From pre-emptive military strikes, humanitarian campaigns and precarious fi nancial bubbles, to the climate change emergency and public health measures undertaken in response to COVID-19, we live in an era increasingly marked by discourses of imminence that bring a future close while also leaving it hard to imagine or inhabit. Claims of urgency – ‘act now before it is too late!’ – conduct the aff ective charge of these sometimes abject and oft en partially unimaginable futures. Yet urgency is rarely self-evident, but a claim in which the distribution of rights and resources, and particular forms of knowledge and expertise, are at stake. Which social actors are most invested in urgency and why? What possibilities does formatting a situation as ‘urgent’ foreclose and what questions does it make impossible to ask? What happens to claims of urgency when they become protracted and routinised? Alternatively, under what conditions might claims of urgency presage new openings?