invert the temporality of forced migration studies, arguing that people not only move in response to disaster but also in anticipation of disaster. Second, we contribute to the recent ‘temporal turn’ in migration studies by exploring not the control of the present but the promise and the fear of the future and how that translates into present (im)mobilities. While the article is mostly theoretical, it relies on the long-term ethnographic engagement with migrants of both scholars in Southeast Asia and East Africa respectively as well as secondary literature, documentaries, and various prepper communities’ online presence.