Practising the Future against Perception

This article explores how young Syrian men in Jordan perceived and practised the future in extreme material, social and rights-related precarity in the time before the fall of the Assad-regime. We introduce the notion of the ‘future as mist’ to conceptualise the future in the context of what we call stagnated crisis. Based on classic and experimental ethnographically inspired research with young Syrians in Jordan, we argue that the ways people practise the future do not always correspond with the ways they perceive the future. We discern three ways in which young Syrian men in Jordan practised futures despite simultaneously perceiving them as unattainable, namely by resorting to principles, by manoeuvring and by scrambling. Through these different ways of practising the future, young Syrian men attempted to act towards futures that were better than the present even though the paths to those futures remained shrouded in mist, that is imperceptible.